We created the Casualization (formerly called ‘Bureaucratization’) group because we wanted to engage critically with the university administration in an academic and a creative way. The group started meeting early on in the development of the course to plan our project and research our topic together. At the beginning of the course, we had two main focuses, which were:
- Understanding the inner workings of governance in the university;
- Addressing the ‘lived experience’ of work in such a system from ethnographic and artistic perspectives.
Faced with the imbroglio that constitutes governance in the university and the impossibility to systematically trace back decision-making, we quickly decided to drop our first subject. We had the idea of creating a flow chart of governance at Edinburgh, and still think that such a project would have proved useful to the student community. This is one of our suggestions for future students of the course, even though it is quite a daunting endeavour to take on.
We decided to use the ethnographic method in our research on the ‘lived experience’ of navigating bureaucracy. Over the weeks, we came to narrow down our interests to the working conditions of tutors. There were several reasons for this. We felt a strong sense of solidarity with the UCU anti-casualization campaign; moreover, our project was becoming increasingly focused on reaching out to students in the spirit of raising awareness about the working conditions of casualized staff. As students, we valued our relationships with our tutors and thought that the student community could do more to lobby for their rights.
We carried out our research over a period of several weeks during the second semester. We interviewed six tutors in various departments, from sociology to physics – you can find the results of our investigation in the dedicated blog posts. What particularly stroke us was the disparity in the situations across the university, and that the tutors’ quality of life was impacted not only by their work conditions, but also by a variety of other factors, such as the amount of funding they were receiving for their doctoral research. We ended up producing blog posts that we hope will help students understand the university’s unfair treatment of tutors and put forward strategies for resistance in alliance with UCU.
This course taught us a lot about spontaneous organising, the relationship between academic work and activism, group dynamics, and gave us a different perspective on what university education is and what it could – or should – be.
As our official course convenor was part of our group, her presence as an equal member made us reflect on the social construction of teacher/student hierarchies. It made us understand that breaking down those boundaries doesn’t hinder learning but encourages creativity and responsibility on the part of the students, while providing them with valuable guidance and counselling from a more senior peer. Looking back on how our group came into existence and the evolution of relationships and hierarchies, we now see that communication is extremely important at all levels in cooperative learning: within small units like Bureaucratization, but also in the feedback to the wider community.
The nature of our research also made us question the division between education and activism, academia and its ‘subjects’ of study, theory and practice. As a course, we had to be accredited by the very system we were critiquing; our research led us to advocate change from the outside and support UCU’s industrial and direct actions. At the same time, the existence of the course in itself was an internal challenge to bureaucratic conceptions of education. It was an interesting and complicated relationship to negotiate, and we are grateful to this course for giving us the space to explore it.
This leads us to our final point: whilst enabling students to get academic credit for their work, the course should remain as detached from normative assessment and organisation criteria as possible, or rather it should allow participants to decide for themselves on the extent to which they want to conform to established learning procedures. Even though part of the Bureaucratization group found that FOOU could have benefitted from more formal structures, it is a criticism that we have reached in the process of the course and that will be valuable in our future cooperative enterprises. Incoming students should be free to engage with the course on their own terms to develop their own methods of learning and opinions about ways of structuring their experience. We hope that the feedback the first FOOU group has left will help them in that.
