“Who's Going to Man the Factories and be the Sexual Slaves if we all get PhDs?” Democratizing Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute

Abstract

Identifying a policy/activism dichotomy in critical geography debates about political engagement, this paper uses the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI) as a way to think about teaching as an alternative response for left geographers. By focusing on the DGEI's commitment to expanding access to knowledge production, not simply the dissemination of knowledge, the paper highlights the radical potential of a key form of academic work, teaching, but reconceived as a radically democratic project aimed at breaking the cycle of expert knowledge production. This potential has largely been marginalized in the development of radical geography, but it has been carried forward, latently, in much of the best thinking about the democratic possibilities of knowledge production, namely feminist discussions of situated knowledges. The paper argues that revisiting the DGEI helps to push those discussions further and restore teaching as a central concern of radical geography's project of promoting social justice.

Getting ‘Out There’ and Impacting: The Problem of Housing and Urban Research and its Anarchist Alternative

“…In other words, they are involved in softening (albeit not overcoming) the boundary between 'in here' and 'out there'. By the same token not all anarchist influenced HURs are overcoming the boundaries between 'in here' and 'out there' by living in common; some anarchist influenced HURs remain wedded to their role as social scientists -albeit they share their expertise with others (see Heyman 2007). They are similarly softening rather than overcoming the boundaries.…”

“…Anything said with passion and you're accused of all sorts of things: perhaps I should take [Professor X] advice to one of my peers and start writing 'more like an academic'! (personal communication) Keith (1992) suggests that this social scientific regulation of HUR leads to scholarship that is 'epistemologically strategic but fraudulent' because it requires critical and 'out there' HURs such as "even Andy Merrifield" (Heyman 2007: 109) to conform to the demands of the social scientific field rather than their own urban constituencies (Kitchin and Hubbard 1999;Fuller and Kitchin 2004;Heyman 2007Heyman 2009). Bourdieu similarly agrees that such a system constitutes "scientific censorship [which] is very often only concealed political censorship" (Bourdieu 2008: 87) because its' denigration of vernacular voices 'out there' as 'not academic enough' subjugates them.…”

“…In rejecting these false and divisive essentialisms, the anarchist task is to establish and expand spaces in which the uncommon is transformed into the common (Chatterton 2006) such that all become more aware of their 'common grounds' (Chatterton et al, 2008). That is to say, the task of the anarchist is to step outside of the 'scholar self' and into genuine personhood and reciprocal human relationships that dissolve the boundary between 'in here' and 'out there' (Heyman 2007).…”

“…The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute provides us with the most commonly cited example of this approach in a HUR related field because it involves a new role for the anti-expert academic that is tasked to place their social scientific instruments in the hands of others (Fuller and Kitchen 2004;Heyman 2007Heyman 2009Bunge 2011). Thus the process of knowledge production itself becomes a vehicle of pre-figuration; a way in which social relations can begin to be reshaped along egalitarian lines.…”

Fixed-Term and Temporary: Teaching Fellows, Tactics, and the Negotiation of Contingent Labour in the UK Higher Education System

“…We do so in order to critically examine the power relations in our own working environments and attempts to negotiate such power relations to achieve productive outcomes in the face of challenging employment conditions. Whilst discussions of teaching or teaching staff are present in Higher Education and geographyspecific literature (see Baulder, 2006;Dowling, 2008;Heyman, 2007;Purcell, 2007) it remains the case that critical accounts of teaching-only staff experiences are fewer than those of research fellows or permanent faculty members. There has also been less attention in geography, at least, to the UK Teaching Fellow as a particular member of the academic workforce (see Purcell 2007 for the US context 3 ).…”