Thinking in place: Picturing the Knowledge University as a politics of refusal

Introduction

In an academic environment concerned with knowledge performativity (Cowen, 1996), thinking about thinking is discouraged as an incalculable luxury. The act of thinking is an essential activity in the university setting, but, outside the disciplinary fields of philosophy or neuroscience, thinking itself is not often a unit of analysis. ¹ Managerial and ministerial perceptions of knowledge production dominate the academic discourse around the utility of thinking, which includes thinking about thinking (Teelken, 2012). Academic activity that is not directly tied to a revenue stream is deemed idle or irrelevant to economically redefined notions of the public good (Marginson, 2011; Pusser, 2014). Thinking that critically challenges academic revenue generation may even be perceived as either foolish or heretical (Lynch, 2014; Morrissey, 2013, 2015). Instead, compliance with the tenets of academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004) is rewarded with the perquisites of our vanishing academic profession (especially employment security and progress through the ranks).

Not only do we not think much about thinking, we do not give much thought to the conditions within which we think, spatially or geographically speaking (Temple, 2014, 2018). I am interested in thinking about the physical and virtual places of thinking, in and through the commoditized spaces of the contemporary university, as a transgression against the revenue-centric models of academic accountability. The question of “where” in relation to thinking surfaces the material conditions (e.g. facilities, networks, infrastructure) undergirding the production of knowledge capital. How might we critically occupy academic places and spaces that have become commoditized? In this essay, I demonstrate how we might think non-productively in place by (re)inhabiting the very facilities, networks, and infrastructures that are maintained to support academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004) and corporate branding.

The images herein are presented in relation to a hypothetical foil: The Knowledge University. I imagine the Knowledge University as a future dystopia disguised with a revenue-positive name. Perhaps this future place is all that will be left of the academic enterprise after the success/tragedy of the Neoliberal University and its “performance regimes” (Morrissey, 2015). For this essay, I include selected images to interrupt the text-centric production values of the neoliberal academy, which has emphasized written expression over pictorial practices for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is related to bibliometrics. In a research context marked by individualized performance evaluation and corporate knowledge commodification (Raaper, 2016; Ramírez, 2014; Roberts, 2013), an emphasis on social media confronts assumptions about the place and form of academic critique, calling into question the “publish-ability” and legitimacy of such engagements (Pauwels, 2010). Analysis of higher education’s policies and practices, including critiques arising from the humanities and the emerging field of Critical University Studies (Readings, 1996; Williams, 2012), often place numerical and linguistic sensibilities at the center. A more visual or multimodal methodology in higher education studies is emerging, yet the approaches utilized to date are often influenced by “legitimated” qualitative research methods, such as content analysis (Krippendorff, 2012). By taking a broad, sensory-based approach, we might assert a different way of thinking about higher education in both form and function. In this context, attempts to visually and textually recognize the possible future Knowledge University might be understood as a “politics of refusal” (Ball, 2016: 1130).

Herein, two photographs are discussed, each taken at the University of British Columbia as part of an unsponsored exploration of institutional image-making at my place of employment. The images are “snapshots” (Zuromskis, 2013), informal photographs captured on my “smart phone” during my many wanderings on campus. Indeed, the ambulatory nature of the discussion to follow is intentional, to evoke the role of “walking while thinking” that is under-described in the academy and yet has been essential to the thinking practices of many “great minds” (Gros, 2014). Further, the images depicted here were uploaded to social media on my personal Twitter account as an informal experiment regarding the “uptake” and circulation of campus photography in social media sites (Kimmons et al., 2017; Veletsianos et al., 2017).

