Name: The Para-Academic Handbook: A Toolkit for Making-Learning-Creating-Acting
Author: Withers, Deborah M.
ISBN: 9780956450753

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The Para-Academic Handbook: A Toolkit for Making-Learning-Creating-Acting

edited by Alex Wardrop and Deborah M. Withers

Intellect Books, 2014
Paper: 978-0-9564507-5-3

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REVIEWS

This is a hugely important book for anyone who feels (as I often do) alienated or marginalised by corporate academic life. It not only gives a voice to a growing constituency of para-academics; it also articulates a series of alternative visions for the future of the university, driven not from the centre but from the margins, the borderlands, the places where the interesting stuff happens. As such, it should be read not only by those who already work in the margins, but by all academics, students, researchers and administrators from across the academy who wish to find out what they are missing.

Academia is dying, and in the process compulsively crushes the desires for learning, creating, teaching, cooperating it claimed to foster. It is a relevant and important political gesture to invent a name, para-academics, for those who refuse to be crushed, who do not sadly dream about a return to the past, when the 'worthy ones' were identified and separated from the flock, but inhabit interstices, inside, outside and in-between, activists and bridge-builders where separation prevailed. It is claiming they are alive, not just surviving, and are part of the fragile creation of a collective future worth living.

This important new book is simultaneously a critique, a lament and a re-envisaging. It is a compelling portrait of the new topographies of higher education and a testament to the power, inventiveness and resilience of those who work within, across and beyond its new spaces.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword: We Are All Para-Academics Now Gary Rolfe

Para-academia: Reclaiming What Has Been Devastated Deborah Withers & Alex Wardrop

A Procrastination Alex Wardrop

Notes on the Prefix Alexander M. Kokoli

Spaces of Possibility: Pedagogy and Politics in a Changing Institution Lena Wånggren & Maja Milatovic

Interview with Joyce Canaan Joyce Canaan & Deborah Withers

A Pedagogics of Unlearning Éamonn Dunne & Michael O’Rourke

Emboldened and Unterrified: In/ Outside and – In Spite Of – The Neoliberal Academy Christian Garland

A Lesson from Warwick The Provisional University

Beyond the Defence of the Public University: Building a New Schole Kelvin Mason & Mark Purcell

Decentring Knowledge Production – Reflections on Learning Spaces In and Alongside Academic Institutions Laura Sterry

Edge, Empowerment and Sustainability: Para-Academic Practice as Applied Permaculture Design Tom Henfrey

Higher Degree (Un) Consciousness: A Frierean Approach to Post-Graduate Study Emma Durden, Eliza Govender and Sertanya Reddy

Crowdfunding of Academic Books: A Case Study Oliver Leistert & Theo Röhle

Para-Academic Publishing As Public-Making Paul Boshears

An Activist-Academic’s Reflections on Para-Academia Louise Livesey

No More Stitch Ups! Media, Research Justice and Fat Activist Community Knowledge Charlotte Cooper

Simultaneous Life and Death in Every Moment Georgina Huntley

On the Academy's Point of Exteriority/ DUST Manifesto Fintan Neylan

The Pros and Cons of Para-Academia: A Personal UK Perspective Tony Keen

Reflections of an Incidental Maverick Paul Hurley

Otherwise Engaged B.J. Epstein

Marginal Inquiries; Precarity, Parergons and Situated Knowledges Margaret Mayhew

Epicurean Rain Eileen Joy

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