Como a universidade pode voltar a ser uma ideia

Abstract

Starting from Latour’s description of how ‘learning to be affected’ relies on made set-up’s, we engaged with students in an exercise of mapping the university campus, which had been largely abandoned during the pandemic, and of articulating its study-forces. The focus was on how these made set-ups stage ‘collections’ and ‘collectives’ and embody forces that enable worlds to become talkative and to be loaded in words and senses. In our contribution, we also report on our own made set-up with students, detailing the articulations that emerged and the ways in which the university could actually become an idea again. This idea is not a mere mental image or (idealistic) representation, but rather a questioning imperative which, as Isabelle Stengers indicates, forces one to think in. Hence, our mappings and articulations of ‘on campus life’ offered no justifications as to why the university campus should indeed matter. Instead, they sought to ‘intensify’ the idea of the university, granting it the power to transform our relations to the reasons that might otherwise advise us to not to take the matter i.e. the campus into account.

Keywords: university campus, educational infrastructure, collective studying, pedagogical forms, digital limitations.