Knowledge mediators and lubricating channels: on the temporal arts of performing the modern university - POSTPONED
- 17 Feb 2012
- 16:00 – 17:30 U.K. - England - London
- What time is this for me?
- Virtual | NSQI Ground Floor Seminar Room, NSQI, University of Bristol
- Speaker details
- Professor Susan Robertson and Mr. Filip Vostal University of Bristol
- Event contact
- Edwina Thorn/Conny Lippert (ias-wun-intern@bristol.ac.uk) University of Bristol
- Lead technician
- Kevin Thomas (video-conferencing@bristol.ac.uk) University of Bristol
- Related Research Groups
- Ideas and Universities
This event has been postponed. A new date will be announced soon.
Abstract
Around the globe, the role of the university in public policy is overwhelmingly being framed by the principle that its unique contribution to development should take the form of economic growth, regeneration, and transformation. This ‘remissioning’ of the university sits in contrast with a more general and historical definition of the university's raison d'être that has emphasized the deepening and extending of human understanding, with economic development an important, but secondary, mission. Yet, as numerous commentators point out (e.g. Slaughter and Rhodes, 2004; Nussbaum, 2009), this reorientation in the production of university-generated knowledge is far from innocent, either in its forms or effects. Much of this we are familiar with. However, what this literature does less well is to focus attention on deeper processes, such as time and space, and the ways these dynamics are strategically and selectively imbricated in structural transformations in the sector. Two things follow from this. First, we end with accounts that focus attention on the outcomes (such as time pressures, fast knowledge production) and not their underlying causes or accompanying dynamics. Second, we are then limited in being able to generate radical alternatives. And yet it is clear that if a fruitful counter-vocabulary, imaginary, and practice, is to emerge to challenge economic reductionism, it needs to be rooted in a deeper, rather different kind of analysis. We recognise this is no straightforward task in that, paradoxically, the accelerating rate of change renders it unstable and hard to seize, and because contemporary accounts tend to underscore the one-dimensionality and unidirectionality of academic life.
However it will be our argument that new actors and projects are being mobilised within the academy whose temporal and spatial logics are tied to, and informed by the logics and circuits of capital, and that far from uniformity, these logics are producing greater uneven development within the institution and sector. One newer kind of actor who is the focus of this paper is the knowledge mediator and broker (KM/B) who sits along the borders of the academy, and whose aim is to operate as 'lubricated channels' (Peck & Theodore 2010) to assist the freer flow of ideas between the market and the academy, and whose incubator and accelerator practices are designed to overcome the temporal rhythms and spatial practices of the academy. We show the complex ways in which these knowledge flows are themselves caught in, and shaped by, the ebb and flow, oscillation and mutation, of ideas and practices, despite attempts to control the spaces, and paces of new knowledge production for and by the market.