Apart from organising the symposium I also participated with a manual "Making a Copenhagen Free University Manual" in collaboration with Trine Friis Sørensen From the call for manuals: Symposium, June 16-18, 2011 Copenhagen Engaging in a dialogue with two previous symposiums, Humanities Unplugged (Berlin, 2010) and Collective Futures (London, 2011), the aim of this symposium is to extract a set of collaborative, academic practices, which can be utilized, enacted, and transformed by collective endeavors within and beyond academia. The symposium is particularly concerned with three perspectives: practices of knowledge production, collective performativity, and the boundaries of academia. These issues have already been scrutinized in the previous symposiums through workshops, presentations, games, and discussions, which sought to open up the personal to the collective, the theoretical to the practical, the rational to the affective, and the academic to what is not academia. In an attempt to think reflectively on these practices, the Copenhagen symposium will engage with the format of the manual. The manual usually operates as an instructional assistance for assemblage or usage and is supplied with most consumer products. Ideally, the manual offers an intelligible step-by-step account of ‘how to…’ enabling the user to acquire and utilize new knowledge for practical purposes. The Copenhagen symposium intends to take the manual beyond its confined scope and instead – learning from numerous artistic practices, e.g. Conceptual art and Fluxus or more recently the publication Do it edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist – to inhabit the format differently. Not by usurping the stagnant format that self-confidently claims to have the only correct solution to our problems, but rather to use the manual as a format, which enables a reflection on a practice: The manual as being preoccupied with how to do a specific thing and intended for the sharing of this knowledge. We wish to sound out the potential of the manual to make change by our own means in the context of academia today. In this spirit we propose to create a provisional collection of manuals on how we can redo academia. CALL FOR MANUALS We invite people to submit manuals for collective practices of knowledge production 1) Work individually or collectively, the latter is encouraged 2) Decide on an action you would like to develop further at the symposium 3) Create a preliminary manual that includes a short description of how to do the action 4) Consider including visual illustrations 5) Reflect on theoretical perspectives of the action 6) Are you a professor? The above goes for you as well 7) Do not follow this manual when not suited for your action The manuals will be collectively discussed, transformed, developed, and enacted at the symposium and eventually distributed publicly. Participation in the previous symposiums is not necessary and new participants are very welcome to propose manuals (academic background is not required) We welcome manuals on different actions: • Manuals on being present • Manuals on being undisciplined • Manuals on designing critical experiences • Manuals on participation • Manuals on repairing situations • Manuals on being a general public • Manuals on affective mapping • Manuals on engaging with public spaces and the people who inhabit them • Manuals on being a good / bad academic • Manuals on academic self-help • Manuals on living and thinking about the limits of academia, disciplines and discourses • Manuals on none of the above http://eurodocsem.net/ http://unfoldingacademia.wordpress.com/