Roundtable discussion: Thinking together from within the times that worry us

The inaugural section of “Praxiography: practices and institutions” of Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research features a roundtable discussion between five scholars who address matters pertaining to practices, legacies, and affects that comprise today’s academia. Preceded by editors’ introduction, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Andrea Pető, Jessie Loyer, Mariya Ivancheva, and Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir offer their reflections on ways of organising, living, and imagining various research and academic praxes by means of thinking with the concepts of resistance, collaboration, 81 Roundtable discussion: Thinking together from within the times that worry us Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volumen 1 (2019): 80-108 ISSN: 2604-7551(1) solidarity, care, and kinship and consider them from feminist, de-colonial, Indigenous, and other anti-oppressive perspectives.


Introduction
We are worried. About job security and student debt. About political climate and climate change. In Hungary the right-wing government of Viktor Orbán withdrew accreditation and funding from gender studies programmes; in Turkey, academic freedom is under threat and signatories of the "Peace Petition" (organized by a group Academics for Peace and circulated in January 2016) face prison time; and the anti- LGBTQ and anti-feminist sentiments are on the rise. For us, as curators of this roundtable, being worried about the state of things provided an impulse to offer a space and a time to worry together as a collective practice of hearing each other out: acknowledging others' concerns, sharing our own and thinking how we as academics could respond to what preoccupies us. We are researchers working within academia sometimes against it, at its fringes, and sometimes beyond it. This is why in this panel discussion we wanted to situate and start a conversation about things that trouble, upset, and fill us with worry with regards to "our own backyard," the world of academia. Academia is a heterogeneous terrainin terms of power relations, communities it affects, includes, and excludes, voices it mis/represents, narratives it legitimises, wipes out, or creates. Academia is a microcosm of a sort, in which precarious working conditions, neoliberal exploitation, and hopes for the better future percolate through each other. We wish to zoom into some of those worries and dreams, lessons and strategies, "values and facts […] cooked together as part of one brew" (Barad et al., 2012, p. 16) in today's university.
Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 80-108 ISSN: 2604-7551 (1) As editors of a section "Praxiography*: practices and institutions"1 of a new academic journal Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research we wanted this roundtable discussion to provide an opportunity to engage with topics of research practices, critique of institutional structures, and to host bold explorations of ways of organising, living, and imagining various research/academic praxes. Thus, we aim at politics of new materialisms that is about putting feminist new materialisms to work (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 101) through diffracting theoretical reflection, personal experiences and practice in search for more just and liveable ways to think, feel, and act. To this effect we invited five scholars, whose activism and theoretical inventiveness have been an inspiration to us, to share their insights on the state of today's university from their own situated (Haraway, 1988) perspectives. The voices gathered here contribute to the politics of feminist new materialisms by directing our readers' attention to questions of knowledge production, canons, and classifications and, specifically, by thinking how to destabilize them. These objectivesto our minds are central to feminist new materialisms.
Our intention was to bring together their distinct voices and feminist, Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-oppressive perspectives on practicing as researchers, teachers, and activistsrooted both in academic environments and in our respective communities. The invited contributors are not necessarily coming from feminist new materialisms' perspectives or identify themselves with this body of work. We strongly believe that offering spaces for dialogue across disciplines, theoretical standpoints, methodologies, generations, and various feminist genealogies to which we are indebted constitutes an effort to break outside of the often limiting borders and classifixations (van der Tuin, 2015) and to share worries, struggles, experiences, coping strategies, and solidarity beyond them. 1 The term "praxiography" was coined by Annemarie Mol (2002) and, independently, developed by members of working group "New Materialisms: Tackling (1) Thinking about our own worries and shared concerns from within our academic situatedness and wondering about the ways in which academia may respond to contemporary political, environmental, and social crises and systemic violences, we encouraged our invited authors to approach the following five notions: Resistance: We asked: In times of "anti-gender mobilization", the rise of anti-migrant sentiments and the far-right, which forms of organizing and resisting make you concerns are longstanding. While I will focus on the UK, I suggest that the arguments I make are pertinent across a variety of sites.
When universities in the UK opened up to women in greater numbers in the postwar period, and especially after reforms which created a system of mass higher education in the 1960s, one of the first things that women found was that women could not be found in these institutions. For some female scholars, this absence required address.
In terms of the curriculumof knowledge productionthis was done by seeking to identify women as both the objects and subjects of research and by coming to argue for the need of a feminist perspective across disciplines and other areas of study (see Bhambra, 2007). They addressed both what was to be taught as well as who should teach and, in the process, changed these institutions. Within the UK, it is not a mainstream opinion to suggest that the curriculum or universities are being distorted or disfigured by the inclusion of women and feminist perspectives. So, what are we to make of those who criticise the call to decolonise our institutions?
