Friday, July 17, 2026

sessions

I just watched a really interesting talk called “The University of Excess: Redundancy, Crisis and the Future of Study” (event description: As universities become increasingly governed through financial imperatives, visa regimes, managerial restructurings, and strategic repositioning, what forms of intellectual, political, and collective life become impossible within them? What survives beyond them? If the university increasingly appears unable to sustain the conditions for collective intellectual life, where does study go? What forms of inquiry exceed the university, and what kinds of institutions – or anti-institutions – might emerge in its wake?)

it got me thinking about a side of this research that I haven’t put as much focus into (since finishing my PgCert ) partially because its part of my day to day work reality and it sometimes feels like a seperate other issue to my PhD. The issue is, the increasingly difficult context of teaching in higher education in the UK, that I think will only be exacerbated by the growing infiltration of commercial AI tools. A concept that really stuck with me that was discussed was this idea of para-academic institutions which are organisations existing outside/ on the edges of academia that allow for ‘scholarly’ work - I want to do more research into this term and what exists. I wonder if this ends up being the future of things if the trajectory of higher education and academia continues in its current form