Well, it's one way to get out from under your student debt. "Undercommoning", aka stealing.
Undercommoning the University
A Workshop
University of Wisconsin-Madison
June 4, 2015 - How can we cultivate a practice of stealing from the university?
- Do marooned and resistant communities exist on campus?
- What writing and research practices can we use to escape the university’s demands to be productive for it?
Inspired by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study ( PDF), the newly formed Undercommoning Collective will host a day-long workshop to consider these questions.
Our aim is to create and share ways to remove enclosures set by the university, like debt and hierarchies of knowledge, in favor of reallocating and sharing resources that are intellectual and social as much as they are financial.
Sessions on critical research to be used within and against the university—from the archival to the financial—will be facilitated by graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars from across the U.S. and Canada who have been involved in this type of research at their home universities.
For more information, contact: enoterman [at] gmail [dot] com or lahanson3 [at] gmail [dot] comFor a full schedule, see below 
What is the Undercommoning Project?
In brief, Undercommoning is building a North American network of radical organizers within, against, and beyond the (neo)liberal, (neo)colonial university. It hosts critical discussions and engagements to build solidarity around radical and marginalized forms of knowledge and undercommons-centred power. We aspire to create heterogenous networks that will link disparate geographic locations while also facilitating meaningful relationships around local, place-based organizing.
What do we do?
While we are just getting off the ground now, as a collective, we aim to...
...host regular online meet-ups for organizers and thinkers to learn about one another’s struggles and build solidarity and capacity.
...publish interviews, transcripts, essays, news and examples from struggles around the world
...organize local events where organizers can gather and make common cause.
...act as a network for organizers and activists within, against, and beyond the university.
...reveal and challenge the North American university as a site working at the junction of settler-colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy and other systems of domination and exploitation. We also diagnose the university as a key institution of power that works in concert with police, prisons, the financial system, the ‘lower’ education system, punitive state bureaucracies, culture industries and other means of oppression.
...catalyze intersectional solidarity between and beyond laborers of the university, including: precarious academic workers; clerical, technical, food service, maintenance, and other support workers; subcontracted workers; exploited student laborers; international learners’ and those ejected from or refused by the university.
...valorize the labor of the “undercommons”, promoting the autonomy of these forms of bottom-up refusal, collaboration, solidarity and mass intellectuality that the university at once subjugates and requires for its survival.
How can I find out more?
We'll be publicly launching our project in the summer of 2015.
Until then, please click here to subscribe to our email list for updates. Twitter and Facebook coming soon.
Until then, hang out with our friends at Class War University
Schedule
Undercommoning: A Workshop
June 4, 2015
313 University Club, University of Wisconsin-Madison Virtual Participation Available through Google Hangouts Free and Open to the Public. RSVP by May 28th - email enoterman@gmail.com or lahanson3@gmail.com or call 402-314-7410 please let us know if you will require translation or interpretation of some kind
9 AM Opening Session: Discussion of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney led by Elise Thoburn and Eli Meyerhoff
Discussion questions: What do Moten and Harney mean when they recommend theft as our proper relationship to the university? What would this look like in our institutions and disciplines? Where do the undercommons exist or where can it be created? What skills do we need to develop to become thieves? Where would we use stolen and reappropriated resources?
11 AM Skill-Sharing Sessions:Doing Counter-Hegemonic Archival Research led by Laura Goldblatt and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein)
Laura’s work involves viewing the archive as a space that documents a complex set of power relationships, as well as the absence of archival documents in research. She will discuss FOIA requests and strategies to construct a political narrative when those documents are withheld or do not exist.Zach’s dissertation research involves looking at private university archives to document anti-union strategies as well as under-researched spaces like parking lots as sources of profit for universities.2. Investigating University Finances led by Lenora Hanson, Elsa Noterman and Max Haiven
Lenora and Elsa have researched and published on UW-Madison’s increasing investment in high-cost construction projects, the costs this places on students, and the wage-pressures it puts on workers here.Max Haiven writes on the art and culture produced under financialization and the limited imagination that contemporary capitalism offers for producing another reality.
1:30 PM Lunch Break (provided for registered attendees)
2 PM Radical/Counter Cartographies led by Liz Mason-Deese
Strategies for using maps and mapping to make marginalized spaces visible, to destabilize hegemonic spatial representations, and to build alternative spatial imaginaries and practices.4 PM Conversation with M Adams (Young Gifted and Black Coalition) and Karma Chavez (Communication Arts, UW-Madison) moderated by Thea Sircar
What is the role of university workers in supporting undercommoning and radical resistance occurring in our communities? How can we appropriate the resources of the university to take action beyond campus? How do non-black allies stand with those involved in radical black struggles?
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