The format of representation here is screenshots of the posts, including time/date stamp. Thus, the discussion that follows each image relates to my thoughts at the time the image was taken, the geo-social practice of circulating the image on social media (Rose, 2016), and my analysis of the movement of the image/text post in that context. The figures selected for inclusion in this essay are representations of reflection and resistance, themes that relate to my thinking in place about the futurity of the Knowledge University. Social media has provided a “sandbox” for my thinking about the multimodality (image/text) of academic discourse, with my participation in that virtual space serving as a real-time experiment in public view. Jancsary et al. (2016) noted that “multimodality is governed by cultural and institutional rules—norms, conventions, and guidelines that tell us what is adequate, and what is not” (182). Multimodality and meaning can nonetheless be elusive in social media contexts, particularly due to the intertwined effects of globalization and digitization. To ground the analysis of multimodal discourse, we can approach social media contexts through questions of how it was created, what was seen/said, and who was responsible for the communication and transmission over time (Jancsary et al., 2016). The following sections describe my participation in the multimodal environment of Twitter, followed by a discussion of the changing role and place of dissent in the academic context.

Reflections on the Knowledge University

Reflective thinking about the performative Knowledge University settles into spaces concerned with learning for improvement at the level of the individual student (Barton and Ryan, 2014; Ryan, 2013) or the organization (Kinzie et al., 2015; Pettersen, 2015). Removed from the concerns of evaluation, my reflective thinking has questioned the place of value and the value of place in higher education. The physical location of the university campus is increasingly seen as an asset that holds value for the institution in several ways. First, the campus is a site of institutional history and memory, within which the traditions of the university are maintained. Second, the campus is the site of academic activity, where the mission of the university might be achieved. Third, the campus is a mise-en-scène upon which the stage of university life is struck. Lastly, but not finally, the campus is becoming a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994) of academia, increasingly a hollowed out version of itself that seeks to appear “academic” in recognizable ways, even if it does not actually give place to intellectual work. To critically occupy this place of monetized value, we might reconsider timeworn traditions by removing anachronistic or offensive statues (Banda and Mafofo, 2016), challenge stated missions through collective action (Barnhardt, 2015), clandestinely redress the scenery (Pickus, 2015), or reposition meaning at the core of the institution rather than as a surface attribute seen in marketing campaigns (Osei-Kofi and Torres, 2015). Thinking in place takes up space that could otherwise be used for the Knowledge University.

During my campus wanderings, I find multiple opportunities for such reflective thinking. Sometimes opportunities are erected in my path as the Knowledge University is constructed around me. The water feature depicted in Figure 1 sits within the newly built Martha Piper Plaza, named for a former university president, on the Vancouver campus of the University of British Columbia. A concrete bench encircles a basin of water, where a ring of fountains form the backdrop for metal letters spelling out the name of the university. In the center is another ring of water, which remains still even when the fountain is flowing. Now in my path to the office, I pass by this fountain each day, taking note of the changes that occur there at the center of campus. Its location makes it a focal point of campus activity and organizational sensibility. On one April Fool’s Day, for example, the fountain was filled with soap bubbles. On another day, students were standing on the edge of the fountain, chanting in protest over a proposed rise in tuition fees. During a recent drought, the fountain was dry per a city-wide water restriction advisory. Every day that I pass the fountain and pause before it I am presented with an opportunity to reflect upon the connections between campus and community, between our “brand” image and our imagination, between our purpose and our predicament. OPEN IN VIEWER

In January 2015, as I passed by on my way to work, I was surprised by the clarity of the fountain and the quality of the reflected light at its center. The interior circle was smooth like a mirror, in contrast to the rippled surface of the water at the edge of the fountain. I snapped a photo with my iPhone, and tweeted it with the question, “What do we see in ourselves, UBC?” and the hashtag #ThisIsResearch. Two hours later, the image was retweeted by the university’s primary Twitter account (@UBC), with the addition of “Great photos!” I received no answers to my query from @UBC or other Twitter users, but frankly I didn’t expect any. I admit I was hoping to generate a dialogue on social media, but was initially content instead with wider exposure to my question. Upon further reflection, I am unsatisfied with my query, which fell flat as an institutional critique due to its lack of specificity. As written, the question was too easily subsumed into the evaluative narrative of neoliberal self-improvement, with the subtext being “What can we make of ourselves?” If I had stated instead, “How can we look at ourselves given what we have we pushed under the surface?” my tweet would likely not have been retweeted by the institution.

