Presidential Plenary Panel: "Precarious Civilities"

Though the openness of this panel’s title is intended to offer our speakers the flexibility to decide their focus, “precarious civilities” might prompt considerations of the ongoing assaults on academic freedom and cognitive responsibility in Canada, Australia, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. At the same time, it provides an opportunity to question how the ideal of civility functions as a behavioral genre that conventionalizes the performance of reason as a condition of admissability. While an academic’s enactment of disinterested “rationality” safeguards the value and promise of intellectual pluralism, it also problematically enjoins a show of restraint that serves to shelter the complacencies of those who benefit from silence about the painful impacts of sociocultural and political-economic hierarchies. From this standpoint, it becomes urgent to reflect on the tolls that performing civility inflicts on the dispossessed and persecuted along with their descendants who face a succession of humiliations and impasses over time. What are the limits of civility for those who cannot withdraw from the freighted legacies of enslavement, mass violence, and long-term subordination?

Moderator: ACLA President Karyn Ball

Panelists:

Timothy Brennan
Basit Iqbal
Christina Sharpe
Michael Bucknor