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Increasingly those working in higher education are tasked with targeting their teaching approaches and techniques to improve the "employability" of graduates. However, this approach is promoted with little recognition that enhanced employability does not guarantee employment outcomes or the tensions inherent in pursuing this agenda. The increasing focus on employability seems to suggest that the primary role of contemporary higher education is to produce skilled (yet increasingly un/der paid and precarious) workers. Although graduate employment is undoubtedly an important outcome, we do not consider it our primary purpose or the yardstick by which the quality of education (and our teaching) should be measured. To do so would be to cede ground on what the role of higher education is and can be, potentially impacting negatively on both students and those who teach them. Drawing on anarchist pedagogies and prefigurative politics and our own experiences as educators and researchers in vocationally-oriented disciplines, we consider the possibilities for resistance within the academy to the dominant discourses of employability. We highlight the tensions inherent in the neoliberal pursuit of employability, characterising them as fissures through which possibilities for resistance and transformative praxes may take hold and indeed thrive.

AbstractThis paper reflects on the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Project that unfolded in so-called brisbane in 2021, in response to concerns over how the framing of demands and solutions to the present housing crisis in so-called australia can reinvest in and further legitimise colonial-carceral-capitalist logics and structures. Using critical co-constructed autoethnography as methodology, the authors reflect on their own involvement in housing struggles as settlers on unceded Aboriginal land, the recent history of these struggles in so-called brisbane, and the lessons and reflections that instigated the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Project, and which emerged from our experiences organising together. The project, comprising a series of radio interviews and broadcasts followed by a public forum, was an attempt to foreground what ongoing Aboriginal sovereignty means for struggles for housing justice, and to challenge the colonial logics and common sense that often permeates settler-led housing politics. Drawing on Indigenist research approaches and police and prison abolition discourse, we offer some partial reflections on building communities of struggle that refuse to accept a housing justice that begins and ends with a more equitable distribution of stolen land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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