‘Poor worm, thou art infected!’: Seduction and colonisation in Further Education

An island enveloped by artful storms, a product of detritus, pilgrims and marauders washed up on an inhospitable shore, Further Education stands, simultaneously occupied and alive yet relentlessly manufactured as barren and devoid of noble life. A land of artifice and artefact, a landscape of devils and saviours, further education has been colonised and recolonised, fashioned and refashioned, simulated and simulacremated. This chapter focuses on the very processes of seduction, the tyranny of novelty and the sorcery of leadership that has tamed a hostile land, that has employed language and love and passion and guile to seduce both savages and the outcasts into their own colonisation.