Abstract

One of the things least discussed in the everyday lifeworld of higher education in England today is the role that universities have played in the ascendance and consolidation of national and global capitalism, and that they play in legitimising and normalising the many injustices of this system in this country and in our everyday lives and communities. Equally little discussed, however, is how certain forms of radically democratic and autonomous learning can help us understand and resist concrete forms of power and powerlessness within these institutions, and can enable the production of economic, social and cultural infrastructures that place both knowledge and labour in the service of creating a ‘world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation [and] nothingness’ (Bloch 1995, p. 18). This paper explores the possibilities of autonomy in relation to the question ‘What is to be done?’ More specifically, ‘What can be done here and now by us from our own locations to foster the development of spaces for higher learning and research, which embody and advance principles of individual, social and ecological flourishing, and which are dedicated to the expansion of social justice and possibility and to the struggle against their contraction?’