Thanks Zoe for putting this workshop together – these readings went together perfectly. I was also really thrilled to read Ghostly Matters again, especially because I have my physical copy from 2007, apparently having decided it “sparked joy” when I did my last major purge!

I’m just going to highlight a few passages I was struck by in the texts, in order to see if these things interest anyone else. I think these passages in different ways get to Zoe’s questions about the ethical obligations to ghosts and hauntings.

From Ahmed: “I had no right to tell their secrets, as they were not my secrets.”

This quote blew me away, and thinking of this precise phenomenon alongside thinking about ghosts, hauntings, melancholia was so interesting. What do we do with secrets that we know that it is not our “right” to tell? What do we do with secrets that it is not our right to tell, even when our knowledge of this secret is what motivates what we DO write? A lot of times when I read people’s writing I try to consider if what motivates a whole project can’t, for whatever reason, make it into the project, and how the work would be transformed if somehow the taboo secret did appear (and I guess I can rephrase that as: I often think about what is haunting the work). It’s honestly an ethical problem that has been with me (haunted me?) for as long as I remember thinking of myself as someone who could be a scholar, and I’d be really interested in discussing this attached to the particulars of Ahmed”s essay, and as it attaches to other particulars.

Avery Gordon –

“I have not endeavored to establish transhistorical or universal laws of haunting per se but rather to represent the structure of feeling that is something akin to what it feels like to be the object of a social totality vexed by the phantoms of modernity’s violence. What does it mean? It means following the insights that come to those who see all these forces operating at once. Such a way of seeing can make you a bit crazy and imprecise and wary of shorthands” (19).

Love this, and it reminds me of two things: 1) It reminds me of Deleuze’s notion of “hysteria” that he elaborates upon in The Logic of Sensation, where he writes of “hysteria” as a state that does not see linear time or normative space (so, it sees a lot of times together at once and a lot of spaces together at once). 2) It reminds me of Sara Ahmed’s notion of the “feminist snap” which…is a very tricky snap because it often emerges at exactly the time where it seems disproportionate to the IMMEDIATE offense!

Also: “In the twentieth century, literature has not been restrained by the norms of professionalized social science, and thus it often teaches us, through imaginative design, what we need to know but cannot quite get access to with our given rules of method and modes of apprehension” (25).

I wish I had this quote on top of my syllabus or research paper assignment this semester, as this is the precise thing I teach my students about what art can do that is unique, and is the answer to the question about why it might be valuable to study fiction.

I don’t have a particular quote from Eng, but melancholia vs. mourning has been something I’ve thought about a lot lately and appreciated his figuring of the two (“two”) experiences, especially as last semester we read the Butler essay referenced – which I really recommend and which I actually think gives a pretty decent diagnosis of heterosexuality!

Looking forward to talking about these texts tomorrow.

Thank you Katie for providing a workshop on these really important issues of how we treat ourselves and each other in this space of the academy. I’m also really excited about the activity re: academic interests that Katie mentioned in her description!

Something I was thinking during our last class is that “academic” isn’t really part of my personal identity, and so I don’t really feel fraught, at all, re: conversations about the role of the academy in society, or about “academic” language vs. “non-academic” language, etc. This assertion is not to disavow my positionality and my access and the privilege of that; I “identify” as a teacher, so I do have fraught feelings about that, and as someone who wants to centralize writing about and talking to people about art and philosophy etc. in my life. I have no interest in destroying my spirit for the sake of this institution. Sometimes I think to myself, “Stefanie, at your age and with your experience, do you have the capacity to be abused by a faculty mentor in the academy?” And well, I think the answer is YES, I am definitely more abuse-able than I pretend to be, but I also know some red flags and a strong sense of what I want vs. what I don’t want, which I didn’t have before, and I know I wouldn’t want to talk with someone who made me feel guilty about not destroying myself for this. After my first run with graduate school and the trauma that came with that, I worked a really long time to ground myself in my values and decide that I did not need to be praised by someone whose values (esp. surrounding the way they treat others, ESPECIALLY people they have power over) I do not respect, and that’s kind of my advice to other graduate students.

