Date: October 27, 2021, 14.00-16.00
Venue: Online
Registration deadline: October 21, 2021
Registration: The HEPP Webinar falls into two parts. Part 1 is open and free to all, while Part 2 is a closed SIG-meeting only for members of the Special Interest Group ‘Higher Education Policy and Practice - HEPP’.
For the conversation about academic citizenship, the “common infrastructure”, the spaces and forms of the university and the attitudes, moods, they create, are of crucial importance for how to think the transactions between the university and society at large. In his talk, professor Jan Masschelein will discuss how the university as gatherings of people, structures, and things can create, sometimes, a way a being with/in the world which we might think of as “publics” of various scales.
14.00 - 15.00 | Part 1: Lecture by Professor Jan Masschelein (with Professor Maarten Simons), KU Leuven, Belgium. The lectured will be followed by a facilitated Q&A session. |
15.00 - 16.00 |
Part 2: SIG meeting in HEPP with follow-up discussions related to the themed SIG strand around academic citizenship. |
… we need to win the argument for education rather than support the idea of the university as a therapeutic safe space for vulnerable students. (Dennis Hayes, University World News, 6.02.2021)
Relying on a mapping exercise with students during the pandemic, support is provided for students’ call for ‘on campus’ education, for its re-discovery and re-inventing. The support concerns not the need for a social life and social contacts, but refers to the educational forces that a university can embody in its ‘common infrastructure’ i.e. in its architecture and pedagogical forms, in the gatherings and moods it engenders, in the displacements to which it induces, in the kind of life it stages, in the kind of (always fragile and temporary) collections and collectives it performs and that enable particular encounters with worlds. This ‘infrastructure’ can make a particular kind of study happen. It involves made set-ups that enable to taste the world and sustain the becoming of a (collective) studying body. The digital, for sure, can add greatly to the world of university study, but it cannot simply replace it’s differentiated pedagogical infrastructure.