Learning in Emergency States: Flourishing, Universities, and the Future

A panel discussion with Wendy Brown (IAS, Princeton), Margot Finn (UCL), Eva von Redecker (H-U, Berlin) and Sasha Roseneil (Sussex). Convened by Paul Gilroy & John Sabapathy.

Universities everywhere are in what feels like a state of permanent emergency. Their problems are political, financial, technological, and ethical. All these are intensified by increasing uncertainty about the purpose and value of higher education in general, especially in traditional non-STEM disciplines which are drifting towards a new status as luxury subjects confined to elite environments. Largely nineteenth-century institutions are buckling in twenty-first century conditions.

'Learning in emergency states' brings together critical thinkers to diagnose North American, British, and continental European experiences of this crisis. It will explore what is shared, seek what is distinct, and strive to find what will help universities to protect, repair and salvage themselves as emergency defines the normal conditions in which they work.

Three themes seem central. First, the question of disciplinarity and how universities can facilitate the novel kinds of inter-/multi-disciplinary learning needed to address our manifest ecological, political, and ethical crises. Second, questions of value and flourishing. How can universities shape and revive progressive discussion in increasingly polarized and militarised worlds? How might they restate and restore a sense of their own educational value beyond the narrowly instrumental? Third, there are practical questions. How might we meaningfully articulate and mobilize around the intergenerational emergency as experienced inside higher education and on the paths that lead into it, especially given the growing dominance of opaque forms of EdTech?

So far, only fragmented responses to these questions have been evident. In these emergency contexts it seems particularly valuable to recall that the pandemic demonstrated universities' ability to reorganize and restructure rapidly. Those capabilities offer cause for cautious hope, but the shifts they institutionalized have barely been digested and their wider implications have not been drawn out.

'Learning in emergencies states' will clear a space for practically oriented, critical discussion about the future of the university.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher UCL Anthropocene