Research Seminar Series - Accounting for the University

Join us for the latest in our autumn research seminar series when we welcome speaker Lenka Vráblíková, PhD student in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

Following on from the work of Bill Readings, this paper suggests that if we want to imagine the university and its futures as other than in ruins, we need to change the ways in which we account for the university. More specifically, if we want, as Readings proposes, to conceive the university as centred on the ‘attention to the other’, we need to change the ways in which we respond to the ‘instrumentalisation’ and ‘marketisation’ of higher education. Drawing on work by Jacques Derrida, Keith Hoskin, Peggy Kamuf and John Mowitt, this paper proposes to pursue our critiques of the changes within current higher education through the word and the concept of accountability approached as a textual problem. In this seminar, Lenka Vráblíková will argue that by grasping the accounting of accountability as a movement which cannot be enclosed in any taxonomy, we can drive a wedge into the phallogocentric character not only of the university, but society at large.

The seminar briefly outlines one of the chapters of Vráblíková’s PhD thesis ‘Tremendous Pedagogies: Re-inventing Feminist Resistance for a University’.

The venue is Room 2.09 in the School of Fine Art History of Art & Cultural Studies, University Road at the University of Leeds. It is free to attend and all are welcome.

This event is in connection with the Futures research seminar group, organised by the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies as part of the autumn research seminar series.