ERUA TALK: Practicing the Presence of Study against the Future of the Universities?

The notion of “black study”, sketched by Stefano Harney & Fred Moten in The Undercommons, offers a welcome alternative to the current conception of our universities, driven by the toxic double imperative of “teaching” and “research”. What does it mean to “practice study”? Is it bound to be a clandestine activity, or can it be promoted by academic administrations? What insights can be drawn from recent proposals about a “third university”, different from the “first university” (which delivers MBAs) as well as from the “second university” (which delivers certifications of guilty conscience through critical humanities)? 
Selected readings from Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, Elie Meyerhoff, la paperson and Graham D. Burnett will guide us in addressing such questions. We will begin with the last words of a piece entitled “The University: Last Words”: “Fuck the future of the university. Please stop worrying about that shit so we can worry (till, tease, turn over, chew over, chop up and fret) the practice of our presence. No promises from the university, no demands on the university, just the presence of our practice in love and battle, in and through its ruins, on the other side of its dying gasps and last words.”

The ERUA TALK is organized by the research group “Re-imagining higher education” (WP 2).
This session is organized by Yves Citton, University of Paris 8 in cooperation with Anne Kwaschik’s history of knowledge research seminar, University of Konstanz.   

 
You can download some of the suggested article here:
 
Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, « The University : Last Words », Academia.com, 2020
Elie Meyerhoff, introduction à Beyond Education. Radical Studying for Another World, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2019
Yves Citton, « Practicing Study as Self-Alienation and Counter-Addiction (studium, black study, études) » to be published in Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education, Special Issue “Answering the Question: What is Studying?”, 2022
 
The event will take place online. If you want to participate, please write an e-mail to erua@ruc.dk and we will mail you a zoom link as well as additional reading material.