<nettime> Request for support / solidarity: Public statement against compulsory redundancies at the University of Essex

[Stevphen Shukaitis via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Greetings Nettimers,

I’m writing to ask for your support in relation to a developing 
situation at the University of Essex. Colleagues in the Management and 
Marketing Group at Essex Business School have drafted a public statement 
in response to a series of compulsory redundancies that are currently 
being implemented within the School. The statement raises serious 
concerns about the scale, distribution, and lack of transparency 
surrounding these decisions, which have had a particularly severe impact 
on our Department.

The Management and Marketing Group at Essex University has, over many 
years, built an internationally recognized environment for 
interdisciplinary scholarship that brings critical questions of work, 
democracy, inequality, sustainability, technology, and collective life 
into business and management education. Through initiatives such as the 
Centre for Commons Organizing and the Values, Equalities and Resilience 
(COVER 
<https://www.essex.ac.uk/centres-and-institutes/commons-organising-values-equalities-and-resilience>) 
Research Centre, colleagues have developed innovative forms of teaching 
and research that challenge narrow market-driven understandings of 
organizations and economic life.

This work has sought to expand what business education can be. Rather 
than treating management as simply the optimization of profit and 
control, colleagues in the Group have explored commons-based forms of 
organizing, democratic governance, cooperation, mutual aid, labour 
rights, ecological sustainability, and socially embedded models of 
economic coordination. This has involved engagement not only with 
academic debates, but also with workers’ organizations, community 
groups, public institutions, and broader civil society.

The current redundancies therefore cannot be understood simply as 
isolated staffing decisions. They represent a broader attack on attempts 
to create space within business and management education for genuinely 
interdisciplinary and publicly engaged forms of scholarship. At stake is 
not only the future of individual colleagues or research areas, but 
whether universities will continue to support intellectual projects that 
question dominant organizational orthodoxies and experiment with 
alternative ways of understanding economic and social life.

What is being dismantled is a rare scholarly community that has 
successfully combined internationally recognized research excellence 
with ambitious teaching and public engagement. The disproportionate 
targeting of this Group sends a troubling message about the kinds of 
knowledge, values, and institutional cultures that are considered 
supportable within the contemporary university.

We are now seeking signatures from colleagues across the university 
sector and beyond who are willing to stand in solidarity with us in 
calling for a pause to these redundancies, greater transparency in 
decision-making, and a commitment to protecting the diversity of 
scholarship at Essex.

You can read and sign the statement here: 
https://sites.google.com/view/mmpublicstatement/home

Cheers + solidarity
Stevphen


--
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info
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