The adventure of study: thinking with artifices in a Palestinian experimental university

ABSTRACT

The question concerning the relation between thinking and the university is the starting point of this paper. After a very brief outline of some reflections on this topic, the case of Campus in Camps, a Palestinian experimental university, is presented to shed light on this issue. Inspired by Isabelle Stengers’ ecology of practices, it is possible to discern four requirements on thinking in the work of Campus in Camps, namely storytelling, comparing, mapping, and using. It will be argued that the particularity of thinking at the university, is that it is done via artifices that initiate processes of composition, problematization, and attention. In the concluding section, the paper proposes to understand the study practice of Campus in Camps as an adventure that activates a sense of the possible, and hence opens up futures that are different from the ones that present themselves as obvious or unavoidable.

KEYWORDS:

• Study practices
• requirements
• artifices
• stengers
• campus in camps

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For a presentation of the social and spatial interventions of Campus in Camps, see Elzenbaumer (2018) and Petti (2013, 2018). In the first two years of Campus in Camps, it is possible to discern two phases. In a first phase the participants worked around concepts they deemed relevant to understand the camp condition. Their discussions around these notions were brought together in a series of booklets called The Collective Dictionary. In a second phase, the participants conducted research at different sites in and around the camp in order to propose social and spatial interventions. Their reports were published in a series with the name The Initiatives. For an edited volume in the Springer series Debating Higher Education, Post-critical Perspectives on Higher Education (forthcoming), we have written a chapter that deals with the main obligation of Campus in Camps.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Onderzoeksraad, KU Leuven [ZKC4752/OT/12/039/BOF].