Webinar & Walkshop: (Dis)arming academia – tracing the military-industrial-university complex

Description

An event by the Military Surplus: Toxicity, Industry and War research network.

Please note: The morning session is an in-person event and the evening webinar is online. Neither session will be hybrid.

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About the event

The act of disarming works on both weapons and emotions. Depriving someone of the means, reason, or disposition to be hostile is often as important as depriving them of a weapon. Starting with this doubleness, the walkshop and webinar will question the literal and discursive weaponisation of knowledge within contemporary higher education (HE) – be it the use of scholarship to justify military violence, the development of arms and military technologies within universities, or the general reluctance of university administrators and academics to acknowledge complicity/vocally oppose militarisation. Through a guided tour and a series of talks, (Dis)arming academia will explore historical and contemporary entanglements between academia and the Military-Industrial Complex – spanning from the Cold War to the Nakba in Gaza. Scholars will discuss strategies to demilitarise and disarm the University and dismantle the Military-Industrial-University complex, providing liberatory and abolitionist models of knowledge production and circulation.

The morning session (10:00 – 13:00), in-person with limited places

A webinar and walkshop exploring historical and contemporary entanglements between academia and the Military-Industrial Complex.

The day will begin with a guided ‘theory’ tour around Cambridge, exploring historical and contemporary entanglements between the University and the Military-Industrial Complex. The group will be taken on a walkshop around different sites with links to the military and weapons manufacturing, highlighting the co-optation of biological science, visual and audio technologies, predictive technologies and AI, ethnography/anthropology, and social science for military use.

The evening session (17:00 – 19:00) is online

In the evening, a webinar will be hosted with academics and activists discussing the militarisation of Higher Education since the Cold War and strategies for its potential demilitarisation. Speakers will critically engage with complex issues of representation, complicity, and culpability. They will reflect on the emergence of the University as a space for the development of arms technology, the formulation of defense policy, and the creation of epistemologies which excuse and, at times, abet conflict. The webinar will offer a space to discuss and consider strategies of divestment, demilitarisation & boycotting on the level of academic research practice, as well as through community engagement/radical praxis.

For the day’s full programme, please see the Programme tab on this page.

Abstracts

• Anna Stavrianakis: ‘No Bombs from Brighton’

Brighton is known for its progressive politics as a City of Sanctuary and home to Pride and two universities. Less well known is its role as a node in the global war machine: it is also home to L3 Harris Release and Integrated Systems, which makes bomb release mechanisms used in Yemen and Gaza. This talk explores the politics of arming and disarming in the city of Brighton and the connections being drawn by activists between the University of Sussex and the global arms trade and Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine.

• Carmen Wilson: ‘Demilitarise Education’

Demilitarise Education (dED_UCATION) is a community and guide for modern-day peacemakers, working to see universities break ties from the global arms trade and become champions for peace. dED’s Director of Operations, Carmen Wilson, will be speaking about the issues surrounding the Military Industrial Academic Complex, and dED’s work to build the most extensive database on university-arms partnerships and leverage research, media and community to empower campaigners with innovative tactics to break these ties.

• Andy Stirling: ‘The Global Civil-Military ‘Nuclear Complex’: escalating war risk, warping energy strategies, slowing climate action, subverting democracy?’

Although all technologies obsolesce at some point, this unfolding reality seems especially difficult to recognise in the nuclear field. Independent appraisals yield growing signs that this is occurring – culturally as well as scientifically and technologically – around both civil and military nuclear infrastructures. It is now beyond dispute that alternative zero-carbon energy strategies far surpass nuclear programmes in potential, speed and cost. Alternative military strategies, horizontal proliferation, multipolar destabilisation and erosion of deterrence logic help make a similar picture increasingly true on the military side.

Yet in the face of this challenge, the global combined Civil-Military Nuclear Complex is doubling down. Often invisibly, each side of this Complex reinforces commitments to the other. Without the indirect funding of industrial, education, research and skills base for civil nuclear power through electricity consumer revenues, national capabilities to produce and run nuclear-propelled submarines would be unaffordable. Without this hidden military logic, nuclear power would long ago have been abandoned as superseded. Surprisingly interconnected across apparent adversaries, nuclear lock-in in one country, helps provoke the same syndrome in others. Across otherwise contrasting polities, a similar politics entrenches – of denial, concealment, misinformation and democracy-eroding manipulation.

Highlighting key neglected links and patterns substantiating this analysis, this talk will explore implications for university teaching and research as well as for wider energy, climate and security strategies – and ultimately democracy itself.

• Stuart Parkinson: ‘Military involvement at UK universities: a brief history’

This presentation will provide an overview of military involvement at UK universities since the end of the Cold War in 1991, discussing how the situation has changed and continues to change.

• David Widder: ‘Basic research, explosive effects: Researcher Disavowal in US Department of Defense AI Research’

The US Department of Defense has long been a major funder of AI research, and consequently, universities. For example, nearly half of research funding for my PhD institution, Carnegie Mellon, is from the DoD. In this talk, I will present ongoing collaborative research with Sireesh Gururaja and Lucy Suchman, where we examine a corpus of DoDgrant funding solicitations, which articulate the DoD’s hopes and dreams for AI. I will narrow in on the ‘basic/applied’ research funding distinction, and the moral work I’ve seen it do in my activism against military imbrication with my former university, and discuss this in terms of the moral disavowal made possible for researchers by dislocated AI supply chains, as I’ve explored in previous work.

For enquiries please contact the Research Networks Programme Manager.