Deterritorialising Teaching and Research through Information Technology and Capitalism

Allegedly there is a gap measured in astronomical units between the ways in which the contemporary youths and universities work with knowledge. And thus the universities at least in Finland should gird their organisational loins and adapt accordingly. In this paper I investigate one such attempt to deterritorialise teaching, learning and research to better suit the future the involved parties have envisioned or wish to create. I do this by concentrating on the use of the concept of Knowledge Practices in expressing and explaining this vision. Deterritorialisation is used here in two senses: Firstly as travelling to new places and secondly as the parameter defining the state of the boundaries and relative internal heterogeneity of an assemblage. With these concepts I try to map out the envisioned future relationship between universities and society by tracing the relationships of different components of a particular assemblage called Minerva Plaza expressed in material form or through language.

This is a work in progress but Knowledge Practices seems to be effective in making various boundaries less fixed and solid by being somewhat amorphous and scalable. It spans recurring everyday activities (practices) from individual to societal level linking together epistemology, social sciences, psychology and cultural-historical activity theory. Furthermore information technology is deemed to have the general capacity of enhancing the joint knowledge creation of humans in conjunction with it. Is the future role of universities to provide such easily adaptable concepts which facilitate bringing in corporate partners by avoiding excessive clarity? Would this contribute to the techno-political utopia of virtual online communities developing the roles of the state and combating transnational corporations as Tauel Harper suggests in “Smash the Strata!”?