Displacing Academic Practices in the Ruins of the Neoliberal University

Rather than an acute crisis with the potential for a substantive renewal, the neoliberalization of the university has revealed and exacerbated a longer term condition of ruination whose effects have proven to be especially devastating for the humanities. The recent developments in the field of generative artificial intelligence further threaten to deepen this already grim situation. In the face of the patent exhaustion of traditional knowledge frameworks and academic modes of production, scholars have sought to explore alternative research and writing practices, both individual and collaborative. What could be named an “auto-theoretical turn” in the humanities in the last decade started with many diverse writing experiments (auto-theory, theoretical fiction, auto-fiction, critical memoir, autography,...) that engage critically with epistemological neutrality and universality by bringing theory back to its existentially situated places of enunciation. The majority of these experiments emerged in the context of feminist, queer, postcolonial and critical black studies traditions – critical loci of enunciation for the denouncing of academic writing’s supposed universality.  

Overall, reclaiming creativity and experimentation in academic praxis –  for instance through transdisciplinary collaborations and contaminations, interactive modes of writing and researching, or alternative forms of publishing and doing editorial work – has become a means for scholars to cope with, and even resist, the entrepreneurialization of the profession and the dismantling of the critical and creative potential of the liberal arts.

This seminar seeks to foreground an open discussion about the possibility of transforming academic practices and scholarly writing by bringing together researchers who are practicing and reflecting critically on such alternative modes of approaching working at the university. By sharing experiences and writing practices, the seminar will address, among other questions: What is the potential for such “auto-theoretical” writing practices to challenge the current conventions of traditional knowledge frameworks? How might they be able to situate our work in opposition to the neoliberal-entrepreneurial determination of knowledge practices and their subjects-objects? What forms of affect, desire, collaboration, kinship, friendship or community are such practices capable of invoking? What experiences, voices or forms of alterity might be empowered by such practices?

We invite faculty, independent scholars, and graduate students from different areas of the humanities experimenting in alternative modes of academic practices – including but not limited to comparative literature, literary and cultural studies, critical theory, feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy  – to submit a proposal for presentations dealing with these issues as part of a three-day seminar.