Just as some men found gender equality a challenge to their sense of self, it's not surprising perhaps that those whose sense of self is intimately tied to the idea of Empire having been a force for good in the world, are unsettled by arguments to the contrary. In this context, what I find surprising is how they locate such criticisms as forms of identity politics when it is quite clear that the only politics of identity being peddled here is their own.
Any number of commentators, on being confronted by the trade in human beings, often respond by saying, yes that was bad, but we did abolish the trade. It is correct that Britain did abolish the trade, after over 200 years of profiting from it, but this is not the only thing that was done. As Catherine Hall and Nicholas Draper have made publicly known, Britain also paid compensation of £20 millionor £65 billion in today's money, or the equivalent of 40% of GDPto those people who had lost  (1) industrial revolution, build country houses, and endow public schools, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and art institutions.
In February 2018, the Treasury rather ineptly tweeted that "we", that is British taxpayers, did not finish paying off the bond that had been raised to pay out this compensation until 2015. Yes, current taxpayers, and their parents and grandparents and great-grand-parentsnot just in the British national state, but across its imperial provincespaid through taxes to compensate British slave-owners and their descendants for ending the abomination that was slavery. This fact either rarely makes it into standard discussions of abolition or, if it does, there's usually some muttering about the rule of law and the necessity to compensate for the loss of property however distasteful we might find the fact that peoplein a different time, with different moralities, etc.regarded it legitimate to own other people.
This claim, however, is not then followed by agreement with the idea of more general reparations to compensate those across the colonial empire who had lost property.
That is, those who were dispossessed from their lands, whose right to property in themselves was taken from them, or in compensation for the resources that were extractedto the tune of $45 trillion from India alone as the economist Utsa Patnaik (2017) has calculated. If the rule of law and the right to be compensated for property lost is central to who we think we areis central to all articulations of British values then why not generalise the process and compensate all those others? What is the obstacle to doing so? Saying that "we know that slavery was wrong because we abolished it" erases the historical narratives of those who had always opposed slaveryincluding successfully as in the Haitian Revolution (see Bhambra, 2016). It also pretends that we knew it was wrong prior to others telling us so, even as we argue that it is not possible to judge the past according to the standards of the present. Which is it? Because logically you cannot have it both ways.
The reason for presenting this extended example is to say that decolonising the curriculum, fundamentally, is about transforming the "common-sense" narratives we have about how the world we share in common was configured.  (1) also includes those who believe themselves to be exempt because their own states were not significant contributors to colonialism and imperialism. Yet, all settler colonies were constituted by the "emigrationist colonialism" of populations across Europeincluding Northern and Eastern Europe. For example, during the nineteenth century, over two million Polish people moved to the lands that come to be known as the Americas, as did over a million Swedes, constituting about a fifth of the total Swedish population. This was a movement of populations that benefitted those that remained as well as those that moved. If we do not adequately understand the shared histories that produced us, we have no hope in constructing a politics that will effectively address the many challenges we face.  (1) have been in train for over 500 years and so the work that continues to be needed is extensive and requires us to work together.
There is little that matters in this context other than doing the work. And, in doing the work, we are doing the work of the university as properly understoodas constituting the university as a repository of the common learning of communities.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the reviewers and editors for helpful comments on this paper. All errors are, as ever, my own.
Bibliography Bhambra, Gurminder, K. (2007). Sociology and postcolonialism: Another "missing" revolution? Sociology, 41 (5) (1) is the concept of "gender ideology", which is constructed by those who consider gender as a concept to demonstrate the failure of liberal democracy. The opposition to this so-called "gender ideology" has become a means of rejecting certain facets of the current social and economic order, from the prioritisation of identity politics over material issues such as labour conditions or housing to the weakening of people's social, cultural and political security. Secondly, the demonization of "gender ideology" has become a key rhetorical tool in the construction of a new concept of common sense for a wide audience, a form of consensus of what is normal and legitimate. It is important to note that this social mobilisation against "gender ideology" and political correctness does not just demonise the worldview of liberal democracy and reject the human rights' paradigm which has long been the object of relative consensus in Europe and North America. But the anti-equality movements also offer a livable, viable alternative centered on the family, the nation and religious values, as well as freedom of speech. This alternative to the neoliberal progressive narrative is widely attractive because it offers a positive identification of individual's own choices, and it promises a safe and secure community as a remedy for individualism and social atomisation. Thirdly, the opposition to "gender ideology" is also a possibility for the right to create a broad alliance and unite various actors that have not necessarily been eager to cooperate in the past. That is why fighting against those forces who use the concept of gender and equality to mobilize hate and exclusion is an imperative not only for gender studies scholars independently. It is also an imperative to admit that we have lost a battle in this war. "Gender as symbolic glue" has an impact on those who have been attacked and it creates very clear fronts gluing together those who are victims of these vicious attacks, they stick together in collective resistance.
