Audrey Beard

is a freelance researcher and software developer in Brooklyn. Their academic work is concerned with the construction of AI “ethics” and the political work done by AI, machine learning, and computer vision algorithms. Like many others, she began to see her activism efforts as a part of the abolitionist struggle in May 2020, and has been reading, learning, and trying to aid since. They’ve got a long way to go, but they’re here for it. (For more, see .

Cops Off Campus Research Collective Inquiry

Cops Off Campus Research Collective Inquiry

Our theory of the university - how to study it and how to be in relation to it - calls for a fundamental rethinking of property relations. It is a theory that refuses many collective assumptions of the university, perhaps most centrally its benevolence and its inevitable future. To focus on accumulation, capital, and land  has the potential to widen the frame of who the stakeholders are in this struggle beyond students and faculty so as to be accountable to and ideally in solidarity with other campus workers and the people who live in areas adjacent to college and universities. To think the university in this way is to shift away from the idea of being “in but not of” to grapple with the ways we’re all of it, whether or not we want to be and thus to refuse a tempting absolution from complicity with the institutions’ violence. We understand ourselves as working in and on the university, with our different and shifting positions in relation to university institutions (tenure-track, tenured, adjunct, staff, grad student-worker, ex-academic) to agitate across our positionalities—particularly in reckoning with the limits and possibilities for studying, collaborating, and organizing in solidarity with each other.