Event overview
Guest lecture with Dr Stephen Turner, University of Auckland
The four key platforms of ‘progress, potential, openness, discovery’ mark the strategy of Auckland city’s ‘place of enlightenment’, or Learning Quarter, which encompasses AUT University and the University of Auckland (UoA). The LQ is a statement of ‘built pedagogy’, and represents the innovation ecosystem of the UoA’s Business School writ large. With strategic plans oriented around excellence, innovation and leadership (i.e. management), universities like these are generic by design. The ‘fractal’ or self-similar university – at once entrepreneurial, globalising and convergent ? is underpinned by the probabalising logic of econometrics (systems of measure and knowledge management). The capacity to correlate systems means that the measures that govern university practices are measures of measure, or templates — up-dated constants of prior systems of review developed at peer universities. Inside my university the fractal orthography of performance measures governs the workplace, while externally an aggressive building programme is producing state-of-the-art, or self-similar, buildings (see the Cube at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, the design hub at RMIT, Melbourne, or the College of Design, Engineering and Commerce at Philadelphia University). The drivers of university building programmes are sustainability and securitisation, which is to say, securing the risk of investment. Control-by-measure converts ideas into data, at least at the UoA, through every academic’s ‘research outputs module’. The emergent subject (myself), now digitised or cached, is fully aligned with capitalised imperatives driving the reconstruction of the university. My own data-entry unfolds the fractal university as both building programme and public pedagogy. The digital grounds of the ‘being’ of measure calls then for post-critical construction, which articulates the scripting, or programming, of education by econometrics, and the transparent shaping of social futures by capital interests.
Bio:
Stephen Turner teaches in English, Drama and Writing Studies at the University of Auckland. His research encompasses writing environments, technologies and the econometrics of education, and the ‘public pedagogy’ of settler colonialism and settler-indigenous politics. He has presented at numerous international and local symposia and conferences, and is widely published in journals and anthologies, most recently The Oxford Handbook of Colonial Studies, edited by Graham Huggan (Oxford University Press 2013), and Indigenous Media in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Brendan Hokowhitu and Vijay Devadas (University of Minnesota Press 2013). With Sean Sturm he has most recently published articles in Educational Philosophy and Theory (2013), Interstices (2011) and the Australian Journal of Communication (2011). He is currently working on two book projects, First Law and Post-settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand, and with Sean Sturm, Pedagogy, Writing and the Fractal University. He is especially interested in transformative education, activity theory and leaning games, and is constructing, as a CLeaR teaching fellow in 2014 (Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education) a diagrammatic textbook for Writing Studies students. His creative work includes an image-text collaboration with New Zealand photographer Anne Shelton (‘Wastelands’ 2010), and a new journal, Argos Aotearoa: a Journal of Place and Politics (with Miri Davidson, Sean Sturm, Ashlin Raymond and Anna Boswell), which will be launched in February 2014.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Jan 2014 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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