viva la institucion!
this courtesy of Rowan, our absent blogger: crazy MA course from Leeds Uni on activism and social change. Actually I don't know what to think of this: I was all primed to offer my own modules on Call & Response techniques in Demo Chants, Russian Constructivism and Contemporary Placard Design, Practical Direct Action from Treehouse to Batman Costume etc, but the course descriptions sound pretty good and spoilt my fun. Plus I know several students who'd find this degree fascinating and career-promoting, so I reserve judgment. Views, anyone? Rowan's problem, I guess, is that it institutionalises activism - and when they mention 'the current neoliberal takeover of Higher Education' I can't help think that this MA is going to have the men in suits rubbing their hands with delight, rather than running for cover. Also not sure what 'militant research' would be (storming the short loan section?). And how do they grade this kind of thing? 'Students will be assessed on the degree to which they contest the mark for this module (or marking system, or the entire principle of marking)...'
posted by col at 11:55 pm
3 Comments:
max my Nietzche up! and shudder at the 'zhead' tat. I'm amazed they didnt think to make a Zizek toilet seat though...
Col – I believe you can probably guess where this is going…
There is an elephant in the room here and while I may sound like Boris Johnson for pointing it out, I’m going to do it anyway. Why this is a Masters level course? Most MA courses are, as we all know, polished up funding streams. I did a Masters in “Narrative” – and rest my case at that. Is there a polite way of describing developing a course which purports to further the revolutionary goals of organic intellectuals while charging its students a hefty £3,000 a year for the privilege? If the ‘neoliberal takeover of the university’ (there’s a phrase which hardly betrays a postgraduate level of political subtlety!) is characterised by anything, then it is the instrumentalisation of learning for economic ends. There doesn’t seem to be anything here that couldn’t be either incorporated into an undergraduate programme or achieved by the radical practice of, er, joining a campaigning organisation and attending a few meetings of the local SWP – so why charge for it?
I’m also not convinced it is all that thorough. The only two theorists mentioned anywhere here are Marx and bloody Gramsci. Lawks! I’d imagine the market they are targeting (oops, sorry) is made up of people who will have already spent plenty of time with their heads buried in the Prison Notebooks. I like the bit that says ‘rather than attempting an exhaustive investigation, the module team will introduce selected thinkers and their works’ which, forgive my cynicism, sounds to me like ‘we won’t be seriously addressing any of the broadly liberal political philosophies of the vast majority of campaign groups and NGOs (Amnesty, the WDM, Oxfam, Greepeace etc.); instead we will focus solely on activist groups (i.e. the Zapatistas – yawn! Though I suspect the government of Hugo Chavez will sneak in as a special kind of non-governmental action group somewhere here) who show us that our particular brand of Marxism is alive, well and on the verge of toppling the neoliberal global hegemony.’
I actually think a Masters in campaigning politics is a great idea. The problem with this course, however, is that it is pretty obvious from both the tone and content that it isn’t going to be a ‘rigorous’ investigation of the politics and practice radical activism. I can’t see anything on the history of campaigning, for example: nothing on Chartism, abolitionism, or women’s suffrage. I don’t see anything on animal liberation, Welsh nationalism or the Countryside Alliance (too ideologically messy all of that stuff – best stick to neat romantic-sounding campaigns in far off countries). The whole thing looks like its based on that illusion of radical critique which sadly pervades a lot of university teaching in this area: define your examples as inherently counter-hegemonic and thereby avoid having to discuss alternative political positions on the grounds that they are, ipso facto, part of the dominant ideology and therefore not genuine examples of activism (thus not proper objects of study on their own terms).
Apart from that, it looks horribly like something out of some 1970s campus novel … and I hate 1970s campus novels!!
Sweet Jesus and Mary Chain! What the hell is going on with that zheads business?? Here's a Zizekian conundrum: one large wooden bat, 2 people in baseball caps: 1 says "God Bless America", the other says "International Journal of Zizek Studies"
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