Over the past several years, American higher education has been dramatically transformed through the variously complementary and contradictory deeds of its different stakeholders: government antagonists, saboteur trustees, acquiescent administrators, firebrand educators, impassioned students, “free-speech” agitators, ed-tech tricksters, voracious bots. Those deeds, however unthinking and automatic some might seem, enact a theory of education and a politics of knowledge.

Drawing inspiration from the CIA’s 1944 “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” participants in this interactive lecture/workshop will work in small and large groups to catalogue the signature deeds of diverse institutions of higher education, analyze the pedagogical values inherent in those deeds, and design a Diagram of Defiant Deeds for Pedagogical Probity. In preparation for the latter exercise, Mattern will share the deeds that have defined her own recent resignation from a full professorship, as well as her pedagogical reorientation within a civic commons.

Speaker

Shannon Mattern is the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council and founder of its Cross-Reference Coalition, an experimental, interdisciplinary school. Previously, she held tenured, full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and art history at The New School and the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of four books, (co-)editor of four collections, and author of roughly 100 articles and book chapters about topics ranging from urban technology and knowledge infrastructures to maps and maintenance. In 2025 she was the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.