<font face="'PrimaSans BT,Verdana,sans-serif'"><font face="'PrimaSans BT,Verdana,sans-serif'"><h2>Out of the Ruins: The University to Come</h2>
<h3>Deadline: 02/15/2012</h3>
<p>Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies</p>
<p>CALL FOR PAPERS</p>
<p>Out of the Ruins: The University to Come</p>
<p>Guest Editors<br>Bob Hanke (York University) and Alison Hearn (University of Western Ontario)</p>
<p>TOPIA 27, Fall 2012</p>
<p>This special issue of TOPIA seeks contributions (articles, offerings, review essays and book<br>reviews) that reflect on the contemporary university and its discontents. Fifteen years after<br>the publication of Bill Readings’ seminal book The University in Ruins and in the wake of<br>
the UK government’s new austerity budget, Nick Couldry and Angela McRobbie proclaim<br>the death of the English university. In Italy students demonstrating against the Bologna<br>Process protect themselves from police with giant books. On the heels of severe budget cuts<br>
and increasing privatization in the California state system, protesting students occupy<br>university buildings, while in British Columbia and Quebec hundreds of students gather for<br>rallies against spiraling student debt and increasing corporate influence on campus.<br>
Everywhere university systems are being eviscerated by neoliberal logics asserting<br>themselves even in the face of economic recession. After decades of chronic under-funding<br>and restructuring, public universities have ceded the university’s public role in a democracy<br>
and embraced “academic capitalism” as a “moral” obligation. Acting as venture capitalists,<br>they pressure academics to transfer and mobilize knowledge and encourage research<br>partnerships with private interests; acting as real estate developers, they take over<br>
neighbourhoods with callous disregard for established communities; acting as military<br>contractors, they produce telecommunications software and light armoured vehicles for<br>foreign governments; acting as brand managers, they open branch plant campuses around the<br>
world and compete for foreign students who can be charged exorbitant fees for access to a<br>“first world” education. With tuition fees and student debt on the rise, academic labour is<br>tiered, cheapened and divided against itself; two-thirds of classes in U.S. colleges and<br>
universities are taught by faculty employed on insecure, non tenure-track contracts. The<br>casualization of academic labour and a plea for sustainable academic livelihoods were at the<br>core of the longest strike in English Canadian university history. As collegiality, academic<br>
freedom, and self-governance recede from view, the university remains a terrain of<br>adaptation and struggle.</p>
<p>We will need all the conceptual tools that cultural studies can muster to analyze the changing<br>university as the foundation for our academic callings and scholarly practices. In addition to<br>external influences such as globalization, technoscience, corporatization, mediatization, and<br>
higher education policy, internal managerial initiatives, bureaucratization,<br>deprofessionalization, structural complicity between administration and faculty, and<br>intellectual subjectivities must also be analyzed. All of us, no matter what our political<br>
position, must take the time to reflect on the broad questions raised by these changes. Is the<br>site of the university worth struggling over or re-imagining? Can the neoliberal university be<br>set against itself? Is it time for reform or exodus? What other practices of knowledge<br>production, interpretations, modes of organization, and assemblages are possible? This<br>special issue is designed to reflect upon, analyze and strategize about the past, present and<br>
future of the university.</p>
<p>In addition to these matters of concern, possible topics to further dialogue and enable further<br>study include but are not limited to:</p>
<p>• analyzing and assessing the crisis of the public university<br>• implementing globalizations: theory, rhetoric and historical experience<br>• continuity and transformation in national academic cultures<br>• the position and role of the arts, humanities and social sciences<br>
• university leaders and university making<br>managerial theory/practice, academic ethics, and the symbolism of university finance</p><p>university-private sector intermediaries and initiatives; “innovation” and “creativity” as<br>
alibis for academic capitalism; knowledge “transfer” and “mobilization”<br>marketing, media relations and the promotional condition of the university<br>space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university<br>the professor-entrepreneur, research practice, and the imperative to produce<br>
academic labour, tenure, stratification and precarity<br>faculty governance, unions and institutional democracy<br>the indebted, student-worker and the decline of academic study<br>scholarly disciplines and territories, infrastructure, information practices, communication<br>
and publishing<br> the
scholarly community of money: grant agencies, writing, committees and
adjudication media/cultural production and critical/radical pedagogy<br>the development of knowledge cultures and the expansion of the commons<br>
the university in relation to nearby communities and wider social movements<br> resistance, common and counter-knowledge, alternative educational formations<br> remaking the public university in Canada and in other national contexts</p>
<p>Submissions</p>
<p>To view the author guidelines, see<br><a title="http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/about/submissions#authorGuidelines" href="http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/about/submissions#authorGuidelines" target="1">http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/about/submissions#authorG...</a>.<br>
To submit papers (with titles, abstracts and keywords) and supplementary media files online,<br>you need to register and login to the TOPIA website at<br><a title="http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/user/register" href="http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/user/register" target="1">http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/user/register</a>.</p>
<p>The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2012. Peer review and notification of<br>acceptance will be completed by May 15, 2012. Final manuscripts accepted for publication<br>will be due July 5, 2012. Comments and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke <a href="java_script:main.compose%28%27new%27,%27t=bhanke@yorku.ca%27%29" target="1">bhanke@yorku.ca</a><br>
or Alison Hearn <a href="java_script:main.compose%28%27new%27,%27t=ahearn2@uwo.ca%27%29" target="1">ahearn2@uwo.ca</a>.</p>
<p>For more information about TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, visit<br><a title="http://www.yorku.ca/topia/" href="http://www.yorku.ca/topia/" target="1">http://www.yorku.ca/topia/</a>.</p></font><br><br>Professor Baden Offord
Chair (Visiting Professor) in Australian Studies
Centre for Pacific and American Studies
The University of Tokyo
E: baden.offord@scu.edu.au
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