the central issue of ‘the idea of the university’, the meaning and purpose of higher education, is reinvented at the level of curriculum development as a democratic, horizontal pedagogical process

‘education’ cannot be separated from ‘life’ in institutions, and that thinking about education cannot be separat ed from the spaces and times in which we produce knowledge – which, in this formulation, are potentially everywhere and always.

Given the extent to which the language of man a gerialism has overwhelmed the discourse of higher education, this is no mean achievement

living knowledge

a moral code: ‘social ethics’ rather than ‘business ethics’ (161), grounded in what Merrifield describes as the Other of abstract labour, ‘the nature and capacities of concrete people’ (21).

patial learning landscapes within which teaching is set: at the geographical level of the classroom , the campus and beyond; but also as a horizontal space within which collaborations can multiply. And, in a learning environment that is saturated with digitalised educational technologies how are students made aware of the politics of machinic production.

time is no longer simply a measure of work, but a rhythm which corresponds to the ‘beat or pulse of human life’ (Ne ary and Rikowski 2000). Living labour.

use value is converted into exchange value in a process dominated by both the violence of abstraction and resistance to abstraction,

The supreme good is time - space: this is what ensures the survival of being, the energy that being contains and has at its disposal’

tudent research and research - like activity at all levels of undergraduate programmes, for the production of new knowledge and not simply as a pedagogical device

t is therefore likely that any really promising occupation of the curriculum, which app ropriated it to communalise, defetishise and decommodify education, would constitute a direct threat to the logics of capital and give rise to political struggle.

less metaphorically – the alienation and exhaustion that come from the intensification, exploitation and ab straction of academic labour.

“occupy” our classrooms, “occupy” the curriculum, and then collect stories about what we have done (Bigelow 2011)

So what might it mean to ‘occupy’ a curriculum?

‘We are always in occupation’

It can only exist when enacted within particular social relations and material environments , spaces and times

a confirmation of the unde fined and indefinable multiplicity of things, and gets lost in classifications, descriptions, and segmentations’, curricula may be regarded as violent abstractions in their own right

t may be said of a natural space modified in order to serve the needs and possibilities of a group that it has been appropriated by that group. Property in the sense of possession is at best a necessary precondition, and most often merely an epiphenomenon, of “appropriative” activity, the highest expression of which is the work of art

will remain a permanent crisis unless it is understood in a more holistic materialist way.

‘reconfigure the common experience of the sensible’ and ‘create a new landscape of the visible , sayable and doable’

They also asserted that because it was primarily an idea or collectivised sense of agency, it could never be ‘evicted’ from social relations.

The logics and languages of Occupy resonate with these projects, being experimental, emerge nt, focused on journeys rather than destinations, valorising the critical attitude, positioned outside of hegemonic discourses and practices, and radically hopeful (Cote et al . 2007: 14)

primary function of both formal and informal education is to produce docile neoliberal consumer - citizen subjects,

the Occupy movement is explicitly pedagogical

does Occupy open new possibilities for reclaiming higher education from capitalist logics; for creating new forms of teaching, learning and critical inquiry that enable the production of autonomous subjectivities and liber ating relationships within, but more importantly beyond, formally ‘occupied’ territories and environments?

Do the core principles and diverse practices of Occupy, as well as its weaknesses and contradictions, suggest a new ‘pedagogy of space and time’ (Lefebvre 2008: 354) that can inform the increasing struggles against all forms o f dehumanisation in contemporary society, including, but not solely, those which have their origins in the violence of capitalist abstraction?

critical pract ical reflexivity is more than simply intellectual or theoretical knowledge production; that it is embodied, affective, intersubjective and collective;

a critique of the politics of space and time into the institutions and idea of education itself.

as educators who are seeking to ‘occupy’ spaces of higher educat ion inside and outside of the institutions in which we work.

‘deviant or diverted spaces, though initially subordinate, show distinct evidence of a true prod uctive capacity’ (2008: 383), and in doing so reveal the breaking points of everyday life

groups take up residence in spaces whose pre - existing form, having been designed for some other purpose, is inappropriate to the needs of their would - be communal life