(Apologies for cross-posting) The Post-Corporate University We would like to bring to your attention an online experiment that is currently taking place titled The Post-Corporate University. Edited and curated by Davin Heckman, it is the second volume in Culture Machine’s Liquid Books series. The volume is available now online and is open for discussion, contributions and open collaboration. Please visit: http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/The+Post-Corporate+University The Post-Corporate University starts from an assumption that the University is in crisis and that this crisis has been caused by the social and economic characteristics of neoliberalism. Asking the question, Is Another University Possible?, it provides space for multiple answers and interventions. Please visit the site, read Davin Heckman’s chapter, 'Neoliberal Arts and the 21st Century University', and contribute to the discussions, the bibliography and the book. About the Liquid Books Series Culture Machine’s online ‘liquid books’ – to which everyone is invited to contribute – are written and developed in an open, cooperative, decentralised, multi-user-generated fashion: not just by their initial ‘authors’, ‘editors’, ‘creators’ or ‘curators’, but by a multiplicity of collaborators distributed around the world. They are freely available for anyone, anywhere, to read, reproduce and distribute. Once they have requested access, users are also able to rewrite, add to, edit, annotate, tag, remix, reformat, reinvent and reuse them, or even produce alternative parallel versions of them. In fact, they are expressly invited and encouraged to do so, as the project relies on such an intervention. It is hoped that the Liquid Books project will raise a number of important questions for ideas of authorship, attribution, publication, citation, accreditation, fair use, quality control, peer review, copyright, intellectual property, content creation and cultural studies. For instance, with its open editing and free content, the project decentres the author and editor functions, making everyone potential authors/editors. It also addresses an issue raised recently by Geert Lovink: why are wikis not utilised more to create, develop and change theory and theoretical concepts, instead of theory continuing to be considered as the ‘terrain of the sole author who contemplates the world, preferably offline, surrounded by a pile of books, a fountain pen, and a notebook’? At the same time, in ‘What Is an Author?’, Michel Foucault warns that any attempt to avoid using the concept of the author to close and fix the meaning of the text risks having a limit and a unity imposed on it in a different way: by means of the concept of the ‘work’. To what extent does users’ ability to rewrite, remix, reversion and reinvent this liquid ‘book’ then render untenable any attempt to impose a limit and a unity on it as a ‘work’? And what are the political, ethical and social consequences of such ‘liquidity’ for ideas that depend on the concept of the ‘work’ for their effectivity: those concerning attribution, citation, copyright, intellectual property, academic success, promotion, tenure, and so on? To find out more, please go to the first Liquid Book, New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader: http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/New+Cultural+Studies:+The+Liquid+Theory+Reader For a quick and easy-to-read guide on how to collaborate on the writing, editing and curating of a Liquid Book, please visit: http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/How-to-Contribute-to-a-Liquid-Book Clare Birchall and Gary Hall -- Gary Hall Professor of Media and Performing Arts School of Art and Design, Coventry University Co-editor of Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press http://www.openhumanitiespress.org My website http://www.garyhall.info Latest book: Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/H/hall_digitize.html