Join us for a panel discussion of Isaac Kamola's, Making the World Global, followed by a celebration of his work along with Eli Meyerhoff's Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World and Sean Parson's Food Not Bombs, Homes Not Jails, and Resistance to Gentrification.

Free food and (non-alcoholic) drinks will be provided at the party! The panel on Isaac's book will feature comments from George Ciccariello-Maher, Jonneke Koomen, and Eli Meyerhoff. (Please note that there will be a a separate panel on Eli's and Sean's books within the APSA conference on Sat. at 10am in the Hilton.)

Making the World Global by Isaac Kamola
Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education. In Making the World Global Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced.

Duke University Press 2019 - order and read a pdf of the introduction here:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/making-the-world-global
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Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World_ by Eli Meyerhoff -
Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities, as sites of intersecting political struggles over resources for studying.

Meyerhoff argues that the predominant mode of study, education, is only one among many alternatives and that it must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution. He traces how key elements of education—the vertical trajectory of individualized development, its role in preparing people to participate in governance through a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste (the “dropout”) and value (the “graduate”)—emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making.

Through interviews with participants in contemporary university struggles and embedded research with an anarchist free university, Beyond Education paves new avenues for achieving the aims of an “alter-university” movement to put novel modes of study into practice. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, it charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.

University of Minnesota Press - Forthcoming in July 2019 - pre-order here:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/beyond-education

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Cooking up a revolution:
Food Not Bombs, Homes Not Jails, and resistance to gentrification_ by Sean Parson
During the late 1980s and early 1990s the City San Francisco waged a war with the homeless. During this period over 1,000 arrests and citations where handed out by the police to activists for simply handing out free food in public parks. Why would a liberal city arrest activists helping the homeless? In exploring this question, the book uses the conflict between the city and activists as a unique opportunity to examine the contested nature of urban politics, homelessness, and public space while developing an anarchist alternative to liberal urban politics that is rooted in mutual aid, solidarity, and anti-capitalism. In addition to exploring theoretical and political issues related to gentrification, broken-windows policing, and anti-homeless laws, this book provides both activists, students, and scholars, examples of how anarchist homeless activists in San Francisco resisted these process.

Manchester University Press 2019 - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/cooking-up-a-revolution-9781526107350?cc=us&lang=en&#