WS: James Arvanitakis: Piracy as Method (workshop day 2)

The workshop format is an all-day open discussion amongst all participants. The open (though moderated) discussion is punctured by 5-minute-participant presentations that structure the debate.

Prior to the workshop, 5-8 projects of doctoral candidates are selected for presentation, and arranged in a way as to support 1) a thematic clustering of topics and 2) sensible transitions and breaks between topics so as to encourage a smooth collective train of thought. For doctoral candidates, these presentations are a good way to recontextualize their own work in the larger framework of the workshop focus, and to open elements of their dissertation up to debate with peers and senior colleagues, but without having to invest excessive amounts of time for preparation.

The discussion-based workshop focuses on the issue of “pirating knowledge” – knowledge meaning, in this context, “situated” knowledge that is produced in the classroom, or that affects the classroom. In this vein, this part of the workshop explicitly addresses the intersectional and interactive logic of academic knowledge that the digital sphere has introduced to the discussion of collected, revised, and debated knowledge. The expertise of Martin Fredriksson is especially valuable at this point. He will be asked to give a short presentation to start the afternoon session, and also to moderate the afternoon session.

The following guiding questions will be foregrounded in the discussion, and will also be given to doctoral students for orientation when conceptualizing their five-minute-presentations:

• Accountability, legitimacy and responsibility: Who teaches whom? Who is present as a teacher and as a student?
• Disruption, attack and insecurity: the violence of classroom dynamics and of rigorous argumentative logic
• Piercing the disciplinary filter bubble: challenges to academic forms of conversation as well as of canonic bodies of knowledge
• The problem of terminology: large categories as a resource for the recontextualization of academic debate (large categories may be, for example, accountability, legitimacy, text, knowledge, culture)
• Recontextualizing the past: the institutional context of the academic classroom, its traditions, and its conceptual emphases

As is obvious, these guiding questions are very general and allow for an interpretation into many directions – which is, of course, also the point of a format that foregrounds the value of working with arguments already made by the participants in their dissertations. It is all the more important, then, to have implicit background structures in place that help structure the debate along the methodological logics developed here; these structures are mainly provided by the expertise of PiracyLab participants.