A third space of resistance and resilience: struggles in praxis for adult Learner-Teachers

The contemporary university is, to borrow Giroux’s descriptor, a disimagination machine, suppressing dissent and denying democracy. It’s a site of trauma and dissonance for many working within it, a place of ever-increasing efficiency and vocationalism, compliance and managerial control. In an attempt to counter the ‘systemic neoliberal colonisation of higher education’ (see Morley) and advocate for critical education, we sought to cultivate resilience and resistance in the form of a critical pedagogy reading group with academics working in Australian universities. While a reading group might not sound radical, we argue that the consciousness raising, or conscientisation, provides an outlet unmet elsewhere in a culture of silencing. As teachers, the labour of educating others is core business, yet educating our peers is a radical political act (see Foley). This paper is a critical account of that experience. Drawing on critical auto-ethnography, we document the limitations of both the corporate neoliberal university (CNU) and the union apparatus accessible to us, theorise the necessity of this third space of radical adult education and resistance, and demonstrate how frighteningly prescient the theorising of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed continues to be.