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Abstract
This essay explores the activities of strikers at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL over a 14 day-period in the early spring of 2018. These days were part of the 2018 University and College Union (UCU) Pension Strike, one of the largest strikes of university academics in recent times, which occurred over a 4-week period, with strike days increasing from two days in the first week, to five by the final week. This was a strike to protect the pensions of university workers as a defined benefit scheme rather than a defined contribution one. This essay is structured as a two-stranded diary, weaving together textual materials taken from the Strike chronicle and website produced at the time, with critical reflections written in the present, concerning the current state of the neo-liberal university, discussing issues relating to pensions – namely institutional critique, ethics and equity, labor and work, precarity and care.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. The University and College Union (UCU) is a trade union representing 110,000 staff at UK universities. The pensions strike which took place at 64 universities across the UK, and involved 42,000 staff, commenced on 22 February 2018, and at 14 days is the longest-ever strike in UK higher-education history. (USS). It was part of an industrial action against 64 universities, represented by Universities UK (UUK), concerning proposed changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS). See for example https://www.ucu.org.uk/strikesandpensions and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_UK_higher_education_strike#cite_note-:12-5 for a start. For more detail see the work in particular of Felicity Callard, Sam Dolan, Jo Grady, Sam Marsh, Mike Otsuka at https://ussbriefs.com/briefs/
2. ‘Interview with Rosi Braidotti’, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, eds., New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 19–37, 37.
3. Naomi Hodgson, Joris Vlieghe, and Piotr Zamojski (eds), Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy (Goleta, CA: Punctum Books, 2017).
4. Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. En Abyme (London: Routledge, 1994).
5. Jan Verwoert, “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform,” What’s Love (or Care, Intimacy, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with It? (Berlin: e-flux, Inc., Sternberg Press, 2017), 205–246, 208.
6. See Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: IB Tauris, 2000) and Jane Rendell, “Critical Spatial Practice as Parrhesia,” special issue of MaHKUscript, Journal of Fine Art Research 1, no. 2 (2016): 1–8.
7. Artist/architect Apolonija Šušteršic has suggested that institutional critique “doesn’t produce any constructive resolution, when it doesn’t effect changes in our political and cultural structures.” See Apolonija Šušteršic, Moderna Museet Projekt, 4.2–14.3.1999. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet Projekt, 1999), 56.
8. See for example, Jane Rendell, “Giving An Account Of Oneself, Architecturally,” Special Issue of the Journal of Visual Culture 15, no. 3 (2016): 334–348.
9. See Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” translated from Corps écrit no. 5 (February 1983): 3–23. See https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.hypomnemata.en/
10. Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
11. Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” The Black Scholar, 44, no. 2 (2014): 81–97.
12. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 33–34.
14. For a study of transitional spaces in architecture and psychoanalysis see Jane Rendell, The Architecture of Psychoanalysis: Transitional Space (London: IB Tauris 2017).
20. Text extracted from an email sent from Lorens Holm to the author, with the note “Please pass the message on as you see fit, a bottle of solidarity, launched to the world.”
22. Megan Povey, “Defending Pensions: A Fight for all our Futures,” #USSbriefs37, (25 July 2018). https://ussbriefs.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/ussbriefs37_25072018_1900.pdf
23. See Sarah Burton and Vikki Turbine, “Solidarity in the Neoliberal University? Acts of Kindness and the Ethics of Care during the UCU Pensions Dispute”. Available online: https://discoversociety.org/2018/03/31/solidarity-in-the-neoliberal-university-acts-of-kindness-and-the-ethics-of-care-during-the-ucu-pensions-dispute/ (accessed March 31, 2018).
24. See Burton and Turbine, “Solidarity in the Neoliberal University?”
25. See for example, Igea Troiani “Academic Capitalism in Architecture Schools: A Feminist Critique of Employability, 24/7 Work, and Entrepreneurship,” Catharina Gabrielsson, “The Critical Potential of Housework,” and Claudia Dutson, “The Entrepreneurial Self,” in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. Helene Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Helen Runting (London: Routledge, 2018).
27. Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: IB Tauris, 2011).
28. This phrase has been attributed to a paper by Carol Hanisch, published in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation (1970) edited by Shulamuth Firestone and Anne Koedt (New York: Radical Feminism), originally titled, “Some Thoughts in Response to Dottie’s Thoughts on a Women’s Liberation Movement,” (February 1969). See http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html.
29. See for example, Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) and Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).
32. Andrew McGettigan’s The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets, and the Future of Higher Education (London: Pluto Press, 2013) remains one of the best analyses of the potential impact of student fees on the higher education sector in the UK.
33. See for example, Rosalind Gill, “Academics, Cultural Workers and Critical Labour Studies,” Journal of Cultural Economy 7, no. 1 (2014): 12–30 and “Don’t get comfortable: the rise of the precarious academy’ THES.
34. See for example, Gill, “Academics, Cultural Workers and Critical Labour Studies,” 12–30 and “Don’t get comfortable: the rise of the precarious academy’ THES.
35. Josh Bowsher, “Precarity in the Neoliberal University: Some Notes on the Plight of Early Career Academics,” #USSbriefs31 (accessed July 9, 2018).
36. Bowsher, “Precarity in the Neoliberal University.” See also Aditya Chakrabortty and Sally Weale, “Universities accused of “importing Sports Direct model” for lecturers' pay, The Guardian (accessed November 16, 2016); and two sets of HESA data analysed by UCU, from April 2016, here https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/7995/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-a-snapshot-of-insecure-contracts-and-institutional-attitudes-Apr-16/pdf/ucu_precariouscontract_hereport_apr16.pdf and November 2016 here https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/8384/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-November-2016-update/pdf/ucu_precariouscontracts_hereport_nov16_.pdf.
37. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jane Rendell
Jane Rendell (BSc, DipArch, MSc, PhD) is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she co-initiated the MA Situated Practice and supervises MA and PhD projects. Jane has introduced concepts of “critical spatial practice” and “site-writing” through her authored books: The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002). Her co-edited collections include Reactivating the Social Condenser (2017), Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999) and Strangely Familiar (1995). Working with Dr David Roberts, Bartlett Ethics Fellow, she leads the Bartlett’s Ethics Commission; and, with Research Associate, Dr Yael Padan, she leads work on “The Ethics of Research Practice” for KNOW (The ESRC funded project, Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality: PI Prof Caren Levy). In 2018, she received the RIBA Research Award for History and Theory, for May Mo(u)rn, – her research on housing and psychoanalysis, and a UCL Provost’s Education Award for her work on ethics.