Middlesex Philosophy needs support

http://www.danparkstudio.com/
found in Dan Park

********

Academic Boycott of Middlesex

This post will remain at the top of Larval Subjects until something changes with the Middlesex Situation.

In solidarity with our brothers and sisters at Middlesex and to preserve the integrity of academia, I strongly encourage readers of Larval Subjects to sign this petition boycotting Middlesex until the Philosophy department is restored and those students and members of the faculty who have been wrongly suspended have their positions restored. This is not just an issue pertaining to the Middlesex Philosophy department, but goes straight to the core of academia. We must not let these sorts of practices become acceptable.

Middlesex University Cuts Philosophy Department.

Middlesex University recently announced their decision to close the philosophy department. The department has been a leading center for the study of Continental Philosophy. The program there is internationally reknown, and hosts some important thinkers such as Peter Hallward, Peter Osborne, Mark Kelly and Eric Alliez.

Save Middlesex Philosophy Petition

Diasporas: a new sort of togetherness

The Economist (UK)

May 20th 2010

With new technology and new concerns, émigrés reinvent themselves. At A Hindu temple in Chicago, hundreds of people of Indian descent, professing many faiths, turned up from across Illinois and farther afield to hear a speaker from back home. But the meeting on May 15th was not the usual style of diaspora politics, in which a nation?s far-flung children are urged to cheer for the homeland.

Amnesty: working against oblivion?, Gita Sahgal

Salman Rushdie has said, ?When people are told that they cannot freely re-examine the stories of themselves, and the stories within which they live, then tyranny is not very far away?. Forty nine years ago, this week, Peter Benenson struck a blow against tyranny by announcing the formation of a new organization to support forgotten prisoners who were jailed solely for their beliefs.

This week, Amnesty International launches its Annual Report and starts year long preparations for a jamboree titled Amnesty@50.  From a small group of activists it has grown into a gigantic, global organization. And in many ways, has come to resemble the forces that it has done so much to oppose. Its record of handling one of the greatest challenges to its reputation suggests that it is entirely unable to examine the story of itself or the story of its times. So difficult is it for Amnesty International to provide a coherent account of what has happened over the last few months, that it has chosen to provide no account at all.
Alain Touraine: The world needs new types of relationships
Today’s Zaman
Attending the İstanbul Seminars organized by Bilgi University in cooperation with Italy’s Reset-Dialogue on Civilizations Foundations, Touraine interpreted

Saving philosophy from the suits, Sarah Amsler

Nowhere have the battle lines of neoliberal power in education been drawn more clearly than in Middlesex University?s recent decision to close its renowned department of Philosophy, and in its brazen refusal to engage with either the student-led movement to challenge it or the much wider expressions of outrage from the international academic community. Now two weeks on, with the sit-in-cum-occupation phase of the student protest complete, responses to the news have shifted from incredulous confusion to hardened resistance as the full significance of the university?s position ? for Middlesex, the public university, and democratic life more generally ? has become increasingly clear. But interestingly, so too has the intellectual and political necessity of critical philosophy.

?So-called Islamic universities following Western tradition?

Renowned Iranian thinker and academic Seyyed Hossein Nasr told Sunday?s Zaman that most of the so-called Islamic universities in the Muslim world are not Islamic in the sense that they operate within the framework of a Western worldview.

Conflict and Custom in the New World Order : a conversation with Gita Sahgal, Deniz Kandiyoti

DK:  In  Part I of our conversation ‘Soft law’ and hard choices you concluded that the ?war on terror? had a deleterious effect on women?s rights issues. Can you provide some illustrations of what you meant by that?

GS: One of the examples that shocked me most was what happened in Iraq where, as you know, there has been a massive slaughter of women since the US-led military intervention. This has been underreported by the human rights movement and existing reports often focused on so-called ?honour killings? i.e. women being killed by their families and kinsmen. This, of course, totally obscures the fact that the victims were often professional women, active in public life and that the perpetrators were militias and armed groups’

Fred Dallmayr: Turkey balances democracy, secularism
Today’s Zaman
These questions, which are being intensely debated at the İstanbul Seminars organized by Bilgi University and the Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations

Nebula Award winners!

Professors and Social Media

A new study reveals that nearly all faculty members use social media — and most use it to teach. more

Figures on American faculty workers

John Curtis of the AAUP Research Office was kind enough to provide me with their current compilation of government figures on instructional staff in the U.S.

Networked Teaching

Abstract for my ?Internet Research 11.0? paper, to be presented this coming October?

Networked Teaching: Institutional Changes to Support Personal Learning Networks

Much of the educational literature of late has made a marked shift to the perspective of the individual learner at the center of a network of learning resources in the form of other people, environments, and information artifacts. These provide affordances for learning, shaping a highly individualized environment that corresponds?in many cases?only imperfectly to the structures of educational institutions that the individual may engage. With the attention on the learner, and on informal learning, the words ?education? and ?teacher? seem somehow archaic. Yet schools, including institutions of higher education, have always supported learning networks to some degree. We are rapidly encountering a crisis in higher education: structures that were established (and ossified) over the last two centuries to formalize and standardize knowledge seem ill-suited to the needs of today?s citizens.