Maïa Pal

Anxieties regarding colonial and neoliberal education have generated multiple calls for critical international pedagogies. Scholars of critical pedagogy have analyzed the pedagogies of the neoliberal project, whose ethos and economic imperatives aim to produce apolitical consumers and future citizens. Such calls, this article argues, articulate a concern about other-regardedness, critiquing the impact of neoliberalism on the cultivation of student values and relations towards politics, society, and others. How can we articulate a critical international pedagogy informed by, and enhancing, students' and future citizens' other-regardedness towards those " superfluous " and " disposable " others outside the classroom and the formal curriculum? To this end, we mobilize Michel Foucault's thinking of " counter-conduct " to illuminate how students resist being conducted as self-interested and apolitical consumers. Such practices remain largely unexplored in examinations of recent student protests and occupations. Examining the 2005 occupation of a French university against the local government's abandonment of asylum-seekers, we discuss students' own processes of social participation and self-formation, thus exploring the possibilities and tensions for advancing a critical and other-regarding pedagogy. Greater attention to students resisting the historically blind and market-driven rationalities and techniques of governing-inside and outside classrooms and curricula-marks an important point of departure for critical pedagogies of the international.

Deploying the Foucauldian concepts of 'conduct' and 'counter-conduct', this article provides an analysis of 'Occupy Sussex' – a two-month long student occupation launched in opposition to the outsourcing of service staff at the University of Sussex. Situated in the context of a post-Fordist political economy, we argue that the British university constitutes an especial site of conduct formation – a University Factory – wherein individuals are sorted and socialised as immaterial labourers. We argue that Occupy Sussex was a reaction to such conduct formation. As such counter-conduct is deployed as concept that can effectively map the tactics and strategies undertaken by Occupy Sussex against the university management. Moreover, counter-conduct is used in order to trace prefigurative attempts to redefine the university within the space of the occupation – away from the University Factory, toward collective self-management, alternative understandings of the 'university experience', and an emergent notion of 'community'. Finally, the use of counter-conduct serves to highlight the dangers of appropriation and co-optation; how university management attempted to co-opt and thus defuse the counter-conduct of Occupy Sussex.

Anxieties regarding colonial and neoliberal education have generated multiple calls for critical international pedagogies. Scholars of critical pedagogy have analyzed the pedagogies of the neoliberal project, whose ethos and economic imperatives aim to produce apolitical consumers and future citizens. Such calls, this article argues, articulate a concern about other-regardedness, critiquing the impact of neoliberalism on the cultivation of student values and relations towards politics, society, and others. How can we articulate a critical international pedagogy informed by, and enhancing, students' and future citizens' other-regardedness towards those " superfluous " and " disposable " others outside the classroom and the formal curriculum? To this end, we mobilize Michel Foucault's thinking of " counter-conduct " to illuminate how students resist being conducted as self-interested and apolitical consumers. Such practices remain largely unexplored in examinations of recent student protests and occupations. Examining the 2005 occupation of a French university against the local government's abandonment of asylum-seekers, we discuss students' own processes of social participation and self-formation, thus exploring the possibilities and tensions for advancing a critical and other-regarding pedagogy. Greater attention to students resisting the historically blind and market-driven rationalities and techniques of governing-inside and outside classrooms and curricula-marks an important point of departure for critical pedagogies of the international.

WORKSHOP: 'The Space of Biopolitics.'

Tuesday, 04th July 2017, 11:00 to 16:00

Oxford Brookes University - The Green Room, Headington Hill Hall, Headington Campus, Headington Hill site.

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/HSS/Events/-The-Space-of-Biopolitics%E2%80%8B--Symposium/

"Our contemporary world is witness to spatial re-configurations on an unprecedented scale: the enforcement of borders and internment camps, the displacement of populations on a scale not seen since the world wars. Towns and cities creak and groan under the pressures of outdated infrastructure, regional inequalities increase societal tensions and create new forms of politics, and the individual biological body is increasingly forced into precarious forms of existence.

The workshop seeks to interrogate the ‘space’ of this amorphous, and yet discrete, subject of biopolitics that shapes our current world from the perspectives of the Anthropocene, jurisdiction, urban design, or atmospheric living, among others, and drawing on varying academic backgrounds such as law, architecture, politics, and philosophy."

There is no registration required and the event is open to all. A full programme is yet to be confirmed.

clloyd@brookes.ac.uk
akotsakis@brookes.ac.uk

The Research Handbook on Law and Marxism will be the first large-scale edited collection of its kind on specifically Marxist approaches to law and legal theory. It will bring together thirty-six scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

Questions of legal extraterritoriality figure prominently in scholarship on legal pluralism, transnational legal studies, international investment law, international human rights law, state responsibility under international law, and a large number of other areas. Yet many accounts of extraterritoriality make little effort to grapple with its thorny conceptual history, shifting theoretical valence, and complex political roots and ramifications.

This book brings together thirteen scholars of law, history, and politics in order to reconsider the history, theory, and contemporary relevance of legal extraterritoriality. Situating questions of extraterritoriality in a set of broader investigations into state-building, imperialist rivalry, capitalist expansion, and human rights protection, it tracks the multiple meanings and functions of a distinct and far-reaching mode of legal authority. The fundamental aim of the volume is to examine the different geographical contexts in which extraterritorial regimes have developed, the political and economic pressures in response to which such regimes have grown, the highly uneven distributions of extraterritorial privilege that have resulted from these processes, and the complex theoretical quandaries to which this type of privilege has given rise.

The volume is edited by Daniel S. Margolies (Professor of History, Virginia Wesleyan University), Umut Özsu (Assistant Professor of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University), Maïa Pal (Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Oxford Brookes University), and Ntina Tzouvala (Postdoctoral Fellow in International Law, University of Melbourne).

Contributors include Ellen Gutterman (Associate Professor of Political Science at Glendon College, York University), John Haskell (Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Manchester), Richard S. Horowitz (Professor of History, California State University, Northridge), Daniel S. Margolies (Professor of History, Virginia Wesleyan University), Kate Miles (Fellow and Lecturer in Law, Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge), Maïa Pal (Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Oxford Brookes University), Alice M. Panepinto (Lecturer in Law, Queen’s University Belfast), Austen L. Parrish (Dean and James H. Rudy Professor of Law, Indiana University), Sara L. Seck (Associate Professor of Law, Dalhousie University), Péter D. Szigeti (Assistant Professor of Law, University of Alberta), Mai Taha (Assistant Professor of Law, American University in Cairo), Ntina Tzouvala (Postdoctoral Fellow in International Law, University of Melbourne), and Ezgi Yildiz (Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science and International Relations, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva).