‘Against’: Workers’ Inquiry and Co-research
摘要
The moment ‘Against’ poses a challenge for the critique. Here problematic oppositions are overcome: between knowledge and action, theory and practice, subject and object or movement and critique. By drawing on the tools used in the long history of workers’ and student movements: workers’ inquiry and co-research, this chapter shows possible ways of sublating the oppositions. If the tradition of workers’ inquiry allows for an effective exploration of the technical and political composition of academic producers, co-research is the right process to enable critique to establish a proper relationship with counter-subjectivities in a university in crisis. To illuminate the argument, this chapter closes with a discussion of the co-research opened during the December occupation of the dormitory Jowita in Poznan, Poland. The open cycle of student struggles and the role co-research played in it offers the hope that co-creating knowledge ‘In’ and ‘Against’ the university helps to go ‘Beyond’ its constraints.