I remember feeling a little guilty last semester in class when we were reading something (don’t remember what) where the writer, an academic, talked about her own imposter syndrome. And the professor and others in the class were casually referencing their own imposter syndrome. I wanted to say – but I didn’t, because I felt guilty! – that I’m sorry, I don’t have imposter syndrome. That doesn’t mean I think I’m the shit, because I don’t – I am wrong a lot, and I get embarrassed, ashamed, etc., a lot. But if my job is to interpret, share ideas, and research, if I am being truthful, I am not an imposter. I called this post “ethics and imposter syndrome” because how I’ve come to think of academic imposter syndrome is almost as a poisonous technology of reproducing academic culture. Academics who have “made it” feel like they have to grasp onto this myth of merit, and impose that onto others in the form of nurturing a perpetual imposter syndrome that values status over truth. I remember once, shortly after I dropped out of graduate school, I found myself having dinner with a group of people, one of whom was an academic who had recently gotten her Ph.D. and some sort of job. When I mentioned I had recently dropped out because I had to acknowledge I was miserable, she said in this very specific tone: “Well…of course. The misery is part of its rigor.” I understand now that despite her need to imply that my “not being able to handle it” was evidence of something bad about me, someone who says something like that is not a happy person, and someone who says something like that is suffering from and reproducing this “imposter syndrome.”

In Harris’ chapter on “Academic Guilt,” she mentions sharing an office with other graduate students and the way people would compare themselves to each other in really competitive ways, including feeling satisfied if one was torturing oneself more than one’s colleagues and having various bad feelings if one was torturing oneself less than one’s colleagues. It’s infuriating. It’s so much more fun to be generous and supportive, and the ideas are way more truthful. I feel happy to have not really seen this dynamic and mentality at GC as strongly as it exists in other places, but I’m curious if others feel the same?

And just to be clear, I am above defining “imposter syndrome,” when I call it “reproductive,” as a phenomenon very specific to academic spaces and distinct from the feeling that the system is oppressive, hurtful, and only built for some people to thrive.

One random thing I wish was noted in the reading was that when they talked about self-care and how women seemed to want to talk about it more is that men, especially cis white men, don’t need “self-care” as much because women are taking care of them. We’ve all seen the articles about how during the pandemic, academics who are men have produced more while academics who are women produced less? I’m also curious how people feel about the term “self-care” in general. I also was surprised to read how common clinical depression is in grad school!!! I haven’t heard it talked about so much; I am happy to share strategies for how I deal with clinical depression with anyone who asks, but I hesitate to put them here just because “advice” re: depression can be taxing for some people.

Sandra, thanks for putting together such a thoughtful and interesting workshop. It’s funny; I’m so “traditional” in so many ways. I kind of love the craft of conventional academic writing partially, I think, because it didn’t come naturally for. me and the process of training myself to do it was really formative for me. I also really love working with conventional texts! And so I’ve always kind of run from the phrase “digital humanities” but, it turns out, engaging with this material was really useful for thinking about some things I had been thinking about. Also just to be clear I’m a novice to this stuff in a lot of ways; I basically only use Youtube to watch music and makeup tutorials!

In addition to reading the chapter, I watched the video re: JK Rowling and the video re: video game one. I chose the former because I’m often thinking about the relationships between authors and their texts, and the latter because I had just read Against the Fascist Creep by Alexander Reed Ross, which discussed Gamergate a bit, which I had of course heard of, but had no real understanding of because I’m not very online and I don’t know anything about video games. I also watched a few of the tiktoks. I have two questions that might be simpler for you to answer, Sandra: 1) I’m interested in how, in your instructions, you didn’t seem super invested in us sitting down and watching the videos (instead saying we should cook, etc.) I’m just interested, then, in how you see the difference between youtube “culture” and say, podcast culture (that could be an ignorant question – I don’t listen to podcasts either!). 2) Is it a pattern for popular youtubers who are men to have less expensive lighting setups than popular youtubers who are women? I really liked Big Joel, but kept thinking about his lighting in contrast to Ellis’ lighting!

