University and State

R. Radhakrishnan
English
UC Irvine

Rei Terada
Comparative Literature
UC Irvine

University and State was a two-day international conference that took place in Fall 2017 at the University of California, Irvine. Featuring the work of a diverse group of UC faculty, graduate students, recent UC PhDs, and prominent scholars from across the Americas, this event generated theoretical debate about the complexity and intensity of the relation between the university and a variety of states across the globe. How does teaching cultures, generating professional techniques, credentialing professional fields, and reproducing corporate institutionality fit into a variety of state forms–from the 19th-century European nation-states, to the maintenance of neoliberal states hollowed out by capital, to the Latin American state, perhaps only ever incompletely constituted on European fantasies of state? How does the university fit into African states that have “failed” or into societies, like the United States, where chattel slavery is historically implicated in state success? We reframed debates about the university and the university’s mission in crisis as questions about the limits, borders, and modes of demarcating speaking, thinking, and writing academically. The conference featured keynote addresses by Willy Thayer (UMCE, Santiago, Chile) and Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto).