Outrageous thinking

Cultivating the next university

Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Stanley Steve E. Nwaogu, Annika Lindberg

An introduction to outrageous thinking

We met at a time when one of us was struggling under the oppressive structures of the Danish asylum and deportation system (Steve), another one was studying these structures (Annika), and the third one was engaged in supporting the struggle (Julia). Annika is a Swedish citizen, former public worker, now scholar at Gothenburg University. She is the descendant of a long line of white northern european ancestors, whose identities have been reconfigured by their perpetration of colonial, racist, patriarchal violence and exploitation - and by their active efforts denying their implication in this violence and forgetting their history of being otherwise. This is also the case with the maternal ancestry lines of Julia; a light-skinned Colombian-Danish double citizen with a trajectory of migration and a scholar at Roskilde University. Both her parents came from geographically isolated areas and were fostered by parents who primarily worked the land they owned. On her father’s side, Julia’s ancestors include German peasants contracted by the Spanish crown to colonize certain areas of what is now Colombia and the Indigenous peoples subjected to their violent imposition - here specifically those who inhabited the land of Suaita/Tundama. The third one of us, Steve, has a long trajectory of migration and, like many other African migrants in Europe, he was categorized ‘irregular’. With such categorization, “Europe legalises, endorses and enables their exposure to extreme forms of violence en route. This is contemporary racial terror meant to deter migrants not only from physical movement but from having aspirations to improve their lives in the first place.” (Freemantle 2022). As an ‘irregular’, Steve like many others was relabeled as ‘criminal’ in one European country, a categorization that forced him to flee and seek ‘regularization’ (papers) in another^[1]. He descends from the people who saw their families, friends and enemies be treated like things, cargo, and labor at the hands of the white man. He was born into a world of exploitation and extractivism where he is expected to be a grateful subject to the system, and a subject of study.

Annika and Julia are paid to think, study and teach within the confines set out by the university institutions themselves. Steve is not supposed to think at all; rather he is to stay grateful and obedient to a system that does all it can to reduce him to what he is not—to return him to the status of a thing. Being always the person who has to be helped, he is expected to talk about his suffering (Tuck & Yang, 2014), about how (white) people have helped, and about what is good about Northern Europe. This expectation effectively obstructs him from talking about what keeps him as the person who has to be helped and requires him to gratefully receive condescending lectures from (white) people about the violence and oppression he has been exposed to, of which they do not have knowledge. About how he should understand his and other Black/African people’s experience of state racism, everyday racism, and epistemic racism – meaning that in fact, those problems do not exist but are rather Steve’s misinterpretation of things.

Our political-intellectual convergence point was the struggle against states’ border and deportation regimes, which gave way to processes of knowledge cultivation (Shilliam 2015) about racism, borders, camps, knowledge, and another world. When we met, Annika was a PhD student in Bern, Switzerland, while Julia was associate professor at Roskilde University. This latter is, as all other universities in Europe, complicit in these problems, for instance by hosting colleagues who are funded by European governments or the EU to produce knowledge helpful to ‘manage’ mobility from Africa, and to legitimize existing border policies or policies-in-the-making.^[2] Annika previously studied at a Swedish university that was a center for the development of ‘scientific racism’ in the 20th century, yet where research on racism - historically, but even more so in the present - remains silenced. More broadly, the academic ‘field’ of migration and border studies in which Annika’s work is situated is part of and reaps its benefits from the border-industrial complex.

Our process of knowledge cultivation takes place at precisely that point where who and what each of us are allows us to understand the complex reality that we share across and against the hierarchical positions that we have inherited, those that are enforced upon us, and those that we still need to liberate from. That shared place of knowledge cultivation is our center at the margins of dominant society and of the university. We took the invitation to dare dreaming a university beyond its current confines as an opportunity to continue these processes by engaging in what we refer to as “outrageous conversations.” Taking reality seriously as it is, with its oppressions and lies, unraveling the lies and undermining oppressive structures is outrageous to the racist colonial system. This, in turn, is outrageous to us.