I am, nevertheless, optimistic because I believe that the lessons learned during the past years living, working and teaching in illiberal Hungary will help the fight for academic freedom. Previously scholars of gender studies were marginalised, even spatially: working in their offices in the attic or in the cellar of the university building.
Now due to the anti-gender studies campaign, Hungary, a country of ten million inhabitants, became a country of ten million gender experts! Everybody seems to  (1) have an opinion about the course curricula and reading lists, learning outcomes or the labor market opportunities of gender studies' graduates.
The first lesson learned in this struggle was the importance of networks, international contacts and press relations. Responding to media inquiries, prioritizing media outlets, explaining the complex situation for often unprepared and overworked journalists required time and special media skills we had to acquire. European professional organisation of gender studies scholars and professionals, AtGender works well in "normal" times as it became just another fee paying professional organisation, which is organising academic conferences. But gender studies have never been and will not be just another profession especially not now.
Therefore, AtGender failed to serve as a major lobbying and interest protecting tool during major crises partly because it defined its role in academic setting when academia is losing its lobbying power more and more. The quick and effective support came from established professional networks and institutionalized organizations; from feminist sociologists, historians, political scientists who quickly wrote protest letters (and organized letters sent by their universities) and signed petitions despite their own workload. And that is another lesson learned; that writing letters and signing manifestos is not enough. European professional organizations like European University Association and All European Academies issued statements calling for protection of academic freedom and gender studies but they all received the same standardized general answer from the Hungarian government.
The protest and support letters are evidence that there are scholars and institutions that are resisting and despising the politics of the Hungarian government and its attack on gender studies but in practice their protest had little impact. The EU Commissioner whose portfolio is to protect academic freedom and European values  (1) if not gender mainstreaming in the best sense of the word? These issues would not have been brought up had the government not banned a discipline of gender studies.
The ban was a wake-up call for all of us to save not only the discipline but to fight for free academic research as such.  (1) identity or blood quantum politics. Researchers in Indigenous Studies, when they state their affiliation, are letting their audience know who they are responsible for and accountable to. This statement marks the communities that make this research possible.

Bibliography
The ways we explicitly call our communities into our writing and our presentations lays out a foundation of accountability and responsibility and helps to position researchers in a genealogy. It confronts the myth of a single scholar toiling alone.
None of us emerge from nothing: we are all the result of generations of relationships.
There are so few Indigenous librarians that we are often the only one in our library  (1) Reciprocity within a nêhiyaw and Michif legal system asks us to be responsible in very particular ways to the people we teach. We know our relatives through wâhkôhtowin; miyo-wîcêhtowin directs us to be in good relationship. Kinship connections here extend beyond the family, to the rest of creation, grounded in the land. This legal system extends from the land (see Campbell, 2007;Macdougall, 2010;Innes, 2013;Adam, 2015). With

Mariya Ivancheva, University of Liverpool
Unbundling is the process of disaggregating educational provision into its component parts likely for delivery by multiple stakeholders, often through public-private partnerships and the use of digital approaches (Swinnerton et al., 2018). A neutral definition, it relates to a process that is all but neutral to higher education. Having done research on unbundling South African and English universities, on a project focused on teaching and learning processes, I could not help but realise the extent to which this process affects much more than student learning and online teaching material curation patterns. Under the premise of widening access, it contributes to a potentially profoundly gendered casualisation, automation, deprofessionalisation, and fragmentation of academic labour to new unforeseen degrees. In this, unbundling reveals a new frontier of exploitation and exclusion at universities that we need to be aware of and organise against.
Initially unbundling followed a commons-rather than market-led imaginary (Mansell, 2017). Radical educators saw digital technologies' potential to democratise education and widen access. Shorter, low-cost, flexible unbundled curricular units could be made available online and used by atypical students still at a disadvantage in education: women, people with caring responsibilities and disabilities, mature fulltime working students. Employers could support job-tailored workers' education, and communities could become more involved with universities, demanding need-based content. Such a radical "digital disruption" of the original elite "bundle" of residential university degrees could challenge elite distinctions and transform university education through technologically innovative pedagogies.
Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 80-108 ISSN: 2604-7551 (1) Yet, unbundling did not happen in vacuum. It happens in the era of neoliberal globalisation that sees rampant commercialisation of the higher education marked by quantified competition for excellence and success measured by metrics of individual performance and world rankings. This homogenising vision of the global field of higher education (Marginson, 2008) gives an upper hand to research over teaching, makes English-language publications the only valid academic currency, introduces new governance systems into academic work and services, and raises student fees, debt, and anxiety. It makes research dependent on external funding and researchonly precarious staff, and teachingon a growing number of teaching-only staff bought out to replace fundraising core academics.
