New abstract / Wayward academia—Wild, Connected, and Solitary Diffractions in Everyday Praxis

2021-01-28

In this article, I study the everyday conduct of pedagogies in the wild in contemporary academia by means of an analysis of modes of attention in random “thicker ‘moments’ of spacetimemattering” (Barad, 2014, p. 169). These modes are discussed with the help of the notion of diffraction. I identify three modes of attention—the solitary, the connected, and the wild—that manifest themselves mainly as tensions between several modes. The study leads me to suggest that critical feminist scholarship explicitly aiming to disrupt and trouble normative academia often reproduces competitive, nervous practices, linear onto-epistemologies, and the commodification of both scholars and scholarship. These scholarly practices occur among students and supervisors alike, often in the name of necessity and even survival. Yet, despite the anxiety-inducing aspects of contemporary academia, diffractive moments have a powerful presence, too. In such moments, a wild and responsible otherwise is imagined and diffracted.