Freund Humanus

These are random thoughts of an academic who trained and taught in South Africa, and now in Canada. For many years now, I’ve been deeply involved in what Gayatri Spivak called the teaching machine. Though I prefer to think of myself as what, in South Africa, we used to call a “knowledge worker.” I see myself as one of the people funded by public money to do just that, to work at knowledge. Inside the teaching machine, I work to establish, in a very small way, and in a very specific field (the humanities) what knowledge is, what it can be, how it can be communicated and negotiated. These musings will consider that work, and how it relates to the administration of knowledge in the university today.