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RC57 Workshop Visualising the Marketisation of Academia PAK: MAP Universities Project: Where Are We? What Next?
Language: English
At the Third ISA Forum (2016), Nathansohn and Wilson organized two well-attended workshops to highlight the current marketization of universities and to discuss ways of visualising the commonalities and differences associated with this process and its effects on academics across the globe. The workshops brought together academics at different stages of their careers from all over the World.
The PakMap platform (developed by Mutti) was identified as one potential means of achieving this aim. The platform was set up to allow participants, wherever they are based, to upload photographs, drawings, associated words and short videos expressing their ideas on the current state of universities, or academia more generally, and their concerns for the future. The participants could choose to identify themselves and their specific institution or not.
The workshop will examine critically and reflexively the ways in which the platform has been used thus far and analyse collectively the data uploaded. Such a process will illuminate some of the potential difficulties posed by analyzing visual data in the absence of longer, corresponding, explanatory interviews, or of other conventional textual materials, and feed into plans to develop the platform further in technical and substantive terms. Ethical and linguistic barriers to the international collection, presentation and use of such data will also be explored. The links between the development of such a platform and its potential incorporation into strategies of resistance in a variety of settings and through links with artists, photographers, journalists and others will also be discussed.