CONFERENCE

DPR8: Power and the Academy

The 8th Conference of the Discourse, Power, Resistance Series

6 – 8 April 2009
Manchester Metropolitan University , UK

Geoffrey Manton Conference Centre

Keynote speakers:
Zygmunt Bauman
Cameron McCarthy

(other keynote speakers to be confirmed)

What is the relationship between power and the academy? Academics are effectively government employees, told what to do and how to do it. In research they are told what matters and what does not, and this tells them what they will get research funding for and what they won’t; and they are told what methods to use – what will count as evidence and what won’t. In teaching they are told what to teach and what not to teach, how to teach it and how to assess it. Teachers and learners tick boxes, performing as trainers and trainees with constant reference to the demands of the workplace, and subject to a Byzantine apparatus of monitoring and surveillance. If they transgress, punishment follows, normally in the form of the withdrawal of funding.

The Discourse, Power, Resistance conference has returned to these issues year by year since the first conference in 2002. This year we ask:

• what are the current threats to academic freedom?
• is the academy as powerless as it appears to be?
• how far, and in what ways, are academics complicit in the processes of disempowerment?
• has it been different – better or worse - in the past?
• is it the same in all contemporary societies?
• why does any of this matter?
• what is to be done?

Information on the conference will be posted on the website http://www.esri.mmu.ac.uk/dpr/