[-empyre-] March 2015: Engineering the University : Introduction

[Hamilton, Kevin]

Greetings all - 

It's great to be here moderating for the month, for a forum that continues
to serve so many. This month, my cohort and I want to help generate a
conversation about the potentials, pressures, and possibilities of
contemporary research labor.

THEME : Engineering the University - Technology, Values, and Labor in
Research Institutions

Doctoral programs across the disciplines are filling increasingly diverse
needs. Not all have higher education careers in mind when entering such
study, and those who do often change their plans for reasons of necessity
- given the scarcity of academic posts - or conscience, given the changing
values of higher education in the present economic, biological, and
political contexts. It's no coincidence that many of the deepest critiques
of the modern research university have originated from graduate students,
given their role as laborers in labs or classrooms. In particular, those
engaged in the study of technology, media, or science are often confronted
with the potential of their growing knowledge bases for application
outside the academy, in commercial, governmental, or activist spaces.
Sometimes the same technologies or "knowledge infrastructures" suggest
very different applications across these such sectors, and other times
they do not.

This month, I'll be co-hosting empyre with a group of graduate students
who have been working together on such questions. Each week I'll invite a
different young scholar to the mic, who in turn will invite an
accomplished scholar/practitioner to explore such questions as:

- How can the research or labor forms of higher education prepare one for
work outside the academy?
- What can the study of technology, ethics and society offer a discussion
about the research university's potential as a space of social or
political imagination?
- What can the changing shape of academic labor - especially graduate
student labor - tell us about the current role of higher education in a
global sphere?
- Where might one want to change the shape of learning and knowledge work
in institutions of higher education in order to better prepare graduate
students for work in a variety of fields?

WHO : The Seeing Systems Group, and invited guests
(http://seeingsystems.illinois.edu)


Here at Illinois we're in the second year of a four-year experimental
program in graduate education. Spanning disciplines across the humanities,
our group of faculty and students have been running a series of seminars
and collaborative projects, including panels, papers, presentations, and
workshops. Our group is formed around a common question : How can we make
visible the values and epistemologies embedded in complex technological
systems?

Each week, one of our cohort will lead the discussion through introduction
of a special guest and their work:

Week 01 - Punk Materialities: Activism and the Academy (elizaBeth Simpson
hosts Mimi Thi Nguyen)
Week 02 - Information & Enlightenment: The Roots of the Modern University
(Ned Prutzer hosts Chad Wellmon)
Week 03 - The #Alt-Academy: Technology and new Research Labor (Rhiannon
Bettivia hosts Julia Flanders)
Week 04 - Transnationalism, Translation, and Global Research (Fabian
Prieto-Nanez hosts Tania Perez)

Thank you all for this opportunity, and we look forward to your
participation! I'll launch the first week later today.

Kevin Hamilton
Associate Professor, School of Art and Design
Dean's Fellow for Research, College of Fine and Applied Arts
http://complexfields.org