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<div>Hello all</div>
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<div>This week saw us off to a fantastic start, thanks to the gifting of time from elizaBeth and Mimi, and contributions from Johannes and William as well. I particularly enjoyed the way in which elizaBeth led the conversation from a position that was both
informed (she brought a ton of knowledge and specificity to her questions) and situated (clearly asking such questions from a different or earlier place in an academic path than Mimi). I hope we can continue to see such situatedness through the month - especially
in light of the fact that not all of this list is in academia. I just want to acknowledge here how the stakes are far from the same for everyone on this list when it comes to thinking through the university as a site of subjectivity, labor, knowledge. </div>
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<div>Here on empyre, especially thanks to the work of edu-factory or Trebor Scholz and his colleagues at the New School, we've had some good conversations about education and the academy in the past. I hope this month will continue to build on that as this
week's has through not assuming the university as the end destination of all persons or conversations that start there. </div>
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<div>Sean Cubitt passed along earlier this week a reminder of the recent open-access issue of Topia dedicated to critiques of the University:</div>
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<div><a href="http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/issue/view/2085/showToc">http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/issue/view/2085/showToc</a></div>
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<div>In their introduction to that valuable issue, Hanke and Hearn point out the growing body of lit that might rightfully be described as "critical university studies." My hope is that, though this month's discussion might extend such a discourse, our address
is tempered by close acknowledgement of our current precarious and not-as-precarious positions within these systems, rather than a reach "outside" to produce traditionally-distant institutional critique. This week got us started well to this end.</div>
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<div>I thought the Galloway piece Mimi left us with was a great way to reach back through the rest of the conversation. I took the piece as a caution against seeing any an inherent politics in any one organizational, ontological, epistemological or social structure.
By bringing that to our attention, Mimi underlined the week's other mentions of disciplinarity, town/gown relations, or even peer review and tenure as sites that justly invite structural critique, yet whose structures alone can't explain the politics. That's
pretty interesting in light of how much time graduate students and early professors spend learning how to see and critique structures.</div>
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<div>It was such a pleasure to see references coming up - Bishop, Relyea, Galloway, Lorde - that were already familiar to empyre this week. Mimi and I share a campus and some fantastic colleagues, friends, students, but we don't share curricular or research
circles all that much, so I loved seeing familiarity in her sources.</div>
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<div>Monday I'll be back to introduce week two. THANK YOU ALL!!! Especially Mimi and elizaBeth.</div>
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<div>- Kevin Hamilton</div>
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