The unseen university: a schizocartography of the Redbrick University campus

This thesis examines the tensions between the discourse of Higher Education (HE) in Britain and how the university is physically manifest. Using Bill Readings’s concept of “excellence” from The University in Ruins (1996), it critiques the corporate oriented contemporary university in an attempt to challenge its neoliberal rhetoric. The narratives and processes that support the concept of the corporatised university – whether they appear in the form of its relationship with industry, in the performative measures applied to teaching or in the situating of the student as consumer – will be examined by using the University of Leeds campus. Using archived documents, historical information and psychogeographical methodology, a poststructuralist analysis is provided of the Redbrick University campus based on its origins in the Civic University model of HE. As well as including spatial theorists from the field of urban theory and postmodern geography, the main poststructuralist thrust will be from Félix Guattari – the schizoanalysis he carried out in the institution of psychiatry and his work on molecular revolutions. The methodology will include analysis in the form of urban walking and theories about walking practices, which will include the work of the Situationist International (1957-1972). The outcome of the project appears takes the form of a discourse analysis and semiology of university representations. This thesis offers a supplementary social history of the campus and a critique of university urban development. It provides a view of the campus that is other to the typical one, demonstrating that it can be a place where people challenge conventional routes and express their desire to be creative in response to university space. This schizocartography reveals the hidden university campus and suggests that there are minoritorian politics in operation that challenge dominant discourses and how they appear spatially.