Despite not being invested in Harry Potter or video games, I appreciated the content and more or less agreed with the two videos – though the video game one kind of horrified me because, re: the misogynists, it always truly terrifies me to see for myself what I know theoretically, which is that evil people are also generally truly mediocre people! For me something that was interesting is that the unit of analysis of the two videos I watched seemed to be internet debates about texts as opposed to the texts themselves. And in that sense, both really did feel like a more succinct and clear version of what academics do – and for their succinct quality and clarity, more effective than what many academics do. Something I had been invested in in the community college classroom is making sure students see interpretive work as embodied and relevant, and as something they are ENTITLED to do (as opposed to just “demonstrating skill” in an essay). Something I also always say to students is that writing is merely a form of communication that is more difficult for many, because one doesn’t have gestures, tone of voice, etc. – I think incorporating videos like these into the classroom could generate understanding and conversation about both of these points. I didn’t take the best notes while reading, but something that struck me from the Smyth article was when he said that people really CRAVE hermeneutics. I think that’s true; something I always feel about English majors is we can be so self-conscious about the fact that what we mainly do is interpret texts – but interpreting texts is so important!!! I really am committed to the value of hermeneutics, and I loved the way Smyth talked about this.

But…..not everything is a text! And so where the internet (broadly) scares me, is when it comes to context and history. I used to be of the opinion that the internet created opportunities for community that lots of people might not otherwise have access to. I also used to be of the opinion that the internet made knowledge production more democratic. I don’t think I was wrong, and I still think them in SOME ways…but I think I was always a little bit wrong in some ways, and I also think things have changed. Smyth talked about how the internet is similar to lots of academia but without the same citational practices, and it reminded me of how recently I described Twitter as “the worst traits of academia on meth and without citations.” Like….people tweeting flat-out incorrect things with authority, and then those things going viral. Or…so one really alarming trend I’ve seen lately is people talking about revolutionary leaders or leftist thinkers or…fascists…in a tone that is one that cannot be described as anything other than the same tone as people talk in when they are engaging in fandoms. And leftism should absolutely not be filling the same role in someone’s life as a fandom would. While most of the tiktoks were super cool, there was one that did this “socialists and libertarians are closer than most would like to think” and it was so irresponsible because yes, what we now think of as “libertarians” did appropriate that term from truly left movements, it is what it is now, and i would hope that libertarians and socialists have NOTHING in common! I hesitate to call it “irresponsible” because the person in the video looked so young. But definitely part of a worrisome trend in my opinion, where people start “knowing” things without history or context.

And so quite honestly, when the work is hermeneutics…I do think we English people have something to learn from the Youtubers, as our texts are often boring because they shove a bunch of unnecessary citations in the midst of interpretations that could be exciting otherwise. But history is different. And when various internet platforms worry me lately is when it’s very obvious that the only context for people’s interpretations is the internet. But here again, this is in some ways similar to academia, because lots of academics problems is that the academy is the sole or intensely primary context for analysis.

Sword’s book encourages readers to reflect upon their own writing habits. While writing styles and habits vary widely, she argues, academic writers should try to even out these elements on the base. I more or less agree with the elements she includes on the base, and that it would be good to even them out! To use Sword’s terminology. I know that in my last program my social and emotional habits were very bad. I would write and rewrite and never submit because I was ashamed to submit anything less than perfect, and afraid to ask for help or share. One of my proudest accomplishments last semester was submitting papers I wasn’t COMPLETELY happy with, including one I wasn’t really happy with at all. I had given myself deadlines within the official deadlines and when those deadlines arrived, that was it, and my attitude was really one of feeling that if something has promise, whoever reads the piece can help me make it better – I was proud of this mindset because it really was a shift from how I used to be. For me, this is a benefit of having more old people in Ph.D. programs – I think I’ve matured and become healthier, but I also think the physical and mental strain of caring too much what people think of me has become more than my older body and brain can handle. Even when I do cringe re: writing I submit or something I say, my brain just kind of drops it in a few seconds or so. It’s great!