To understand to what extent workers and students carry out the burden of this system: in the UK alone (a public-mostly system of higher education with over 160 universities) there was a record £44 billion surplus in higher education (Bennett, 2018). Yet in the same year academic pensions fund USS was to be put on the market and individual contributions raised (Povey, 2018). And while universities try to compete for "teaching excellence" to allow them to uncap already exorbitant student fees (Hale & Vina, 2016), students are taught by over 50% precarious faculty (UCU 2013;2016) and student debt has risen to £1 billion (CBDU, 2018). In this scenario, it is rather cynical that online learning, rather than better investment in faculty recruitment and stability and student stipends, is considered a panacea by managers. The way this argument looks, taken to its logical consequences: content can be automated, put online, and facilitated by workers often trained to a postgraduate or post-PhD level with ever more precarious deprofessionalised contracts:  (1) behalf. They reap the benefits from online learning on two levelsfirst by being paid hefty sums for content to be disposed on their platforms, and a second timefor the "learning analytics" big data they collect from the growing student population joining online courses worldwide and sell it to big businesses to hone their local and global marketing strategies.
This process is paralleled by a growing casualization of higher educationa process that affects not only contractual relations, but also means a broader "existential and structural uncertainty" of academics and workers in general (Butler, 2009). It allows university workers to be contracted with ever shorter, more flexible fixed-term conditions, in which basic justice (Frazer, 2016) redistribution (rights and benefits), recognition (visibility and career development options), and representation (in decision-making and union contestation) is increasingly curtailed. In academia this process happened since the 1970s through the erosion of tenure that leaves many at jeopardy of lack of security to plan ahead personally and professionally. In this, precarity becomes more than contractual insecurity and starts being the lack of (self-)care and access to practices of love, care, and solidarity, of control of one's own time and space, and enclosure of academic freedom from the market pressures exposing workers to such arrangements (Ivancheva et al., 2019). The careless lives of monastic scholars is now extended onto a very diverse post-PhD population doomed to the Hobson's choice of (hyper)mobility vs (hyper)flexibility (Ivancheva et al., 2019).
Academics are pushed to constantly look for employment outside their area of residency making a return to their original place of origin impossible (Stalford, 2008 (1) al., 2019) or the improbability of male partners moving location to stay with female spouses (Rivera, 2017). The latter scenario makes single women with(out) children the only mobile female academics, but as they are often doing more emotional and admin work, they often are at disadvantage of ever forming a family (Ivancheva et al., 2019). Black and Minority Ethnic faculty and even less so Black faculty's (Joseph, 2019) probability of women being hired in permanent academic position at all is in times lower than female white or any male candidates (Advance HE, 2018).
Thus, women and members of ethnic minorities are pushed into the raising teachingonly contracts, made invisible for research positions, and career development (Courtois & O'Keefe, 2015). In this, they are made perfect hyper-relational workers for online platforms, where emotional labour is ever more needed as students lack the support of peer-groups and university support staff, unlike in residential degrees.
This produces a gendered new frontier of exclusion and exploitation that the academic profession needs to be aware of and resist. It presents one of the biggest challenges to feminist and progressive scholarship and activism in the next decades. When I grew up, Iceland was going through a rapid pace of neoliberalisation. As a micro-society without deeply rooted traditions, a change in hegemony happens fast in Iceland. Before the economic crash in 2008, people were excited about the neoliberal change and sincerely believed that the handsome banksters were conquering the worlds like Vikings 1000 years earlier. In this environment, I grew up as a fast-paced individual who believed I could compete and maybe win a little in the game of equal opportunities. Fortunately, the unquestionable hegemony of neoliberalism began to dismantle although the aftermath of the economic crash has been difficult and neoliberal capitalism most certainly still relies on a passive consensus from the public in accordance with Gramsci's interregnum (Rehmann, 2013;Gramsci, 2003). Unfortunately, I soon discovered that the fast pace I had embraced had never really been mine, as I had been ignoring repeating signs of chronic symptoms. In a healthcare struck by austerity I tried to find out what was wrong with me. Now, a decade later, I know that I am living with the chronic illnesses of ME/CFS and fibromyalgia.

Bibliography
In the state of chronic illness, academia has been a mixed blessing. I cannot work nine-to-five but I managed to complete my PhD in 2018, and now I can work as a scholar and a university teacher if I find employment. When I have a relapse in my symptoms that seems to take no end, when I cannot leave my bed, when the physical world becomes grey and dark, the fact that I have a desire for my work is a great solace. But I belong to a group of precariously employed academics and it provides me with stress and existential insecurity. Am I betting on a hopeless future? Should I be doing more in terms of securing my own academic career? My partner and I, we need to provide a stable environment for our son, academic flexibility such as getting a post-doc in Singapore or a position in the US, is not an option.
How am I to listen to my own rhythm, my own pace in this enormously competitive system of work? I came to philosophy because of a sense of wonder, frustration and