In Theory (2018), Dionne Brand writes that “the true purpose of the academy…[is] to produce layers of managers of capital in one way or another, to carry out and extend the pedagogy of capital” (174). Following Marx’s definition of capital as a form of social relation that attaches value to a particular object, this conference panel theorizes the various ways in which the academy has shored up value in professionalization and specialization within set “fields” of study. 

In seeking to understand the machinations of capital within the academy, the panel is particularly interested in the place of students, teaching assistants, non-tenured professors, academics outside of the academy, and other modes of precarious work. We seek to echo and extend the dictum in On the Poverty of Student Life (1966) that “being a student is a form of initiation…poised between his present status and his future role” (6). Students are inducted into a field in the form of field lists, candidacy papers, coursework, feedback on prospectuses, and other modes of molding. Fields and capital are, as such, intertwined. Students are thus trained in expectation that they will one day become managers of the same capital that they will eventually reproduce. How might we dream of alternatives to this cycle?

The panel invites papers that both seek to understand the maintenance of rigged boundaries within fields and propose alternative pedagogies to them. We request papers that think rhizomatically across new and permeable fields. We are interested in works that didn’t make it onto field lists but should have; we seek papers that think captiously about transnational connections in all forms of art. We request submissions, then, from other students who dream of a world without boundaries, of porous borders, and fields unknown and deferred.