In a continuation of last year's two sessions comprising our "shadow conference," this session of lightning talks too will offer a series of critical questions and reflections on academic experience under its contemporary structural conditions of exhaustion, minoritizing and differential violence, labor exploitation, precarity, and breakdown. Presenters will consider how these structural conditions feel -- how we respond affectively to these conditions -- as well as how affective responses can interrupt or potentially reconstitute or alter these conditions. Each presenter will speak integratively both from their subjective experience, and from their area of expertise. In the foreground: if contemporary academia works its exploitation and violence through entrapment, containment, and perpetual stuckness, how might we leverage feeling and sensation to mobilize ourselves?
This paper considers the academy, i.e., the proverbial ivory tower, as a sort of empire that occupies and overwhelms those in its shadow. Like the Geresene demoniac in the Gospel of Luke, there are many living among the tombs of lost careers and relationships in higher education. The graves are filled with those who could not publish, or publish enough, and have perished. I find myself among the tombs. How does it feel to grieve such a loss? How does one exhume the bodies for an autopsy? Engaging theories of affect in conversation with the Lukan story of the Geresene demoniac, I argue for affective eulogizing that attends to the mourning and open grief of what has been lost.
Hanna was the name of a character through which The Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany illustrated the shortening of the time the contracts in order to assure innovation, creativity and circulation in a short animation. Hanna was portrayed as a young white, childless, middle-class person. In reaction to this, #IchbinHanna (I am Hanna) was the hashtag created in 2021 and widely used on social media to counter this image and protest increasingly scarce permanent positions and precarisation in the German academy. The precarity is intensified when one has children, performs care work or when competitive and dependent relationships arise between professors and others. One feature of German science is also its claim to ‘neutrality’, which puts any kind of so-called political engagement that restricts the contours of knowledge production. In this talk I give a public/personal account of catching up with ‘Hanna’ from an intersectional perspective.
Centered on the experience of losing oneself while reading, this personal essay explores the relationship between academic time lost when reading for pleasure and academic pleasure lost when reading to maximize time. Emerging out of engagement with the work of Kathleen Stewart (2007), Donovan Schaefer (2022), Sara Ahmed (2010), Margaret Price (2011), and others, it asks: if we’re choosing this academic life out of interest, curiosity, and passion, why do we so often stifle our pleasure? Why do we try so hard to reel in the “ordinary affects” that draw us into unexpected places, encounters, and experiences of time (Stewart, 2007)? While answers like capitalism, neoliberalism, and university-as-business offer insight, none of these click—none satisfy the emotional longing behind this “why” (Schaefer, Wild Experiment, 2022). This essay aims to sit with the dissatisfaction.
Academia often seems overwhelming and potentially created to destroy us. Yet, it can also be a place to explore the possibilities of joy. In this paper, I draw on Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Baruch Spinoza’s concepts of joy as the ability to move. If we think about joy as the ability to move, what possibilities open to us? My experience in the lighting presentation last year crafted a shared recognition of the construction of academia today as a machine that attempts to inhibit our movement. But also, the presentations recognized points of hope, of the ability to make change and movement happen within our oftentimes oppressive systems. This paper will encourage audience members to think through where places of movement exist in their own lives as ways to cultivate and encourage joy.
In this paper, I reframe Cone’s 1969 work as a work of revolutionary theology that reorganizes affect and emotion. Through his theology, James Cone declares war, turning Christian conceptions of love and reconciliation on their heads, putting forth a theological discourse that finds a way to be Christian and Black, and to do so with feeling. By renarrating Christian discourses with suffering Black bodies at the center, Cone creates a Black theological affective economy, placing emotion front and center in the Black theological project.