Abstract:
As with my emerging practice, this essay sits in an uncomfortable space. It sits in a conflictual site in which what comes to be seen as ‘at stake’ or as ‘counting’ appears in the collision between a dominant institutional culture and a will to wrest freedom, unscripted creative possibilities and spaces of play. As I see it, my current project is formed both within and against the parameters of what Patricia Mccafferty terms ‘neoliberal pedagogy’. In my attempt at writing this essay, I am navigating the central processes of ‘meaning making’ and ‘interpretation’ under such circumstances as outlined above, as it is continuously politicised by a material practice. What’s become necessary as part of this navigation is to understand some of the systems that operate in producing what I am calling a repressive and homogenizing culture of tertiary education. This comes as a materialist approach to a critical analysis of such systems.