Our thinking together is outrageous thinking, and rage for us is a force. When we are together and express our outrage at the system as it materializes around us in specific situations, we can also laugh at its absurdity. We enjoy the creative power that sparks when we think together. We also recognize joy as a force, and we have laughed at the idea that we are a sort of con-versity, a convergence in conversation about the ‘next university’ that this book and others (la paperson, 2017) invite us to take seriously and to co-build. As did Césaire (1944), we also call upon the magician, and when we connect through our anger and our rage and our joy we touch the magic which consists of (sur-)realizing that our dream of the next university materializes as we are together. For Césaire, magic is restoring our deep connection with the world, and poetry is key in that because “poetry restores a more ancient sense of time physicalised in dwelling practices oriented towards inter-subjectivity, rather than mastery and domination.” (Allen-Paisant, 2020, p 4). This resonates deeply with the notion of relinking, a concept that emerged in Julia’s collaborative work with Mamo Saúl Martínez in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the Colombian Caribbean (Suárez-Krabbe 2022a, 2022b, 2025). Perhaps magic can be written out as that which we contrast it to: If “coloniality grows natively from rationalism’s logic of domination and the currents that prepared it,” (Allen-Paisant, 2020, p 2) magic is what happens when we break free from this.

Conversation as relation

We have all experienced how the westernized university confines our thinking, and arranges and deranges our conversations into forms and expressions that it deems acceptable. This university is predicated upon non-relations; what we wanted was to start from and through the relations forged through a need of thinking differently. Thinking through what happens in this ‘con-versity’ we understand that together we learn a lot of things that we don’t learn elsewhere. Love, anger, joy and commitment, and the continuity of our relations, are the factors that make it possible to nurture our conversations. Once these things are present, there is a continuation in the dialogue, and we also find interest and commitment in the conversation. We start from our own perspectives but this knowledge journey happens through relation-building and through relationships. In this process, we also learnt that Nayak and Sheehy have been working with conversation as a Black feminist method of “dissent from oppression and assent towards collective bridge building for women’s liberation.” (2018 p 31). Conversation as a method includes past and present thinkers-strugglers, and hence includes imagination and tresspassing the confines of Western reason (Nayak & Sheehy, 2020).

This type of relational knowledge co-cultivation is at the margins of the university, where knowledge is otherwise routinely reduced to something individuals do in one-time interventions. Positioned in this liminal space (Sheik, 2021) also allows analyzing how that dominant practice applies to teaching, activism, and humanitarianism – they are all embedded in anti-relationships; situations that are transactional, extractive and build on an idea of non-relations: short-term, shock therapy. They are also built upon the idea of productivity ultimately rooted in settler colonialism (Tuck, 2018). We see that producing knowledge for the westernized university makes people into parts of the racist, colonial, capitalist and patriarchal machinery. The westernized institution doesn’t really care about the person doing the research, but does care about regulating them into doing so-called proper research which ensures that the institution and with it the person making the research, does not have any lasting, authentic, and equitable relation to those being researched. Furthermore, the researcher tells those whom they research what should be produced and how, in alliance and allegiance with the institution. All of this is justified in the idea that research is always what is needed, so any research produced under the system’s regulations is not only necessary but also good (Tuck & Yang 2014).

We know that the majority of academics, humanitarian organizations, and activists do not stay forever with those they study or help, and thereby they close off the possibility of communion, reparation, and long term engagement. Cultivation is an ongoing process that allows us to engage in reparations of our exploitative relations by weaving relations based on care labor (Doyle, 2025) and debt (Harney & Moten, p 61). Without being in conversation with others continuously it is difficult to change our relationship. Our work together as activist-authors is a way to deal with and navigate within and across hierarchies, and also to reflect upon how to include, respect, and hear each other in the conversation when it is outrageous.

Dreaming and remembering

When we dream of how the structures that destroy and that we routinely come up against in our societies could be different, and of how we can dream differently about them, we realize that much of what we dream of is something that we are constantly invited or forced to forget. To dream of a better future is also to remember our wrong past. By this, we mean that we make an effort to remember all the wrongs that the current institutions with which we are affiliated require us to forget in order for them to function and perpetuate themselves.

Contemporary institutions of or within the nation-statist and capitalist-imperialist order, including the university, work together even though they have different functions. Aníbal Quijano (2000) put this clearly when he stated that race is the central organizing principle of all social relations, and that such a colonial power matrix works through the institutions that it has created and those to which it (and we) must be loyal. Each one of these institutions supports ongoing oppressive economic, subjective, authoritative, and normative existences and is therefore interdependent of the others and will defend/reinforce each other (p. 545). The modern university was built upon the lands, minds and bodies of the colonized—its present state is due to the resources stemming from this long-term exploitation. Knowledge was put at the service of the death project (Suárez-Krabbe 2016), and the university continues to produce knowledge to sustain this system. In return it gets money and other resources to continue perpetuating itself (Campbell 2022).

