Description
This seminar stems from its collaborators’ commitment to throwing off familiar academic conventions in order to promote relational ethics in a sector that has been colonised by new managerialism and the associated mechanisms of ‘performance management’, surveillance and exclusion. By engaging in dialogue, Annie and Nini cast light on the performative revelation of Nini’s ethical struggles in developing and delivering anti-racist curriculum against the backdrop of the oppressive climate of contemporary higher education. Whilst valuable learning may emerge when students come close to these historically- and culturally-related origins of othering, Nini's daring to ‘go there’ – to the places of unsettling historicity rather than complacent knowing – is fated to be a doomed venture of ‘going too far’ by the god of student satisfaction.
Dangling on the thin line between truth and dare becomes for Annie and Nini a perpetual grappling with the virtue of endurance – ‘How do we stay still for long enough to allow something to happen?’ Their account is visceral rather than abstract, rooted in lived experience and critical reflection. Annie and Nini see the world without Deleuzions. They stand still, they dart in; stories first, theory later. They espouse a variant of practical aesthetics that involves thinking with rather than thinking about, so that theory does not taint ‘the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself”.
It’s 10 am on a late-autumn day. Nini turns on the light in a gloomy classroom in a university somewhere in the middle of England. Students from ethnic minorities are sitting on one side of the room, and the white students are sitting on the other…
| Period | 18 Feb 2021 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Seminar |
| Location | Edinburgh, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |