[Air-L] CFP: Prospecting: Extraction, Speculation, and Liberation in the Accelerated Academy

[Erin Glass]

*call for papers -- due August 1*


CFP -- Prospecting: Extraction, Speculation, and Liberation in the
Accelerated Academy

(Accelerated Academy 7)

Nov. 22-23, 2019

Michigan State University Digital Scholarship Lab

An interdisciplinary symposium on the future of academic life and labor,
organized by Zach Kaiser (MSU) and Erin Glass (UC San Diego)


In theory, the academy is an institution of research and learning, intended
to advance human knowledge and educate citizens. In practice, however, the
academy appears evermore as a site of prospecting, or a source of raw
material for aggressive forms of neoliberal mining and extraction. Through
various speculative and extractive behaviors, academic practice is
increasingly managed and shaped by internal and external forces as a means
of “optimizing” academic activities and making them more efficient in order
to cut costs and maximize revenue. As is well documented in the growing
literature of critical university studies, this prospecting is manifest in
the adjunctification of academic labor, the rise of administration, the
continuous increase of student tuition, and the perpetuation of the student
debt crisis that has engulfed the United States. We can also see
prospecting in the ruthless capture and privatization of scholarly research
by scholarly publishers at the cost of public access to research that the
public has in fact already paid for. Prospecting is also at play in the
academy’s collision course with surveillance/platform/cognitive capitalism:
the university’s intellectual products have been transformed into valuable
data to be mined, packaged, sold, and ultimately controlled by IT and ed
tech capitalists in their pursuit of profit. Though these extractive and
neoliberal processes are not unique to the academy, their presence in
institutions dedicated to learning has implications for academic
subjectivities and the institutions themselves.

Building on the work of past Accelerated Academy symposia, the 7th edition
proposes the concept of “prospecting” as a productive tool to think through
the future of academic life, labor, and outcomes. Prospecting as a concept
may help us broaden the discourses about academia, and shine light on the
different economic interests, technical assemblages, and affective regimes
that shape its activities. We are also, however, committed to the challenge
of identifying prospects of autonomy and liberation that are still within
the academy despite its compromised state, and thinking through the
strategies that academics might use to better take advantage of them. We
encourage contributors to consider the various material and social
connotations carried by the term “prospecting,” and the way it might help
us develop a robust analysis of life in the accelerated academy and the
high stakes of our contemporary moment. Topics might include:

• Prospecting as it relates to the extractive behaviors characteristic of
the accelerated and platformized academy, including the extractive data
capture of students and faculty through educational and workflow
technologies.

• Prospecting as an extractive colonial appropriation of land and of bodies
within academe (and the uneven distribution of the consequences of this
behavior across race, gender, and class lines).

• Prospecting as extractive ecological behaviors by academia (ranging from
the harvesting of minerals to produce the technologies on which our
academic infrastructure is built to academic travel).

• Prospecting in terms of university real-estate speculation and
acquisition, campus development, the increase in satellite campuses of
major western universities overseas (particularly in the middle and far
east), as well as the growth of extension and continuing-ed programs.

• Liberatory/radical prospecting, or the ways that we, as the academic
community, can work towards reclaiming the academy for social justice and
the public good. This ethos is embodied in works like Stefano Harney and
Fred Moten's "The Undercommons," Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s “Generous
Thinking,” la paperson’s “A Third University is Possible,” Cathy Davidson’s
“The New Education,” and Christopher Newfield’s “The Great Mistake.”



We welcome contributions (ranging from paper presentations to artistic
projects, hands-on sessions, projections, tours, etc) from anyone who is
interested in and passionate about these topics. We will also do our best
to accommodate remote presentations/projects via video conferencing or
other possibilities. Submit a 500-word abstract using the Google Form
linked below by August 1, 2019. Questions? Email Zach Kaiser (
kaiserza at msu.edu) and Erin Glass (erglass at ucsd.edu).

https://forms.gle/QHhQUQ6cLkHjut8KA

If the link above does not work, please copy the following URL into your
browser. https://forms.gle/QHhQUQ6cLkHjut8KA

-- 
Erin Rose Glass, Ph.D.
Digital Scholarship Librarian
UC San Diego Library
www.erinroseglass.com | @erinroseglass
(858) 534-0827