Retheorizing the University: Sites of Critique

A Wallerstein Institute collaboration with the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and CHSN-CHCI.

This workshop seeks to interrogate the current condition of the university in conversation with earlier histories and critiques of the university and with recent theorizations of institutionality. It is vital to understand both the institutional limits and the potentialities of the university, given the new authoritarianism’s fixation on dismantling it alongside other public goods. Participants will be invited to think collectively about the past, present, and futures of the university, understood in its local and global institutional logics and histories. We will discuss the role that empire had to play in the establishment of the modern secular, non-sectarian university, which originated in Calcutta. We’ll look at the debates between “useful” and “useless knowledge” at the heart of that project, and the ramifications of that debate today. We will pay specific attention to the role of the liberal arts and the humanities, and will invite participants to engage in collective thinking that is not limited to critiques of institutional power, but that attempts to think through the institutional form and revitalize the question of what universities are for. We are particularly interested in conceptualizing the liberal arts and humanities as part of democratic society, in considering places of research and learning beyond the North American context, and in reimagining the possibilities of institutional structures and practices in the university.

The workshop took place at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape.