3Cs calls for contributions: Guidebook to the Unbounded University

3Cs is writing a book and we want your contributions!

Call for submissions:  A Guidebook to the Unbounded University: Cartographies of Knowledge Production in Struggle

The university has exploded like a meteorite into a thousand fragmentary spaces of knowledge, affect, production and struggle. Classroom seminars and campus buildings bleed onto adjacent urban fabrics as the city and campus merge. University research leaps up from the laboratory and re-articulates with and alters production networks, military and police contracts and new pharmaceuticals. Autonomous knowledges and movements spring up within and against the university.

Corporate offices are side by side with academic and administration offices, and university inhabitants enraged by the crisis seek to occupy everything. In the midst of these transformations, the university is becoming a primary node of broader social shifts, such as the knowledge economy and its reconfigurations of everyday spaces, increasing precarity of labor, global migration and border-policing, new technology and communication-forms, and a broader interconnectivity of social movements. Perhaps the University has ceased to be a mode of education and has become a mode of organizing society…

Rising through the cracks, beneath the ruins of the ivory tower, unfurl the green shoots of an emergent social form, the rhizomatic university. Old and new forms of knowledge production and exploitation, multiple forms of enclosure and re-invention of the commons,  possibilities of alternative politics, the erasure of borders of what is and where is not the university, the queering of identities such as student, staff, faculty, migrant, non-student, and, and and and…

We propose a guidebook from below to a place which is of our own imaginings. Through this book we will dream together, share demands and cautions, escape routes and itineraries and help to call the rhizomatic university into being.

Contributions could be descriptive and prescriptive, analyzing transformations in the university today as well as the struggles both within and against the university and outside and beyond it. We encourage short’ to medium length writing and as many graphics as possible. Submissions should play with all aspects of the guidebook format and could include:

• Maps
• Specific histories or timelines of movements, universities, social centers or theoretical schools
• Real and imagined itineraries through spaces of knowledge production
• “Instructions to the visitor” – advice, cautions, survival strategies, DIY how-tos for making it in the university today
• Photos or drawings of specific sites, along with short descriptions
• “How it works” — theoretical understandings and analyses of the university (up to 5000 words)
• “Useful phrases” and glossary terms
• Flora and fauna
• Comics
• Nightlife and entertainment
• Facts and figures

Please submit a brief description, abstract, sketch or diagram of your planned contribution via email to countercartographies(@)gmail.com by June 5, 2010. We will make review decisions or suggestions on a rolling basis. Feel free to contact us with questions or comments.