Sophie Mak-Schram: Between Infrastructural Critique and Critical Infrastructure: what’s anti- about AntiUniversity?

Between Infrastructural Critique and Critical Infrastructure:
what’s anti- about AntiUniversity? They couldn't call it a
university so they called it an anti-university. Founded in 1968,
AntiUniversity became an example for the recent wave of alternative
education and alternative art education practices responding to the
current state of higher education. The correlations between the
1960s and 2010s are clear: students protest against changing
political and institutional structures, concerned with the
instrumentalisation of their education and its separation from the
wider 'real' world. Yet, similar to the 1960s, a level of
relationship was upheld to the university - even if just in name.
This talk starts with AntiUniversity to reflect on the different
critical re-imaginings and relationships it had to the university
as an infrastructure. Was it a form of infrastructural critique
(Vishmidt) or a form of critical infrastructure for the alternative
practices that follow? AntiUniversity will be discussed alongside
contemporary examples, AntiUniversity Now (2015-) and Copenhagen
Free University (2001-2007). Sophie Mak-Schram cares about how a
diverse we (come to) know and what forms knowledges take. She works
with others, both as method and as form. Spanning experiential
education, inclusion work, collective practices and artistic
research, Sophie convenes, writes, reads, makes objects to learn
with or listen to, and performs. Her current research (in part held
through the academic frame of the EU: Horizon 2020-funded FEINART
project, where she is completing a PhD at Zeppelin University in
Germany between 2021-2024) thinks alongside contemporary
alternative educational and artistic practices of communal learning
about the forms of pedagogy they propose.