Radical studying for another world: A conversation with Eli Meyerhoff

The following is a conversation between Eli Meyerhoff, Amy Sojot, and Alexander Means. The three discuss ideas from Meyerhoff’s Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) a groundbreaking work of political theory that challenges received liberal, progressive, and radical approaches to the university and to pedagogy. The conversation touches on a number themes such as study and world making, university and labor struggles, the emotional economy of neoliberal education, and abolition. Amy: Beyond Education is an innovative work. And we wanted to begin by asking you, how would you characterize this book? It seems that one of the things the book is attempting to do is to disrupt categories of academic inquiry. It straddles a number of different areas such as political theory, feminist theory, historical and new materialisms, educational philosophy, social history, and genealogical analyses. On a meta-level, how do you conceptualize this book? Eli: It’s interdisciplinary work definitely. I’m coming from a political theory disciplinary background, but the work brings together several different methodologies. There’s a critical genealogy of education in a few historical chapters that try to unsettle our sense of the inevitability of education as the best, only possible way of studying in the world. I also have a chapter that I would characterize as embedded militant research, based on my involvement in a radical anarchistic study project, called the Experimental College of the Twin Cities, where we appropriated resources from normal universities and used those resources for putting on free self-organized classes that share ties with radical movements. The book is also engaging with contemporary debates about higher education, intervening in how we understand the university today. I see the university as a terrain of struggle between different ways of studying and different ways of making the world. My book uses historical, ethnographic, and theoretical tools to help us to understand that terrain of struggle better.