Recognizing the institutional and disciplinary constraints of the neoliberal academe in the Global South, particularly in MENA and Egypt, this paper narrates experiments aiming at the imbrication of diverse practices and networks of knowledge production in and beyond the University. Its focus is two spaces of knowledge production and engagement, namely the classroom and its outskirts within the University on the one hand, and a public open space in a working class neighborhood on the other. Within the University, I contend that - though the classroom is constrained by institutional and disciplinary imperatives, both material and immaterial - the thinking and practicing of knowledge emerges within multiple tensions and frictions relating to questions about the coloniality of paradigms and tools, social relevance, and the effects of disillusionment with critical practices. How the classroom can be rendered an otherwise enabling the merging intellectual and political projects is a question I engage in this contribution. Beyond the University, public and open sites for the production of critical knowledge are experiments that also emerge from and through the interstices of political, economic and social frictions and tensions. How to engender paths through which such spaces may (or may not) connect to the classroom reveal the limits of the University as a key domain for knowledge, but also pose possibilities for challenging the parameters on which the edifice of commodification and de-politicization of knowledge within the walls of the University have been erected.