The Kneller Lecture: The Power of Protest: Paulo Freire and the Strikes against the Extractive University

Group Submission Type: Special Session

Description of Session

The Power of Protest: Paulo Freire and the Strikes against the Extractive
University
Paulo Freire subscribed to Marx’s theory of emancipation and alienated labor, but his
focus was on the liberation of the educated. Based on a “workers’ inquiry” of University
of California teaching assistants, understood as street level educators in the worsening
conditions of the extractive university, we develop a labor theory of pedagogy that informs
the outbreak, development and outcome of an unprecedented
strike involving 48,000 graduate students and postdocs. Without a
commitment to an alternative labor process of pedagogy – which
calls for an alternative university – the materialist strikes intensify the
degradation of higher education. The liberator, too, has to be liberated.
Michael Burawoy taught at University of California, Berkeley for nearly
50 years, during which time he did ethnographic research on industrial
work in different countries. Most recently he has been studying his
own factory – the university – and together with a group of g

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University

Keynote Speaker

• Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley