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.