Post-critical Perspectives on Higher Education: Reclaiming the Educational in the University(3 Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives)

This book addresses essential educational dimensions of the university that are often overlooked, not only by prevailing discourses and practices but also by standard critical approaches to higher education. Each chapter takes a different approach to the articulation of a 'post-critical' view of the university, and focuses on a specific dimension, including lectures, academic freedom, and the student experience.
The 'post-critical' attitude offers an affirmative approach to the constitutive educational practices of the university. It is 'post-' because it is a movement in thought that comes after the critical, which, in its modern and postmodern forms is considered, in Latour's terms, to have 'run out of steam'. It is an attempt to articulate new conceptual and methodological tools that help us grasp our current conditions. It is not anti-critique; but rather than seeking to debunk current practices, this affirmative approach offers perspectives that shed new light on what we do as educators, on the essence of our educational practices, and on their immanent value. The focus on the educational, then, applies not only to practices that happen to take place in the educational space of the university, but also to those practices whose value we can understand in educational terms.

Table of Contents:
1 Introduction.- 2 Practicing Universitas.- 3 From ruins to response-ability: Making a university in a Palestinian refugee camp.- 4 Calculation and Trust in the Governance of Modern Academia.- 5 Participation in Partition: Post-critical Approaches to the University.- 6 University lecturing as a technique of collective imagination: On seeing things as if they had taken a bodily form.- 7 Modes of Meetings in Academia and the Spectres of University: From breaking the chains to appreciative mutual understanding.- 8 Retrieving the educational through embodied narratives of "Know Thyself".- 9 Looking for Love in the student Experience.- 10 The Uselessness of Study Groups in Higher Education.- 11 Philosophy as education: On the position and future of an academic discipline.- 12 Colloquium.

About the Author :
Naomi Hodgson is an Associate Professor of Education Studies at Liverpool Hope University, UK, where she teaches and researches in philosophy of education. Her research focuses on the relationship between education, governance, and subjectivity. Her publications include Philosophy and Theory in Education: Writing in the Margin, with Professor Amanda Fulford (Routledge, 2016), Citizenship for the Learning Society: Europe, Subjectivity, and Educational Research (Wiley, 2016), Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy, with Dr Joris Vlieghe and Dr Piotr Zamojski (Punctum Books, 2018), and most recently, Philosophical Presentations of Raising Children: The Grammar of Upbringing, with Dr Stefan Ramaekers (Palgrave 2019).
Joris Vlieghe is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Education at the KU Leuven, Belgium. With Naomi Hodgson and Piotr Zamojski he recently published a Manifesto for a Post-critical Pedagogy (Punctum Books 2018) and, with Piotr Zamojski, Towards an Ontology of Teaching. Thing-centered pedagogy, affirmation and love for the world (Springer 2019). He is also interested in the impact of digital technologies on education, and more specifically in how fundamental notions such as schooling, attention, community, transformation, literacy and creativity change when a culture of the book is (rapidly) replaced by a culture of the screen.
Piotr Zamojski is an Assistant Professor at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. He has authored four books, including two recently written in collaboration with Naomi Hodgson and Joris Vlieghe (Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy, Punctum Books 2017), and with Joris Vlieghe (Towards an Ontology of Teaching. Thing-centered pedagogy, affirmation and love for the world, Springer 2019). He has also published on issues concerning the bureaucratisation of education, totalitarianism and educational theory, building a public sphere around education, and the role of cultural codes in schooling.