It is outrageous to be reminded that historically all dominant institutions have this trajectory of producing oppressions and reproducing them continuously, and with no real or sustained good in the vast oppressed regions in the world. But, without remembering this, we cannot remember the beauty either. We cannot remember that the existence of this system does not imply that the world is homogeneous or that everyone ignorantly maintains their roles in the colonial matrix. We forget that there are already institutions otherwise, or more-than-institutions around the world; from the Minga through Amawtay Wasi and the Caracoles to the Kilombo and the Palenque to the Unitierra^[3].

More than institutions—these are places where people talk and think together about problems to be analyzed and solved, decisions to be taken, freedoms to be forged. These are places for a different way of having a conversation, where you do not enter a conversation in order to convince someone that your way is the only way, and where positivist thinking is upheld. Instead, these are places where one-together can find a way to repair, restore, nurture the community, and heal.

We were born into a world that squeezes our memory and our knowledge into the confines of the historic self-justification of white supremacy^[4]. We are expected to be the clones of the white man (Essed, 2004). We are required to forget that before the settler, we were otherwise, and were persecuted and killed during the Crusades, the witch hunt, the ‘re-conquest’ of Al-Andalus to obey a Christian-capitalist-patriarchal-conquering project. Our bodies were reduced to machines that could reproduce the system up until today, with our commitment (Federici, 2004). We are required to embrace the death project and reproduce the system that kills people slowly (See Freedom of Movements^[5]), and this in turn requires that we do not become enraged, that we do not forge relationships that challenge our allegiance to the system - and that we do not overstep the line between ourselves and ‘the subjects of study’, of the past and of the present. It requires us to forget and suppress the magicians and their ancestors, who speak truth to power, dead or alive—those whose bodies, bones, cultures, heritage and lands are being stolen, studied as objects and excluded in the Western education system. The university needs us to be living dead that receive and then pass on to others indoctrination, repeating the same things to keep forgetting and to keep fleeing from reality. Our conversations are fruitful because of our commitment to remember even the bad things. Our dreaming is enabled through memory.

Outrage and ‘dannelse’

Living in societies deeply invested in forgetting and ignoring past and present violences, and in denying the existence of other ways to nurture relationships and work towards freedom, we are outraged to see that people like the lie they live in. When we speak of colonialism, of racism, of the death project, the reactions we get are, “don’t spoil my reality!”. We are outraged, yet we laugh from outrageousness because what we observe and experience can get so weird, so absurd. It is absurd, because the violences and injustices that must not be named are so obvious. And still, we find around us such firm belief in lies that claim that borders that kill are sensical, and a university that silences dissent is rational. Or, when a researcher on borders and migration asked us, ‘From what researcher did the migrants struggling against deportation camps learn about slow death?’ presuming that the researchers could not have learnt from the people living that reality. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui has rightly pointed out,

In colonialism, there is a very peculiar function to words, words do not designate, but conceal. . . . The words are a fictional record, full of euphemisms to veil reality rather than to designate it. Public discourses are ways of not saying. And this universe of meanings and un-told notions, of belief in racial hierarchy and the inherent inequality of human beings, are incubated in common sense. (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010, 19, Julia’s translation from Spanish)

