The MSCP is excited to once again participate in the Festival of Para-Academia. This year FOPA is running 12–14 December at Balam Balam Place in Brunswick. The timetable is to be released on November 20.
Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.
In 1934, Samuel Beckett penned a formidable send-up of his short-lived professionalism in the university sector having found endless frustration amongst its ivory borders. Setting its decisional framework to one side, this poetic inflection becomes a trace through which to rethink our own relation to, and difference from, the no longer brick-and-mortar beacon of << and now only a >> symbolic bureaucracy. As the university's erosively unsustainable practices continue to gut and exacerbate capacities of patience, precarity and tolerance, this discussion asks how its place as institution might be rethought today? What desire can be formed through uncommon approaches that turn from it to renewed practices and places of learning? Is thinking still possible... if so, what and how?
To answer these questions the discussion focuses on Beckett’s four-line poem 'Gnome', especially for its intersecting themes of institutional resistance and the subtle, unannounced and seemingly irresolvable dialectic between learning and education.
Presenters
- Ali Alizadeh - Gnome de guerre
- Justin Clemens - Metrognome
- Claire Colebrook - Gnomadology
- Merlyn Gwyther-McCuskey - Gnome-ick
- Sigi Jöttkandt - Gnomie
- Caitlyn Lesiuk - Gno
- Thomas Moran - Gnome’n
- Anthony Uhlmann - 'Key-gnome'