How can we make use of the tools of minoritized fields of study to ask a question that contemporary humanities scholarship rarely does—what is a university?  In this talk and workshop, Nick Mitchell will present from a book-in-progress, Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies, Women's Studies, and the Dawn of Neoliberalism, a historical study in that it uses the institutional histories of black studies and women’s studies as an optic to read the university itself. 

By attending to the dramas and contradictions involved with establishing these fields, Mitchell argues, we begin to see a different kind of university take shape, one increasingly concerned with questions of justice at the same time as it is increasingly engaged in counterinsurgency; one whose ranks absorb wider swaths of the public than ever, yet one whose means of absorption articulate themselves through various forms of dispossession. Discipline and Surplus aims to rethink what it means—and where we turn—to approach the university itself as an object of knowledge.

Mitchell will be joined in conversation with David Bering-Porter, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media. This discussion is presented by the New School Chapter of AAUP as part of “Beyond Austerity School,” an ongoing series of events whose aim is to imagine beyond the seemingly permanent logic of "austerity" in the university, as a set of top-down political and economic policies that perpetuate insecurity, intensify the debt burden of teaching and learning, increase workloads differentially across gender, race, and class, and discipline the democratizing potential of anti-racist, feminist, and anti-capitalist projects.

Registered attendees will receive the Zoom link via email.