Words do not do anything alone. Language, particularly within westernized institutions like the university, is patrolled. In the Scandinavian context, we have recurrent experiences of being told by white colleagues that we have to be pragmatic in order to obtain effective change. They tell us that if we want to change things we must avoid causing discomfort with the language that we use to express ourselves. Implicit in such ideas is the notion of dannelse that frames education in Denmark and Norway, which was part of the Danish Empire. Dannelse is spoken about and discussed among Nordic teachers and researchers on education, and remains a fluffy idea that is however an important one to Nordic white supremacist imaginaries. Sometimes people say dannelse is similar to the German Bildung (Efterskolerne, 2008) and “is applied to general, non-vocational education whose aim is to produce well-rounded individuals” (p 2). However, the criteria of ‘well-roundedness’ is unspoken and not articulated but tacit. It entails defending the equally white supremacist idea that the Nordic region is particularly knowledgeable, tolerant, respectful, and egalitarian. Speaking against such truism indicates lack of dannelse, and is labeled ignorant, intolerant, disrespectful, totalitarian. As Audre Lorde reminds us, “the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only of the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships” (Lorde, 1980: 123). In our view, dannelse is a Nordic version of the notion of civility as understood from within white supremacist frameworks. From “the demand to stay patient, to comply with frames of mainstream debate”; to “Official assertions that meaningful dissent is always welcome, provided it falls within boundaries of legality” which, indeed “are frequently a smokescreen obscuring the invitation to acquiesce in oppression” (Davis, 1971: 39).

Dannelse lays behind many of the calls for not using so-called violent language (such as using the word racism), and it is central to how many people in our context understand critical thinking. In order to deepen what dannelse looks like in practice, we offer this example: One public event organized around the problematization of Denmark’s threat to begin deportation of Syrian refugees included two young women who themselves were threatened with deportation. The academic researcher leading the discussion asked the panelists, which included these two women, to explain how deportations can be more successful. Oblivious to the violence embedded in this request, such continuous reaffirmations of systemic thinking makes genuine conversation in this setting impossible. The facilitator and the event started with effective deportation and not the historical and surrounding circumstances as the problem, thus also making asylum-seekers, refugees, newcomers, and other non- normative Danish citizens as conflated components of that problem. The facilitator identified the non-deported women as the source of normative citizen discomfort, which can only be resolved by these women and those like them being expelled—calmly, quietly and ‘successfully’—ultimately affirming far right arguments and appeasing the consciousness of the majority white audience.

Ironically presented as an event taking a ‘critical’ stance on the Danish deportation regime, the (non-)conversation proceeded in a way that would not challenge the racial hierarchy and the inequality of human life incubated in common sense. The discussion perpetuated participants’ understanding of a situation in which the current system can continue along its habitualized violent practices that are embedded in dannelse. Even our outrage is limited and controlled by dannelse. For example, when Steve wrote in the language he felt to describe the moment, referring to terms like decolonization and reeducation, other activists suggested using terms that were not “insulting” (their words). We are talking about violence, and others working in service of dannelse make an effort to convince us that we are the ones being violent.

Patrolling language and thinking

That those who go against status quo language would be vilified makes sense—both dannelse and education in the Nordic countries are part of the Nordic welfare state, and this welfare state is an important element in the white supremacist pride—from parts of the far right to the progressive left. In the Nordic welfare state, the norm is public schools, and state-funded education all the way through university. Similar to Denmark (Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2022), in Sweden (Mulinari and Neergaard 2022), critique must not address the welfare state’s colonial and imperial investment. Rather, critique is tied to the white popular/worker’s movement which is central to the social democratic parties, and hence aligned with the welfare state. So change is connected to the defense of the capitalist, heteropatriarchal, white supremacist welfare state, and being critical means at most restoring the idea of reform of an already perfect welfare state. As such, the white supremacist welfare state is the contextual regional background for understanding the Nordic configurations of patrolling what is considered useful and useless language to achieve effective change. There is a particularly specific expectation of how those who are seen as the oppressed should express themselves, a requirement of speaking the language of the institutions, to be dannet (formed, cultured, civilized; meaning assimilated). This patrolling of what language one can use and how one can speak about things is also a way of denying that we (anyone different) are actually here. However, we take the liberty, which is ours to begin with, to name the problems that we face, the structures that go against us and the practices that seek to divide us.

That language is patrolled and serves a policed function in educational institutions and in political debates might not come as a surprise. But through our shared work, we find it in some of the activist spaces as well - the experience by Steve described above being one of several examples. We have also encountered language that is policed in the struggles against the Danish deportation camps, where the anger at the system that people in the camps articulate through concrete examples, such as the food – what it consists of, how it’s (un-)cooked, how it is served and patrolled - is ridiculed. ‘There is really nothing wrong with the food’, co-activists/progressive leftists reply; or, they say, complaints about the food will only make you look ungrateful, obstructive; it is not central or necessary for the struggle. In doing so, they obstruct attempts to point out the fundamental issue that depriving people of the right to make their own food is an act of dehumanization, and that starving or malfeeding people is wrong. Period.

