Machine Un/learning: Seeking the Heart of the Academy/University

• In Event: Naming the Past, Reclaiming the Present in Higher Education

Abstract

Analogies and metaphors of the machine are all too common within the context of the academic industrial complex. The growth and spread of the “Must Fall” or “fallist” student-led movements that spread within and across South African universities, posit a humbling case study from the so-called “Global South” to help challenge, reimagine, and transform the hackneyed notion of the “university-as-machine.” Using a South African framework of ubuntu, this community participatory action research project centered collaborative ethnographic approaches to storytelling within and across activist spaces. Artists, activists, and academics actively engaged in #MustFall protests within and beyond higher education institutions reveal that these student-led protests resulted in the emergence of critical higher education transformation studies and reconceptualized the “university-as-machine” into “university-as-body.”

Author

• Sahar D. Sattarzadeh, University of Texas - Arlington
  Presenting Author