La rubrique Laboratoire regroupe des travaux work-in-progress d’exploration et de construction conceptuelle.
Dear Editorial Board, I am glad to see you are considering this issue. It is crucial to the future of academic research. I include below a few basic thoughts about it. To set a context for these thoughts, I should mention that I am currently working on a larger research project with a colleague, Prof. [...]
As the theme of this traverse clearly states, during the last decade, in the wake of books such as Bill Reading’s The University in Ruins (1997), there has been an increasing academic concern with Audit Cultures (Marilyn Strathern, 2000) or Audit Society (Michael Power, 1997). Particularly within the European University system, a form of critique [...]
In the bygone world (a complex, messy, contradictory world), different kinds of institutions embodied various, incommensurable kinds of value. Academic value was not to be identified with artistic value, nor artistic value with monetary value, and so on. But in our brave new world, it seems that a single final criterion of value is recognized: [...]
Quality Assessment. Rector manificus, ladies and gentlemen, the answer that is given increasingly within the science system reads, “Let us count.” Let us count how many Euros have been acquired, how many publications are realized, and how many citations are generated. The higher the score, the better the researcher. However, it is not that simple. [...]
There is a growing body of literature and events critiquing the spread of ‘audit cultures’ [...]
It’s been a long time since academic discussions about research and teaching were part of the board meetings of the department of Anthropology and Sociology of the University of Amsterdam. Most of our meetings today deal with administrative problems only. Sometimes these departmental meetings are followed immediately by teaching obligations. Usually, I find it hard [...]
‘Now, of course, we live in Thatcher’s psyche if not her anus, in the world she made, of competition, consumerism, celebrity and guilt’s bastard son, charity: bingeing and debt.’ Hanif Kureishi (2008: 271) The hidden injuries of the neo-liberal University. In a recently published piece titled ‘Breaking the Silence: The Hidden Injuries of the Neoliberal [...]
En prônant l’élargissement du soi au Soi, en célébrant la valeur intrinsèque de toute chose, Arne Næss oublierait-t-il l’homme ? Augustin Berque souligne le caractère problématique de l’ontologie développée par le philosophe norvégien. De fait, l’homme ne risque-t-il pas de se sentir bien à l’étroit dans une existence vouée toute entière à la réalisation de [...]
Un passage me frappe dans le commentaire d’Alexis Vrignon : celui où il contraste l’écologisme français des années 1970, mouvement social qui se percevait comme une lutte, à la pensée de Næss, qui « n’accorde au contraire aucune valeur symbolique particulière à l’action collective, la restauration du lien écologique ayant la priorité ». Cette remarque [...]
Amador Fernández-Savater : Dans La haine de la démocratie, vous décrivez une vaste opération intellectuelle, médiatique et (anti-)politique qui redéfinit la démocratie comme « le royaume des désirs illimités de l’individualisme consumériste » et la source de tous les problèmes de notre époque (décadence de l’École, anomie sociale, guerre de tous contre tous, incivisme, etc.). [...]