Another level where we see language being policed is within so-called critical perspectives. Academia in the Nordic countries sees itself as rather progressive and advanced, and highly civilized (recall dannelse), at the same time it is hopelessly, and lazily (Santos, 2004) ignorant (Mills, 2017) about the variety of thought beyond the European and U.S. imperial theoretical frameworks. This configuration of the Nordic geography of reason (CPA) is connected to the Nordic countries’ past and present participation and investment in the death project, including their contemporary complicity and participation in U.S. imperialism.

Knowledges that run through different epistemological registers and geographical imaginations (Mawasi, p. 79, 2022) than the Anglophone are acknowledged only when they have been translated into, and for, the English-speaking mind. There is a disparity also voiced in an issue of the Funambulist, which engages critically with this question: “How come so many of us outside the settler colony called the United States of America, are so deeply influenced by and interpret our own contexts through the political ‘software’ (...) created by U.S.-based academics and activists?” (Lambert, p 26, 2022). By software, the authors mean the ways in which politics and its language is steeped in and shaped by Anglocentricism. One of the answers provided is that it allows for the continuous denial of the European origins in and current manifestations of coloniality and racial capitalism. They also argue that this U.S. software often is adopted uncritically, and as such – referring back to our earlier mention of Rivera Cusicanqui- veils more than it reveals about the specific configurations of racism and coloniality in contexts different from the US (Varatharajah, 2022; Mawasi, 2022).

With this critique, we honor the diverse contributions coming from within the heart of the U.S. empire—many of which inform this essay and the volume it is part of. Such contributions are important because the U.S. empire affects us as well. However, as Julia’s work also involves the decolonization of knowledge, which involves epistemic or cognitive justice, she also insists on the vitality of engaging with theories and perspectives beyond the western ones. Such knowledges are, in Césaire’s words, not rational – western rationality produces death - they are sur-rational and involve the magician’s ability to connect with the sacred flesh of Earth, and allows her, him or them to “re-establish a personal, fresh, binding and magical contact with the world [les choses].” (Césaire, 1944, see also Allen-Paisant, 2020).

Individuals, institutions, and the limits of ‘critique’

In a conversation in the Funambulist Shaista Patel and Vijeta Kumar (2022) say the following:

I've been thinking about what it means to ‘get’ an education. i am considering the word ‘get’ - ‘to obtain, reach; to be able to, to beget, to ‘learn’. The word is dependent on the act of obtaining. as in not something that is already there for you to take. but something that relies on your ability to ‘get’ it. one needs to be able in order to get it’. (p 58)

What enables some of us to get an education, what is it that we are supposed to get, and what does such an education enable people to do?

As a student entering the university, you have to register your alliance to the institution—an alliance that is also strengthened through the requirement of becoming indebted to become educated (la paperson, 2017). In the Nordic countries, you must either cut back on your critique drastically if you want to finish, fight so much to keep the minimum of your critique, or drop out. Alliances that work for the Third university come into conflict with peoples’ material needs, such as when they depend on finishing in order to get food and/or support their family. This can force individuals, often immigrants, to remain uncritical, assimilate according to the notion of dannelse and reproduce the institution, or leave.

We have analyzed what we see as the anti-relationship between the individual, the institution, critique and change that in the Nordic context is shaped through the notion of ‘dannelse’. Steve experiences how many supervisors send their students to speak to him as a representative of the so-called oppressed. Such supervisors - often white men - claim to be activists based on their having done research about social movements. They have smooth careers within a university system that privileges white men who are assumed to be civil by nature of their racialization and their educational pedigree and who have the “courage” to study the so-called wild places and oppressed people who speak their truths to power. They supervise often star-struck, white female students who are impressed that they interview those with the labels of being oppressed, such as the people held in and struggling against asylum and deportation camps across Europe who are not to complain about what is written and how they are represented. Furthermore, even though students have not been to the camps, and even though those students privilege interviews with humanitarian workers while disregarding the knowledges of the ‘oppressed’ they claim to ‘speak for’, they still write and still represent. We ask how any kind of writing based on problematically delimited research can offer anything substantial to the very people whose lives are impacted by the global system within which they are caught. Students and their mentors doing this kind of problematic work can only repeat and reproduce the long-standing tradition of research that glosses over more than it reveals. We question if this type of knowledge produced is useful and relevant to the people they write about or who would ostensibly benefit from their work.