I have to admit, it’s a little hard to read about writing habits in this particular moment. Having worked at such an intense job for so long, I had developed a work ethic (these are your hours, and you are doing nothing but work in those hours) that translated to GC, more or less. The pandemic made that all go to Hell, and it’s only gotten worse and more taxing that all these distinct tasks are taking place on one screen. There’s time and space (I guess) but air and light? Nope!

Sword talks about institutional barriers to healthy writing habits in a way that’s kind of shallow, and so I wish she just hadn’t. I also could have done without the “growth mindset” stuff, which I have a personal grudge against. That particular rant doesn’t belong here, but I’ll mention Sword’s own research re: women feeling significantly less pleasure than men while writing. I found those statistics alarming, and individuals developing a growth mindset will certainly not be helpful there.

Sword mentions that there aren’t necessarily spaces to talk about writing in academia. This is a random thought, but sometimes I wonder if (good) practices in composition studies could be translated and used in graduate classrooms. These practices often involve a lot of scaffolding and collaboration at all stages in the reading and writing process, and a lot of metacognitive reflection on both reading and writing.

My workshop will be an introduction to the work of Sara Ahmed, an independent scholar whose work has much to teach about how institutions function. While she used to direct the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths University in London, she resigned from this position as a protest for the university’s mishandling of sexual harrassment complaints. On her website, characterizes her work in the following way: “I work at the intersection of feminist, queer, and race studies. My research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds as well as institutional cultures.” I would describe Ahmed as one of the most prolific and important philosophers of our time. 

Particularly relevant to this class, I think, is Ahmed’s work about ways of navigating institutional spaces, like the university, that are traditionally the domain of white, abeled, men. In her most recent book What’s the Use, Ahmed writes: “We have to find ways of not getting used to it without getting out of it, even if sometimes, for our own survival, our feminist survival, we need to get out of it” (196). One trend I have noticed is that many texts that fall within the umbrella of Critical University Studies will (rightly) critique adjunctification and corporatization, only to fall back on some flat notion of “faculty governance” as the best past forward, either explicitly or inadvertently evoking some notion of “better” days before these trends. These accounts do not take account for the ways the academy has always been racist, sexist, ableist, etc. Ahmed’s work is brilliant in identifying and describing the interpersonal manifestations of structural violence, and, in turn, how these pervasive yet evasive instances of interpersonal violence reinforce structures. 

I have chosen three texts for discussion: 

1. Lecture – “On Complaint” (2018)

In this lecture, Ahmed discusses what the process of complaining about institutions teaches us about how institutions function. After resigning from Goldsmiths in 2016, Ahmed solicited accounts of others who have complained within institutions. These accounts will feature heavily in her forthcoming book Complaint! You can read the description of this project here: https://www.saranahmed.com/complaint. I do recommend watching the whole lecture if you have time. In most of Ahmed’s work, she layers the repetition of images and concepts over different examples or iterations of her core concepts. When she speaks one can hear this layering in a way that is really lovely. 

2. Lecture  – “Queer Use” 

You can read this here: https://feministkilljoys.com/2018/11/08/queer-use/

I haven’t been able to find the best quality video of this lecture, but videos exist. 

This lecture summarizes many of Ahmed’s points from her most recent book, What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use (2019), one of several of Ahmed’s work where she traces the ways words work (she considers this as part of a trilogy with The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Willful Subjects (2014)). In this lecture, Ahmed talks both about the ways institutions signal that they are not for everyone’s use, as she puts forth some principles of what “queer use” of institutional spaces might look like. 

