Uneven Relationalities, Collective Biography, and Sisterly Affect in Neoliberal Universities

This article deploys a collective biographical methodology as a political and epistemological intervention in order to explore the emotional and affective politics of academic work for women in neoliberal universities. The managerial practices of contemporary universities tend to elevate disembodied reason over emotion; to repress, commodify, or co-opt emotional and affective labor; to increase individualization and competition among academic workers; and to disregard the relational work that the article suggests is essential for well-being at work. The apparent marginalization of feminist and feminine ways of being, thinking, and feeling in academia is examined through close readings of three narrative vignettes, which are based on memories of the everyday academic spaces of meetings, workshops, and mentoring. These stories explore moments of the breaking of ties among women and between men and women, as well as document how feminist relationalities can bind and exclude. The article suggests that academic ties are both part of the problem and the solution to countering neoliberal policies, and that academic relationships, especially with other women, are often experienced as unrealized spaces of hope. Building on feminist scholarship about race and diversity, the article reflects on how relational practices like collective biography create both inclusions and exclusions. Nevertheless, it suggests that the methodology of collective biography might engender more sustainable and ethical ways of being in academic workplaces because it provides the resources to begin to create a new collective imaginary of academia

Mattering pedagogy in precarious times of (un)learning

This paper considers how feminist new materialist thinking may offer a resource for re-orienting pedagogy and didactics in light of pressing global issues. In this respect, the paper applies feminist new materialist thinking in a somewhat normative agenda. However, pedagogy and didactics are always already normative, or are engaged in practices that play a role in as well doing ‘business as usual’ or in assisting in opening up to various, yet more un-usual ways of relating and being of the world. Pedagogy is a worlding practice, specifically, as it facilitates ways of relating, thinking, sensing, acting, and is involved in the shaping of a ’collective intelligence’. I argue that one fruitful approach may be to focus on entanglements and affects and on finding ways of facilitating a sensing living/being of such entanglements. The paper concludes by introducing affective geology to suggest possible steps towards a transformation of our ways of knowing, sensing, and relating

The Deconstructive Potential of Collective Biography Writing

In this paper, I highlight the deconstructive potential of the collective biography writing (CBW) method, referring both to its selected theoretical assumptions and those elementsof its research procedure which particularly favour sensitivity to dominant, normative discourses. Since the effectiveness of the method is determined by analytical practice, an importantpart of the article is devoted to recalling my own experience with its application. The use of “checkpoints” specific to the CBW method in the course of collective analytical work makes the relativity of dominant discourses more visible to the esearch team and thus also more suitable for examination and understanding. Therefore, a further inherent purposeof the collective writing procedure is to support the development of critical competences in research participants, which results in showing the method presented herein also as a method of learning critical thinking. As a context for investigating the “invisibility” of discourses and the discourse boundaries in which we are enclosed, I choose the phenomenon of cultural obviousness

Reader Collective Memory-Work

The Reader CMW presents first time English translations of material from the development phase of Collective Memory-Work in the 1980s in Germany, and also contemporary essays from 2020 and 2021 on a large variety of adaptations of the method across disciplinary and geographical boundaries

The potential of Collective Memory-Work as a method of learning: applications and adaptations

The method of Collective Memory-Work dissolves boundaries between research and learning. As a method it is "interdisciplinary, deliberately inchoate, and therefore alive" (Frigga Haug). This book explains traditions and trajectories in adaptations of Collective Memory-Work over a period of 40 years. It encourages to experiment with the method, and to appropriate history from a position of everyday life