Scholars are expected to understand the landscape of their queries. In an edited book like this one where divisions—both geographic and epistemic—are deliberately blurred toward better understanding universities, such a requirement makes sense. However, there is a difference between projects that seek collaboration towards liberation and those that patrol knowledge by institutional order and its gatekeepers. Julia has experienced hearing from her peers things like, “this has already been said by Weber, Deleuze and Guattari, Butler, Haraway.” Such seminal authors are also ascribed the role of having invented a particular art or as having built or delineated a field, as if the knowledge of what becomes that field is non-existent or dead until (re)discovered (Shilliam 2015).

Such practice can also be observed in much border-related research, where white European scholars regularly proclaim to have ‘discovered’ the coloniality of borders, their violence, and the struggles against them, while disregarding the struggles through which these knowledges are born (and the already existing dissenting voices cultivating these knowledges, within and beyond academia). It is crucial to break the loop of the institutional logic of value-giving of a few selected texts and ideas of white scholars who, however revolutionary, are put into the service of the perpetuation of coloniality and hence blocks our engagement in and with each other, dreaming beyond what we are handed. Leaving such texts aside is vital to retain our creative power.

Relatedly, there are ongoing discussions on whether and how the university and the resources and platforms it holds, can be instrumentalized and co-opted to promote social and cognitive justice (Hall, 2018; Santos, 2014), or if the institution itself is so intimately implicated in the structures that cause injustice and harm that it can and should not be rescued (see Tuck 2018, 151). According to la paperson (2017),

When people say “another university is possible,” they are more precisely saying that “a second university is possible,” and they are often imagining second world utopias, where the professor ceases to profess, where hierarchies disappear, where all personal knowledges are special, and, in other words, none are. Their assumption is that people will “naturally” produce freedom, and freedom’s doppelganger is critical consciousness. (p. 66)

Second-worlding universities want to humanize a world that is much more than human, and the third university is the decolonizing university, it is a desiring university involving the “rematrization of land, regeneration of relations and forwarding Indigenous and Black and Queer futures” addressing “decolonization in its particularities” (la paperson, 2017, p. 14). We add that such third-worlding universities must be less uni-versity and more con-versity as in forwarding conversations among and along particularities, creolizations/impurities (Allen-Paisant, 2020, p 14, see also Gordon 2012) and commonalities.

Reform and abolition

The first and second universities beg us to think about change through the language of its reform, of piecemeal, measurable improvements (e.g. through diversifying staff or curricula). They continue to expand but at the same time delimit and define the terms and language of critical thinking, and the imaginaries of change.

Public and academic understanding of any issue in the world comes from westernized academia. These understandings are imposed and are rooted in and define what is the right or ideal way of thinking about things, what problems are valid problems, and what should be researched. The normativity of subjectivity detaches rather than connects. We as those working within and outside of institutions must remember that most of our detachment from reality and misunderstanding of issues - e.g. theory on other human beings, race, religion, capitalism, colonialism etc around the world was done on purpose by the western education system to help the Western imperial regime. The very foundation of many conflicting ideological societal issues here in the Western world, is that of a self-conflict when faced with reality and their western indoctrination. These misunderstandings of world issues can all easily be traced back to western institutions and its army of academics; this is where it starts.

Either private or state, each school has a purpose framed from within the dominant logic that dictates how and what to think. In this sense, knowledge is hijacked by the political order, the elites. In the broad African context, national, international or transnational elites, be they philanthropists or development organizations, donate to the governments with a certain idea of what the school curriculum of the year would include and what is to be taught. Those who sponsor schools push for the proliferation of specific ideas. The same goes for funding for research. All this is a form of indoctrination, or as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o calls it, a colonization of the mind. Fundamentally institutional indoctrinated education in the first and second universities is the problem, it works as a weapon against society itself, teaching people not to be critical. Most of the important things we learned about life e.g, the value of community, comparison, solidarity, spirituality, humanism etc has not and will not be from the Western educational system.