My reflection on the purposes of the university circles around a central dilemma. In a chapter titled, “Educating Human Capital” in her book Undoing the Demos, Brown (2015) noted that “It is a commonplace that broadly accessible and affordable higher education is one of the greatest casualties of neoliberalism’s ascendance in the Euro-Atlantic world” (175, emphasis added). Whereas Brown located neoliberalism as an external influence on higher education, there is little evidence that the “casualties” of market-based ideologies, such as “democracy” and the “public good,” were not instead causalities of higher education’s historic complicities in the further establishment of racialized, hegemonic, settler capitalism (Labaree, 2017; Stein and de Oliveira Andreotti, 2017). The presence of neoliberalism in the academy should not be our primary concern, but instead we might first question how it is that the multiple oppressive stances that undergird the university’s “merit”-based hierarchies are so readily available to the sensibilities and metrics of human capital(ism).

Resistance in the Knowledge University

Ball (2012) noted that “knowledge has its price” (18), and that neoliberal reforms have marketized our academic practices and relationships:

On the one hand, there is, of course, a very, very real economic and political dynamic to the reform of Higher Education, a business dynamic which seeks profit from the buying and selling of education ‘services’. This has become a part of the financial planning and commercial adventures of our institutions and involves, in various ways, the commodification of our academic practice. On the other, neoliberalism gets into our minds and our souls, into the ways in which we think about what we do, and into our social relations with others. (18)

Figure 2 represents resistance to the Knowledge University as an act of graffiti that repositions the relationship between the art market and the artist, as well as challenging the colonial present of the academy by reoccupying everyday spaces. The graffiti depicted in Figure 2 has undergone three iterations. The wall on which it was painted is located in a parking structure on the UBC campus. I first noticed a broken bottle in a parking space and splattered liquid on the adjacent wall in May 2015. A few days later I noticed the spray-painted stencil, and I stopped to take a photo. I tweeted the photo then, with the phrase “Seen @UBC today.” It was not retweeted. Eventually, the broken bottle was cleared away. Several months later the dirty splatter was removed, but the spray painted stencil remained. OPEN IN VIEWER

When I saw the spray painted stencil added to the splatter, my first reaction was to laugh out loud because I felt that a trickster raven was laughing at me. The stencil reminded me of the artwork of Haida artist Bill Reid, whose Raven and the First Men sculpture and silver work are on permanent display at the Museum of Anthropology nearby on the UBC campus. After some investigation I found a similar pattern among Reid’s silverwork, on small box he called The Final Exam (1964). ² Reid’s silver box, I learned, was patterned after a painted bentwood box (c. 1865) located in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The bentwood box’s pattern was reproduced in the celebrated/notorious anthropologist Franz Boas’ Primitive Art (1927), referenced by Reid (2000) as his introduction to the piece. Boas (1927) described the pattern thusly, dismissing Indigenous knowledge in the process:

An interpretation was given to me for the box shown in fig. 287b. Although obtained from Charles Edensaw, one of the best artists among the Haida, I consider it entirely fanciful….Edensaw explained the design as showing four interpretations of the raven as culture-hero. (276)

Returning to Shahjahan’s (2014) call to resistance in the neoliberal university, the raven graffiti reclaimed a space that had become “noplace”—a parking garage—and turned it into a political, educational space. Further, the transformation of designs reproduced by both the anthropologist (Boas) and the artist (Reid) into street art challenges the place of debate about whose knowledge counts and is validated or re-circulated in the Knowledge University. As Marker (2017) noted,

If these spaces of paradigm change continue to open and expand, they could catalyze new third spaces of consciousness combining Indigenous and Western knowledge systems as a form of reconciliation. Universities, willing to acknowledge and engage the history of settler state colonialism while supporting Indigenous intellectual priorities could become the sites for a new/old relationship to the natural world. (12, Italics in original)

Photography as a politics of refusal

The images displayed here were part of an experiment in public thinking where I shared my photographic critique of the university over social media. As the social justification of the university as a “public good” is eroded by commercialization, public thinking in unofficial, non-monetized spaces becomes an act of resistance. The use of a digital “speaker’s corner” like Twitter can be defended as a re-appropriation of the digital infrastructures of the university, previously meant to support pubic knowledge (Lupton et al., 2017).

