08/06/2021 Collaborative Praxis: Unbinding Neoliberal Tethers of Academia * Feminista Journal (original) (raw)
In the course of our conversations in conceptualising this piece, we agreed on three things – a) we adapt to no form of homogeneity, b) we hold space for each other and b) we ponder on various forms of collective and collaborative working. In using each of these terms as our thinking praxis, we have tried to illuminate facets of academia as it displaces us (in the form/identity we inhabit). We open our discussion with the neoliberal conditions that inhibit our agencies in the university. For instance, neoliberalism forces us into an isolationist, individualist conception of labour where structural inequality is made invisible and a politics of care untenable. Similarly, unpacking our positionality illuminates the creation of value and worth through gender as a colonial social construct. “If woman and black are terms for homogeneous, atomic, separable categories”, writes Maria Lugones, “then their intersection shows us the absence of black women rather than their presence”. Worth and value, then, are located in the bodies that are most proximally institutional, if not the institutions themselves.[1] Denial of worth and value, together with isolation, invariably leads us to an urgency to create community and collectives – things that are integral to feminist movements. And in centering these communitarian and collective praxes, we also come in direct existential confrontation with academia itself. To find what resonates to our experiences that are distinctive in themselves, but communicative on a common struggle. In this piece, we hope to rage through these sites of disenfranchisement and other fractures while simultaneously trying to imagine ways in which collaboration centers itself in academia.