TY - JOUR
T1 - Transforming the Game
T2 - Democratizing the Publicness of Higher Education and Commonwealth in Neoliberal Times
AU - Coles, Romand
N1 - Funding Information:
While initial funding for faculty and graduate student involvement in this initiative came from the three programs that formed the core leadership, we have since gained substantial funding from the NAU President’s Innovation Fund, a Dean’s Faculty Development Grant, the National Science Foundation (on climate change science, regional and cultural contextualization, and civic engagement), the Arizona Technological Research Investment Fund (for alternative food economy research), J.P. Morgan-Chase Foundation, Kettering Foundation, and more. The strange heterogeneity of our funding sources reflects an emergent organizing philosophy that seeks to assemble a vast array of tools for transformation, as well as a supple trickster dexterity in our use of them: from collaborative research and public work on myriad specific projects; to broad-based networking; to education and outreach projects; to education and training on multiple modes of community organizing; to searching discussions of critical and radical democratic theory; to voter registration; to hosting public forums; to advocacy and testifying before various representative institutions; to radical street protests (often enough we remove our institutional hats for these); to forming a center for community-based solidarity economics; to dramatic performances and artistic interventions; to fostering collaborations with public, private, and nonprofit partner institutions in ways that seek to magnify and modulate the capacities of each to create change; to seeking state-level revolving loan funds for residential energy efficiency retrofits in conjunction with community organizing; to convivial practices of slow food and gathering at farmers’ markets; to daily liturgies of tending to and creating resilient gardens; to coaching children and youth in the arts of grass-roots democracy; to creative uses of the internet, social media, and video; to petitioning; to engaging in continual conversations about how to push democratic pedagogy and organizing in directions that further enhance our transformative power; to inviting speakers engaged in initiatives elsewhere.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014, © 2014 Caucus for a New Political Science.
PY - 2014/10/30
Y1 - 2014/10/30
N2 - This article argues that neoliberalism should be understood as a game-transformative set of practices in which the objective of each move is not only to gain the upper hand in the established game, but rather to repeatedly change the basic configuration of the game itself to further enhance its power. In the face of this assault on democratic commonwealth in higher education and elsewhere, many progressives are stuck in a primarily defensive frame according to which the objective is to resist losses and re-establish conditions that facilitate a less asymmetrical political game. This political stance harbors little democratic promise because it is insufficiently attentive to neoliberal game-transformative practices. To rejuvenate vital and mutually supportive relationships between public higher education and democracy, we must co-create a radically democratic game-transformative pedagogical and political practice in which we intensify and expand the meaning of publicness and publics. The article explores Northern Arizona University's Action Research Teams initiative as one prefiguration of this possibility.
AB - This article argues that neoliberalism should be understood as a game-transformative set of practices in which the objective of each move is not only to gain the upper hand in the established game, but rather to repeatedly change the basic configuration of the game itself to further enhance its power. In the face of this assault on democratic commonwealth in higher education and elsewhere, many progressives are stuck in a primarily defensive frame according to which the objective is to resist losses and re-establish conditions that facilitate a less asymmetrical political game. This political stance harbors little democratic promise because it is insufficiently attentive to neoliberal game-transformative practices. To rejuvenate vital and mutually supportive relationships between public higher education and democracy, we must co-create a radically democratic game-transformative pedagogical and political practice in which we intensify and expand the meaning of publicness and publics. The article explores Northern Arizona University's Action Research Teams initiative as one prefiguration of this possibility.
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U2 - 10.1080/07393148.2014.954799
DO - 10.1080/07393148.2014.954799
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84920098167
SN - 0739-3148
VL - 36
SP - 622
EP - 639
JO - New Political Science
JF - New Political Science
IS - 4
ER -