3. Article – “Against Students” (2015)

This article is perhaps more related to a niche interest of mine. At around the time this article was written, many (often, but by no means only, ostensibly left) faculty were writing articles about “overly sensitive” students who desired content warnings and safer spaces. Many of these faculty claimed that students were attempting to restrict the freedom of speech of faculty members. This article is Sara Ahmed’s response. I’ll also say that even at this time, I personally believed that the “moral panic” (as Ahmed describes this train of thought) about trigger warnings was a way to warn students against complaining about sexual harassment, almost as if to say: “If you speak out against abuse within this institution, we will characterize you as a whiny, moralistic baby.” Additionally, a lot of the language re: “snowflakes,” language that soon became popular insults hurled by Trump supporters toward those who care for justice, is language that I personally first heard used by academics who consider themselves somehow countercultural.

Reading The Undercommons is illuminating to me in ways that come with some caveats (some, not all, of which are expressed in Austerity Blues). Reading Austerity Blues is illuminating to me in ways that come with some caveats (some, not all, of which are expressed by The Undercommons).

I found myself attaching much less to Putting the Humanities to Work, even when I ostensibly agree with much of it, and I’m struggling to articulate why.

First, let me say, I am GLAD GC’s English department is (often seemingly) hospitable to students who want to pursue alternative paths or more creative assignments. I am truly glad about this, and I cannot emphasize how much different the overall culture seems to be here than in my previous institution. One of the most demoralizing moments at my last institution was when I said I was interested in pursuing a community college position and one of my advisors said, “Well, then why are you here? You don’t need a Ph.D. to do that.” I don’t think I would meet the same response here and, if I did, I don’t think it would be difficult to find support from people within the institution who assured me that that response was a bad response. I am thankful that, from what I’ve seen, people here seem to talk really openly about what they imagine for their futures and about their desires re: pursuing the degree. I think that this culture coincides with more honest and interesting intellectual work, for sure, if partially just because it allows for more honest human beings.

I think it’s a very PRACTICAL book insofar as it suggests some ways we could shift culturally to respond to a context where most people simply will not get tenure track, full-time faculty positions. I guess that just frustrates me because there are…plenty of academic positions! And I think I’d personally prefer a book about how people (especially full-time faculty) could fight the reliance on contingent labor. The end of the book has a list of things to do and questioning racism and sexism was kind of a point on a list instead of foundational to this system of contingency. Something I was missing from the book is just kind of like….How are we going to expect full-time faculty members who are not all but often (as Rogers notes) people with privileged backgrounds, consistently and effectively (as a group, not just as certain cool individuals) mentor people without those privileges? And then if a potential goal of mentorship is to mentor people toward non-faculty positions – does that not just reproduce and reinforce the same departmental hierarchies and demographics?

I also pause a bit at an assumption driving the book about how humanities students trained by Ph.D. programs would be especially suited to non-academic jobs. Is her point that they COULD be with widely different training, or that they are? There was one point where she mentioned that academics would need “no specific training” or “no specialized training” (these are paraphrases because I unfortunately didn’t write it down!) to mentor students toward less traditional careers but…is that true?? The beginning of my previous paragraph called the book “practical,” but I’m not sure if the huge cultural shifts within departments that she said should happen really could happen in meaningful, consistent ways across departments and institutions? It’s almost like the book argues for a cultural shift without being nearly as harsh (in my opinion) about some of the really destructive thinking and relational habits that also happen in and are nurtured by many Humanities departments.

I keep thinking I’m missing something. To be quite honest, it’s possible that the word “career” feels a little abstract at this moment in time! But yeah. Super interested to hear other people’s responses.

