panel 1uncanny encounters: caring for ghosts in neoliberal universities
Embodied Theory Assembly
uncanny encounters: caring for ghosts in neoliberal universities
Embodied Theory Assembly
Our collective experience informs this presentation proposal of caring for the body – its deep, visceral capacity for sensing and feeling – by generating caring in feminist academic spaces. To generate feminist academic spaces within university spaces, which are by default uncaring spaces, we feel it first necessary to address how today’s neoliberal universities in the West shape pedagogy: through manufacturing exhaustion, isolation, repression, epistemic violence, physical threats, and harm to insurgent bodies – and currently by being complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.
Within such a hostile environment, caring is to become cognizant of the oppressor planted deep inside each of us, resist oppression, and build coalitions animated by the politics of everyday life (Ahmed, 2017; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 1984; Simpson, 2021). One way that we, students and alums of the Research Master’s Gender Studies at Utrecht University, sought to do this was to design and facilitate the tutorial “Experiments on Embodied Theory” (November 2022 – February 2023) within the program. Within the care frame, we want to share a specific session, Embodying Ghosts as Refusal, which focuses on evoking present-past histories that reside in us, such as colonial heritage, epistemic violence, and capital accumulation.
We aim to share our experience of designing and facilitating the tutorial as a case study to offer ways of questioning care within a neoliberal structure and knowledge system. We will address the following questions: In what shapes does care take place in the university? What are the demands of embodiment, of histories shaping present materialities/bodies, that care makes of us? And what are the hopes and possibilities of instigating a feminist practice within care-less neoliberal academia? As a partial answer, we propose that by accepting and embodying ghosts as part of our lives, we can reorient and animate ourselves to address the ongoing violence with greater care.
Embodied Theory Assembly (ETA) is a feminist research collective co-instigated by Muhammad Khurram, Rita Sousa, and Kiek Korevaar (since February 2022, the Netherlands). Evolving out of the ReMA Gender Studies program at Utrecht University, ETA directly responds to the institutions’ pedagogy and methodology by refusing the Cartesian body-mind distinction at the heart of the academic white-European epistemological approach, for the body cannot be left behind (as Mia Mingus reminds us) in radical resistance, imaginaries, and the liberation struggle. As such, we depart from an activist intervention seeking to “stay with the trouble” (as Donna Haraway invites us) of working at the fringes of the institution. We do not aim to dismiss the theory. By moving in and out of theory and practice, our experiential work constantly unfolds to lay bare power-imputed structures interwoven on/into our bodily fabric of everyday life. Through our shared background in queer, decolonial, and feminist theory, our practice extends its tendrils into the nurturing compost of theorists, activists, and poets, cultivating futures in the fields above, thus providing us with generous, arable soil for feminist intervention.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman