Just Collaborations

by Danika Medak-Saltzman (Syracuse University), Deepti Misri (University of Colorado Boulder), and Beverly Weber (University of Colorado Boulder)

In this post, the three of us draw on our shared experience at a predominantly white public university in order to share some initial responses to the following question: How are the neoliberal academy’s modes of organizing labor and valuing knowledge steeped in spatiotemporal logics that are both settler colonial and ableist in nature? Our motivation in tracing these logics stems directly from having observed “faculty with disabilities” at our university “running against the tenure clock” under expectations that are as ableist as the metaphor, as well as seemingly abled women faculty, faculty of color, and contingent faculty, who have strained against the academic clock and ended up debilitated in the process.

by Carrie Smith (University of Alberta) and Maria Stehle (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

In our 2016 book Awkward Politics, we write about what collaboration can or might do within, or to, the academy. We write of its subversive and revolutionary quality, of its ability to push back against assessment mechanisms of the university and against the theoretical canon at the foundation of the humanities. Further, we speak at length about our own collaborative relationship that grew from tentative dates via email to long chats on Skype, tracing its origins in a shared sense of academic and feminist political urgency, but also in a mutual understanding that the tools of our discipline, German Studies, should not onlyuse, but must also dotheory in a broad sense. Doing theory can only have meaning when the resulting thinking reaches well beyond the object or subject analyzed, beyond the pages of the book, the frames of the film, the pixels of the video; when that theory has social and political value. Throughout our collaboration, the personal nature of our relationship was bound up in our intellectual and political commitment to feminisms. As Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman write in the preface to their conversation in Sex, or the Unbearable: “our own conversation includes and exceeds us at once” (x). While our thoughts in that book are at times utopian, at their very core lies an understanding that for theory to be written, read, and mobilized as social practice (Berlant and Edelman), the work must be collaborative in conception and execution.

Disability and Decolonizing Time/Knowledge on the Tenure Clock

Counting and Accountability: Collaboration in and Against the Neoliberal University