I think something I can never wrap my head around when thinking about making change in public education seems to require so many different (competing?) groups to come together. Brier and Fabricant’s framing of Pathways is something that resonates with a lot of the experiences I’ve had teaching at CUNY. Essentially, Pathways is a kind of standardization across campuses that makes it easier to transfer – a standardization that “streamlines” and, thus, makes it easier to hit our numbers re: graduation. This IS an austerity measure and it also IS something that is ostensibly good for students and that they want, BUT what is lost in this process? Brier and Fabricant would say this notion is lost: “Our belief is that higher education must enable students to locate what and how they are learning within the context of their experience. Ideas must travel back and forth between their history, a larger social context, and the independent life of an idea or body of ideas. Without such a progressive trajectory, learning is stagnant and unlikely to be dynamic or of enduring value” (249).

This framing really contextualized some of my experiences teaching at CUNY Start (CS) at QCC. CS was founded as an intensive alternative to non-credit remedial courses, one that was $75 dollars, all inclusive. Students essentially are in class for five days a week, five hours a day, 2.5 hours for English and 2.5 hours for math (instructors taught two sections a day, making a whopping 25 contact hour week). It’s a very hard program to explain to people, and it has some similarities with the original SEEK program (although, notably, SEEK explicitly articulated itself as a racial/economic justice program, which CS does not). Back when I was hired, there was a VERY robust training process that was genuinely transformative for me, especially insofar as it valued the nurturing of learning communities. Even though, when I was initially hired, the final assessment would be the standardized CUNY exams, the training really emphasized that this was not a test prep program; while we would do some work to familiarize students with the exams, the core of the work would be in reading, writing, and critical thinking more broadly. And it genuinely did feel like that. It was the first time I had taught without grading – at all, and I think it was in these days that I really strengthened my ability to nurture intrinsic motivation and help maintain an environment based on mutual trust; it was MORE pressure to create engaging assignments, lessons, etc.

When the tests were eventually de-emphasized with the hope of phasing them out completely, at first I was happy because the tests were bad. What became clear, though, is that the dropping of the tests was about money and about “streamlining” remediation; QCC planned to get rid of conventional remedial classes altogether at this point, and so our program was a key player in this “streamlining” effort. So I found myself involved in fewer conversations about teaching, and more about…norming and rubrics, none of which involved critical thinking or creative thinking or commanding voice or anything like that, and bringing that up would almost be treated like a distraction to the “real” conversation – so much so that I thinking reading AB and all the work on SEEK in Professor Brier’s class had this kind of like, “holy shit! I wasn’t thinking completely ridiculous things” effect on me. And also it just became increasingly clear how the desire for students to get out of remediation quickly was not matched by initiatives to improve the quality of their education or provide them with more resources. Something that started emerging was hard decisions about whether or not to pass students who would almost definitely not pass a 101 class; both options seemed harmful because neither would help the student get the necessary resources. With reservations, at this point I actually advocated for “pass” to be a 70 as opposed to the suggested 65 or 60; it seemed to me to send a demoralizing and insulting message to students to tell them a D was “good enough.”

I think I just told that anecdote to give an example of how austerity driven measures (like streamlining) can SEEM good and in some ways actually BE good, but it throws the vision Brier and Fabricant have of education out the window. It’s a cheery vision of what school can do, for sure, that our conversations in this class have me questioning. I’m re-reading this book at the same time as I’m reading The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein, and I just finished the chapter about teacher’s union conflicts with community control advocates, and reading it it’s really wild to me how conversations and debates around public education have been really just recurring. Brier and Fabricant argue for the necessity of forming a “coherent” language that really fundamentally shifts people’s conception of education, one that will create a situation where faculty, students, and community members fight against austerity measures together. I think one example of that is naturalizing an idea like, say, “Our teaching conditions are students’ learning conditions.” But so many things are hard about solidarity. So many different people in the PSC, with ostensibly different interests….also teacher solidarity can be hard when CUNY does have actually bad teachers….

