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Academy Commons is a new tool to be used by an open community of researchers beyond bureaucratic or geographic boundaries. So, feel free to read the ABOUT and FAQ sections, and look for academic and research activities of your interest or post your ones.

Basic information of some pages is translated into languages such as Spanish, Catalan, German or French (we expect to keep improving the language options for new communities of users). In these cases you will find the language options below the title.

Upcoming activities

News
Collaborative Change
Posted on July 12, 2011

We will present the AcademyCommons project in the Symposium Collaborative Change in Dublin this Thursday.

“This Symposium, co-organized by PhotoIreland and GradCAM and supported by the City Arts Office, Dublin City Council, investigates the implications of emergent models of collaborative production, consumption, and ownership for the future of cultural work, education and economic activity.

Where existing models of commons, collaboration, exchange and networks have a long history in the construction and maintenance of community e.g. meitheal, housing and agriculture cooperatives, credit unions, artists’ communities, etc., these are extended and made complex by new models of production emerging through a range of loosely and tightly woven collectives and communities of interest like crowdsourcing, user-generated content, grass roots media and their attendant practices.”

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All power to the free universities of the future
Posted on July 7, 2011

The Copenhagen Free University was an attempt to reinvigorate the emancipatory aspect of research and learning, in the midst of an ongoing economization of all knowledge production in society. Seeing how education and research were being subsumed into an industry structured by a corporate way of thinking, we intended to bring the idea of the university back to life. By life, we mean the messy life people live within the contradictions of capitalism. We wanted to reconnect knowledge production, learning and skill sharing to the everyday within a self-organized institutional framework of a free university. Read More

Researcher sacked for role in destruction of field trial
Posted on June 22, 2011

The sacking of a Belgian researcher involved in the partial destruction of a test field for genetically modified (GM) potatoes has trig- gered a fierce debate about academic free- dom in Belgium.

Barbara Van Dyck, a bioengineer who studies local development and social change at Catholic University of Leuven, says she did not uproot any plants herself during the 29 May operation by a group called the Field Liberation Movement near the Flemish town of Wetteren. But she was present and defended the raid in interviews, referring to the movement as “we.”

Van Dyck, who was fired 4 days later, says the university never gave her a proper chance to explain the protest, which she says was a form of civil disobedience.

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A nightmare scenario for higher education
Posted on May 21, 2011

In anticipation of the trial starting on Monday in the copyright infringement case brought against Georgia State University by Cambridge, Oxford and Sage publishers, and partially financed by the Copyright Clearance Center, there has been a flurry of motions, mostly relating to the admission of various pieces of evidence. But amongst that deluge of paper is a truly frightening document, the proposed injunction that the plaintiffs are requesting if they win the case. I have always known that there was a lot a stake for higher education in this case, but the injunction the publishers want would be a nightmare scenario beyond even my most pessimistic imaginings.

>> Read more

European School of Social Imagination
Posted on April 26, 2011

SCEPSI – European School of Social Imagination Conference 20-22 May 2011,
Republic of San Marino

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM:
http://scepsi.eu/en/program
PRACTICAL INFORMATION:
http://scepsi.eu/en/info

Reinventing the autonomy of knowledge is the task of our time. It’s not only a political task. The epistemic foundation of research and learning as autonomous activities is at stake, when dogmas of profit, growth, competition take the lead in the old institutions of production and transmission of knowledge. This is why we are calling students and researchers, artists and scientists and social activists to gather in the first conference of SCEPSI that will take place in San Marino, on 20-22 May 2011.

Protests against the financial aggression and the destruction of the public school in the European continent are spreading, but we have to create new institutions, aimed to self organization of cognitive workers and to the reactivation of social sensibility and imagination. The conference will be the first act of the activity of the European School of Social Imagination, that in the next year will organize seminars in San Marino, and in European cities like Helsinki, London, and Oslo.

The activity of the School starts from four question:
1. How can we think the consequences to every day life in the face of a possible economic failure of the European Union?
2. How can art and poetry arouse new energies and revitalize the social field weakened by precarization and the alienation of (digital) labour?
3.How can emergent scientific imagination reconstitute the social body?
4. How can we open up spaces for the autonomy of knowledge within the process of the marketisation and capitalisation of the education system?

These questions will be foundational for the emergent curriculum of the first year of seminars and engagements of the European School of Social Imagination. The following is the program of the conference, that may change slightly during the next weeks.