Academic Care Café: Rebuilding the University by Playing in the Rubbish

Description

Academic Care Café: Rebuilding the University by Playing in the Rubbish

This was a creative intervention over two days at the AHRC 'Fail Again, Fail Better? Recuperating Failure in Utopian Politics and Research' project's secondof three conferences, entitled 'Failed Again: The Fault-Lines in Utopia'.
In this care café, we explored the failure of the potential utopian space that is the university today. Mired in managerialism, neoliberalism and capitalism, boxed, siloed, and divided, the academic spaces we live in are those of epistemic structural harm that are geared more towards market values and monetary value than caring for staff, students and the production of knowledge that can support and change the world for the better.
In this workshop space, we worked with conference attendees to dismantle what does not work, create hope from the rubble, engage in collage and sculpture and work in the spirit of collaboration to reimagine and reconstruct the form of the university. What we create on day one faced the disruption of moving to a different space for day 2, allowing for further reimagining and exploration of the fluidity and malleability often experienced within times of systemic chaos. There was no right or wrong in this place of play, speaking, sharing, and reflecting while doing. Working with upcycled university marketing materials or ‘rubbish’ we encouraged participants to rip, cut and crawl through these new landscapes, bringing new to life and hope to the spaces that fail us through discriminatory practices, racist agendas, gendered hierarchies, sexual identity discrimination and ableist practices.
We plan to create an online representation of the final work that can be engaged with online as an interactive virtual gallery for the final project event in London.

Period	10 Sept 2024 → 11 Sept 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Newcastle, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International