I’m obviously getting tired and should stop before elaborating on that last point. I wanted to end by really encouraging people to read about SEEK, and especially…if we get back to campus because I don’t think there are digital versions?…read the work by June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich re: their time in SEEK that has been compiled by the Lost & Found Project.

This is my 2.5th time reading The Undercommons, and also my 2.5th time experiencing a kind of ambivalence about it that I’d like to understand.

For Professor Stephen Brier’s Critical University Studies Class last Spring, I ended up writing a book review of The Undercommons, Rae Connell’s The Good University, and Sara Ahmed’s What’s the Use, and I think summarizing my work here might be the clearest way I can articulate this ambivalence. The conversation I staged between these books went something like this: Moten/Harney consider the university as part of a network of institutions that need to be abolished (in the video Prof. Hintz put on the syllabus, they also define things like “The Artist” as institutions that need to be abolished). Connell’s book has almost an opposite conclusion despite (in my view) not having opposite politics; she believes that radical transformation of universities are possible and her belief in this is based on a very grounded love of the very particular sets of interactions the university produces (her discussion of “research” is particularly moving). Ahmed doesn’t enter into the conversation about the essential goodness or badness of the university per se but, in her characteristic and nuanced attention to the relationships between interpersonal and structural power, throws a kind of wrench in the conventional “administrators = bad” discourse by exploring the ways that discourse characterizes complaints about racism and sexual harassment as somehow “conservative” in its utilization of administrative roles within the university.

I have a real affinity for each of these perspectives and kind of agree with them all despite them – or, well, especially what I’m pinpointing about them? – contradicting each other. I mentioned I dropped out of NYU; both my NYU self AND my NYU drop-out self – which are selves that still exist! – are positively thrilled by Moten and Harney. As they say in the video – abolition, exodus, presence. My CUNY self, and especially the part of that self that had taught for QCC’s CUNY Start for so long, is more with Connell, and this feeling is probably intensified by all the humbling reading we did in Prof. Brier’s class about the intensity of people’s struggles for a fair CUNY. I guess all that’s to say that my feeling about CUNY is wanting to fight like hell for it to be what it’s supposed to be, which is most definitely not abolitionist (and is it delusional?). And re: maybe just one of the reasons I put Ahmed in there…I feel like I should admit that my feelings about The Undercommons are knowing some particular abusive academics who claim the “in and not of the university” idea as describing themselves despite it..not. This grudge is not fair to Moten/Harney, of course, but it’s not not impacting the way I read the text.

That all being said, I think The Undercommons is a profoundly generous text. I have some random thoughts about some of the secondary material: First, I was struck when Zach Ngin wrote: “It’s not so much an excavation of resistance or a primer for the revolution as a celebration of their inescapable, improvised fact.” I loved this point, and I think it might be what Sandra was getting at in the previous blog post as well, or what Moten/Harney talk about when they talk about the kind of misfits of the university who are also kind of in it. I’ve lately reflected on the profoundly generative, playful, intellectual production I’ve engaged in with others that has not taken place within the academy, or that has perhaps taken place within its bounds (or literally on its property) but feels genuinely “not of it.” To some extent, I think portions of The Undercommons are a way of celebrating those “inescapable, improvised” creations. And to some extent, I think the desire to centralize that impulse in my life is why I returned to school, despite knowing that “The Academy” doesn’t encourage that (I feel like being armed with an inability to either be negatively surprised by “The Academy” or by CUNY puts me in an actually decent place for this project?).

I have only watched about half of the video so far, but one person asks this great question about (my words), lonely people. The question basically asks about people who want to leave but aren’t secure they’ve found their people who will leave with and support them. Harney agrees with me it’s a great question and then he gives the least satisfying answer ever! No judgment from me there; it’s an impossible question. I just want to highlight it as a question that was moving to me.

I’m really looking forward to reading and hearing other perspectives on this text! And I love Sandra’s suggestion to personalize it.