Strategies of Critique 2024: Study and Dissent

Keynote Presentations: Dr. Dana Olwan (Syracuse University) & Dr. Chandni Desai (University of Toronto).

Deadline: July 1, 2024

Date: Sept 28-29, 2024

Call for Papers:

Prisoners’ manuscripts; mutual aid for quotidian crises; reading group revelations over a shared meal – all these are instances of study, a practice that spans many sites and subjectivities, not only within (and against), but also beyond the strictures of academic institutions. From works like George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye to Walter Rodney’s The Groundings With My Brothers, a rich literature documents such practices, which take place not only in the university or college, but also the countryside, Pr*son, and protest. The 2024 Strategies of Critique conference takes its inspiration from this literature with the theme “Study and Dissent,” asking what practices can resist the enclosure of knowledge in a perfect circle.

What are the possibilities for practices of what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have described as “fugitivity,” extending far beyond the self and beyond the university? How can knowledge be rethought in opposition to the neoliberal university, which as Wendy Brown has argued, is a site of the production of human capital; or according to Dana Olwan and Carol Fadda, a profoundly militarized apparatus in service of global imperialism? Can thinking through the relationship between study and dissent present us with new ways that politics itself can be thought and practiced, beyond what Jacques Rancière calls the “stultification of intelligence”?

We seek to recognize forms of study that go beyond institutional classifications of teachers and students, to all those who, as Alessandro Russo puts it, demonstrate “a desire to think beyond knowledge” – that is, beyond the reduction of study to textbooks and exams, to the communication of information that “leaves nothing to think about.” Insofar as it refuses to accept knowledge that is pre-given, how can study resist situations that appear totalizing? Can study as a means of refusal, rather than an end in itself, open us up to the dangers of what lies beyond the knowledge of an epoch, and to a multiplication of forms of dissent?

We are interested in papers engaging:

• Marxist, abolitionist, and anti-colonial theories of education
• Critical university studies
• Black studiesPalestinian studies
• Psychoanalysis and education
• Sociology, philosophy, and history of education
• Histories and theories of resistance

Successful conference papers will be considered for publication in Problématique, a peer-reviewed journal by the political science student community at York University. For individual proposals, please submit a 100-word biography and a 300-word abstract. For proposed panels, please submit a 100-word biography and a 250-word abstract for each panellist, along with a brief panel description.

Host or Publisher York Social and Political Thought Graduate Student Association