There is a big challenge in trying to work within the institution from the edges and at the same time, knowingly or unknowingly reproducing its mechanisms of exclusion—for instance by using the same western colonial language or the same forms or “software”, or by forgetting to adjust the language and the form of knowledge to include those who are not part of but impacted by the institution in the conversation. This is also where we encounter challenges in conversations with self-labeled critical academics and activists, who wish to be acknowledged also by those positioned outside for how they allegedly speak truth to power.

The idea that change needs to be comfortable and confined within the language that dannelse would approve of is recurrent in conversations with many of these so-called critical thinkers in the Nordic context. As we have outlined, in the Nordic countries dannelse informs what is considered as critique. The habit of labeling substantial critique as provocation, bias, opinion, conspiracy-theory, and what have you is an indefensible system trying to defend itself at all costs. In her book, Julia argued that there are defensive struggles to defend the death project, and these are among other things articulated through utterances such as the ones listed. Offensive struggles are part of an offensive - and consequently also an offense - to the system (Suárez-Krabbe 2016). This would explain why people devoted to the current system get so offended.

The relational con-versity

From all your manufactured thoughts, from all your graded concepts, from all your concerted measures, not the slightest frisson of genuine civilization could result.

That is of another order, infinitely more exalted and sur-rational.

(...)

I’m calling upon the magician

(...)

I’m calling upon the Enraged. (Cesaire, 1944, p. 121-122)

Daring to dream what kind of institutions of learning that we can have requires outrageous thinking and results in outrageous dreaming because such acts ultimately work against the current iteration of the westernized university and its relentless global spread.

But what does it mean to have spaces where outrageous thinking can flourish? Césaire puts it so well in his Calling the Magician, which we have alluded throughout this text: We see that the Third university cultivates Césaire’s dream of (true) civilization, contributing to “resituate joy and pain, acceptance and creation in the cosmos”, and to nourish a “new attitude towards the object” which, “Once generalized (…) will lead us to the great mad sweep of renewal” (p. 121). In calling forth the magician and the enraged, Césaire, like us, understands that our work is not about reform but abolition, and about demanding “the right to indolence” in face of an indefensible system imploding by its own destructiveness. We know that the university will destroy itself; this will happen if it continues insisting on isolating itself from the world and demanding epistemological and cultural monologues, and it will also happen if it opens up and enters into the world. In either scenario, or a combination of both, which is maybe what we actually have, it will destroy itself.

When we dream of a con-versity, we dream of an institution of knowledge cultivation where language and knowledge are not put at the service of violence or used to defend an indefensible system. We dream of an institution in which the imperial mind remembers it is also a colonized mind (wherein translation may be top-down communication but not con-versation). We dream of a space of connectivity—of outrageous thinking and outrageous dreaming.

Cultivating such spaces within and outside of the university now toward creating the con-versity necessitates abolition of the system forging anti-relationships that separate between the people inside and outside; between those who ‘get it’ in exchange for their allegiance and those whose knowledge is discarded as lacking dannelse; between lives that are valued, and those made disposable. We suggest that what we need are relations that enable knowledge to flow in perpetuity in ways that break down these so-called insides and outsides. And this is also where we can observe how the small changes everyday keep the new changes going. Those small changes give us the feeling that we are getting somewhere, and as long as people in the educational system continue to engage, respect and value the efforts of people excluded from the institutional educational system, we choose to believe that the great, mad sweeping movement of renewal that Césaire predicts is underway. We fight for relationships, real solidarities, and “outside” communities that overflow the current system.

References

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Notes

1. The national order of the world casts people who have been dispossessed and displaced as ‘out of place’, and requires us to ask for legal permission to move and to settle. Legalization is understood as a first step towards normalization in the national order of things (Malkki 1996). ↑

2. See for instance the following policy review based on the findings of 17 large, cross-country, collaborative research projects about migration funded by the EU between 2010 and 2016: European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, King, R., Lulle, A. (2016). Research on migration: facing realities and maximising opportunities: a policy review, Publications Office. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/414370↑

3. There are also those mentioned by Eve Tuck and Budd L. Hall respectively in Spooner and McNinch (2018), and many others too in Pluriverse: A Post-development Dictionary, edited by Ashish Kothari et al. (2019). ↑

4. From Toni Morrisson's keynote address 1975 at Portland State University https://www.mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Transcript_PortlandState_TMorrison.pdf (approx 36:42) ↑

5. https://refugees.dk/media/1757/stop-killing-us_uk.pdf↑