The art of place-making on Wurundjeri Country today

This thesis moves through an old stony part of south-east Australia where Merri Creek trickles along a crack in the hardened urbanised lava flow of Melbourne’s north. I connect as a non- Indigenous woman with the First Nations Wurundjeri people here. Together we acknowledge Wurundjeri Country in the thesis through its fragmented grasslands, valleys and the remnants of indigenous plants and animals including reedy Phragmites and elusive Golden Sun Moths. In Australia, ‘Country’ with a capital ‘C’, doesn’t simply refer to creeks, rocky outcrops, or hills in ‘landscape’ terms. Rather, ‘Country’ describes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ family origins and associations with particular places and embraces spiritual, physical, social and cultural connections. The thesis began in the contemporary contact zone from relationships between Merri Creek Management Committee where I work, and Wurundjeri Tribe Land Compensation and Cultural Heritage Council. This thesis was planned with the Wurundjeri people I worked with. Noticing the lack of published work about Wurundjeri Country today motivated some of us who were working together to shape the necessary intercultural agreements so I could address the issues carefully in this academic context. We designed the thesis as a storying of the things we saw, did and made that connected us to Wurundjeri Country. The overarching research question between us became: ‘How do we see, feel and identify Wurundjeri Country in a contact zone of cultural differences, in a largely urbanised place?’ The formal study positioned me as researcher and therefore created a different relationship for Wurundjeri people and me. As researcher, I had to sharpen my attention to colonisation, my non-Indigeneity, and concerns regarding representation and the risks involved, such as the production of deficit narratives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Within the developing thesis, I began to recognise how layers of volatility contained unexpected possibilities in a contact zone of differences, boundaries, and responsibilities. I have used a relational, emergent and decolonising approach to read the materiality of Country and its objects, creatures, rocks, bark, feathers, plants and ochre. The product is a ‘deep map’ of Wurundjeri Country that includes our various ‘makings’, including necklaces, bouquets, shields and skirts, and two recorded conversations with two Wurundjeri leaders. This is all expressed alongside my etchings, letter writing, and journaling. The emergent deep map is ‘a/r/tographic’ in the sense that it combines art, research, teaching, writing, talking, making, feeling, and learning (Springgay et al., 2005). The concept of ‘the art of place-making’ produces this contemporary deep map of Wurundjeri Country with its intercultural volatilities as well as the unpredictable qualities of making, talking, and remembering. Findings unfolded by constantly going to and fro with people, ideas, places, materials and sharing draft versions of the text. A commitment to motion and a multiplicity of methods is shown to be a vital part of ethical practice in the contact zone, a momentum which built rich exchanges here and is applicable to knowing Country at the cultural interface elsewhere in Australia. In all these ways, ‘antiphonal calling’ has become the signature of this thesis. While antiphonal calling ordinarily refers to vocalising between birds or interacting choirs, here, antiphonal calling lies within intercultural encounters, and with Country. My antiphonal methodology is relational geologically, ancestrally, archivally, contemporarily, and seasonally. The antiphonal prism calls between intercultural spaces to connect in multiple ways with the crying, singing, and feeling that continues to make Wurundjeri Country knowable today

Diasporic Body-Memory Politics: Sexualized Public Gender-Role Surveillance in Post-Revolutionary and Post-War Iran

The nationalist Islamization project has become one of the Iranian Islamic Republic’s longest-standing goals, grounded in efforts to rule women’s bodies, beginning right after the revolution in 1979. Islamization aims to eradicate secularizing approaches to gender socialization in Iranian society by regulating women's clothing and intimate-sexual relationships as a symbol of nationalism, building a substantive weapons arsenal, and making alternative international allies in resistance to western imperialisms. Under the banner of sacred values, Islamicist authorities stake their nationalist claims by surveilling and thereby invading and marking women’s and girls’ bodies and lives with their interpretations, interrogations, and controlled aspirations, leaving a residue of structured psycho-social affects and embodied memories. Three diasporic Iranian women from the 1980s generation agreed to co-explore how the Islamicist government’s male-dominated, female interrogative culture have affected their lives. Drawing upon collective memory work (CMW), the study examines specific co-selected surveillance practices that mark women and girls as vulnerable in Iran’s public and private spaces. Participants engaged in five virtual, three-hour meetings over a period of six weeks, followed by collaborative work on written memories, before developing a collective biography in the form of a virtual ethnodrama. The Persian term, toroma, is used here to trace the unique normalization of interrogative gender surveillance and related forms of violence after the Islamic revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war. The results demonstrate the willful production of an alienated female body, detached from its agency under hegemonic Islamicist practices of monitoring gender power markers and intimate relationships. The variable alignments between private patriarchal families and public governance approaches have produced an Islamicization of sexualities, with distorting complexities in social relations that pass toromas across generations in ways that can resurface in the diaspora