With regard to Twitter, I had not always been brave in that space, and have since evacuated it due to its vitriol. Tweeting while academic can be dangerous business, despite common understandings of academic freedom (Abraham, 2015; Bose, 2012). The emerging knowledge regime is oriented toward prestige and intolerant of threats to its corporate image. If we are not yet fully incorporated by the Knowledge University, we seem to be enveloped by the Reputational University, which is attuned to the marketplace and overly concerned with institutional “image” and prestige. As such, I am not surprised that my university’s public relations staff did not retweet the graffiti photo (Figure 2), with “Great photo!” or some other enthusiastic tag line attached. By contrast, the openness of my question, “What do we see in ourselves, UBC?” in the first tweet (Figure 1) permitted its endorsement by the official university Twitter account. What I intended as a provocative question to challenge our values and assumptions could just as easily be read as part of a navel-gazing, neoliberal self-affirmation project.

Other academics have been bolder in their thinking out loud over social media (Gonzales, 2015; Ringrose, 2018). Recently, some academics have come under scrutiny for their controversial social media presence, particularly when critiquing their own places of employment (Thomason, 2015). It has been argued that academic freedom policies and guidelines need to be rewritten for the social media age. While that may be, outlets such as Twitter provide public spaces for a politics of refusal to resist the Neoliberal University before it entirely becomes the performative Knowledge University. As reflective and critical thinkers in the academy, we are not beholden to maintaining a shiny, bright image of our institutions (Maskovsky, 2012). By capturing and recording atypical campus images such as these and by publicly posing critical questions about the space and place of higher education, we might contribute counter-narratives and unofficial images in the very social media spaces that so often feature market-fresh images of the same physical places. Ball (2016) might consider subversive social media activity as a “micro critical practice” that is “lacking in grandeur” (1130), both suitable and essential as informal challenges to authoritarian views (Lupton et al., 2017). In its best form, thinking out loud via social media about the commoditized university is “fearless speech” (Ball, 2016). Ball references Foucault’s writing on the politics of public engagement known to the ancient Greeks as parrhesia, speaking truth to power (Foucault, 2001). Dyrberg (2014) defined parrhesia as:

speaking truthfully, freely and being up-front in the sense of being open, transparent, engaging and saying everything there is to say about a particular issue in contrast to holding something back, being secretive, covert and manipulative….it is risky and takes timing and courage, it requires knowledge, a good sense of judgment and resolve. (2)

Conclusion

In this essay, I presented two images, previously shared over social media with accompanying text, related to themes of reflection and resistance in higher education. In sharing my thought processes about each image, I have endeavored to make my thinking about the place of thinking in higher education more evident. The two image/text posts are explicitly connected to the physical campus and the virtual university environment. In contrast to the sleek marketing messages my institution shares daily over social media, my campus snapshots and others like them serve as critical counter-points to the image-consciousness of the prestige-seeking university as it clamors to become a Knowledge University. Yet, we may find that, over time, social media holds less and less potential to affect change within the academy, if the goal is to re-assert the place of thinking within the university itself. In that regard, efforts might be better made to attempt to insert multimodal critique into the more traditional venues for academic discourse, such as peer-reviewed journals. This would require a more conscious effort on the part of authors and editors to parse visual/textual argumentation, and perhaps this might relate to the larger discussion on the commercialization that pervades academic publishing (Jessop, 2017). To the extent that this essay, wherein social media posts are reproduced, serves as a counter-narrative and an alternative form of knowledge dissemination, it is also a successful academic transgression in the formal sense.