[csaa-forum] CFP: The Para-Academic Handbook: A Toolkit for making-learning-creating-acting (Deborah M. Withers)

[Ann Deslandes]

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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:27:30 -0000
From: "Deborah M. Withers" <mail at debi-rah.net>
To: <nextgenderation at nextgenderation.net>
Subject: [NextGenderation] CFP: The Para-Academic Handbook: A Toolkit
        for     making-learning-creating-acting
Message-ID: <6726208DF9F84A949718D361AA43CFA6.MAI at mrsite.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

There is a name for those under- and precariously employed, but actively
working, academics in today?s society: the para-academic.

Para-academics mimic academic practices so they are liberated from the
confines of the university. Our work, and our lives, reflect how the idea
of a university as a place for knowledge production, discussion and
learning, has become distorted by neo-liberal market forces. We create
alternative, genuinely open access, learning-thinking-making-acting spaces
on the internet, in publications, in exhibitions, discussion groups or
other mediums that seem appropriate to the situation. We don?t sit back and
worry about our career developments paths. We write for the love of it, we
think because we have to, we do it because we care.

We take the prefix para- to illustrate how we work alongside, beside, next
to, and rub up against, the all too proper location of the Academy, making
the work of higher education a little more irregular, a little more
perverse, a little more improper. Our work takes up the potential of the
multiple and contradictory resonances of para- as decisive location for
change, within the university as much as beyond it.

Specialists in all manner of things, from the humanities to the social and
biological sciences, the para-academic works alongside the traditional
university, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, usually a mixture
of both. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities to research, create
learning experiences or make a basic living within the university on our
own terms, para-academics don?t seek out alternative careers in the face of
an evaporated future, we just continue to do what we?ve always done: write,
research, learn, think, and facilitate that process for others.

We do this without prior legitimisation from any one institution.
Para-academics do not need to churn out endless ?outputs? because of the
pressures of a heavily assessed research environment. We work towards
making ideas because learning, sharing, thinking and creating matter beyond
easily quantifiable ?products?. And we know that this is possible, that we
are possible, without the constraints of an increasingly hierarchical
academy.

As the para-academic community grows there is a real need to build
supportive networks, share knowledge, ideas and strategies that can allow
these types of interventions to become sustainable and flourish. There is a
very real need to create spaces of solace, action and creativity.

The Para-Academic Handbook: A Toolkit for making-learning-creating-acting,
edited by Alex Wardrop and Deborah Withers, calls for articles (between
1,000-6,000 words), cartoons, photographs, illustrations, inspirations and
other forms of text/graphic communication exploring para-academic practice,
and its place within active intellectual cultures of the early 21st century.

It will be published by HammerOn Press in 2014.

Enquiries to mail at hammeronpress.net
Deadline for submissions 1 July 2013.




www.debi-rah.net
www.hammeronpress.net


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