Better Questions workshop on the university today at the Trash Culture Review, Cork, 19th of June

cork | education | event notice Tuesday June 15, 2010 22:54 by Mick - Better Questions mickbyrne at gmail dot com

We're organising a workshop at 2.30pm at Meades (wine bar) Oliver Plunkett St.

Better Questions are organising a workshop on critical and transformative perspectives on the University today at the upcoming Trash Culture Review festival in Cork (themutation.com/the-trash-culture-revue/). The time and date for the workshop is 2.30pm-4pm @ Meades (Downstairs) on Oliver Plunkett St.

Below is an introduction to the themes of the workshop. We've written a text which can be read on-line at http://thought-movement.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

The workshop

There is generalized hostility towards the university today: we hear of the excessive costs of maintaining useless departments/disciplines, about the failure of third level education to provide skills that might be decisive in the labour market, about the laziness of academic staff and the apathy of students. Unheard are better questions about the intrinsic, potential powers of learning and emancipation found in the university.

This workshop will be a space for exploring the openings and closings at work in the university today: the mechanisms for the pacification of the student and the quantification of knowledge but also the energies and potentials, the ‘lines of flight’, which escape these mechanisms. We want to draw on images, current debates, critical theory and, of course, the experiences and reflections of everyone who takes part, to create the kind of encounter for the sharing/generation of critical knowledge so evidently lacking within the university-apparatus.