Slow Scholarship

• In Event: 28.037 - *CANCELLED* Timespacemattering: An Invitation to Create a Manifesto for Justice in Higher Education

Abstract

Slow scholarship is derived from the Slow food movement, initiated by Carlo Petrini, a leftist journalist as a protest to McDonald’s being imposed on the Spanish steps in Rome in 1986, after which a Slow food manifesto was internationally developed. The Slow food movement invited a refocus on the pleasure of enjoying the quality of locally-grown food. It has since sparked an interest in many areas of life (e.g. Slow cities, Slow travel), including academic practices and disciplines. Slow scholarship calls for a re-engagement with quality and pleasure in the higher education practices. More particularly, the focus is on care-full, close-up, detailed and attentive reading, writing, listening, re/searching and pedagogies. Slow scholarship enables practices which are care-full not to do epistemological damage by standing at a distance from texts, or pitting one position against another, but rather engage in diffractive readings of one text through another, in order to do justice to the ideas expressed. Experimentation in transdisciplinarity and collaborative processes in spacetimematterings provide ways of resisting relentless performative imperatives and the focus on progress an age of neoliberalism in higher education.

Author

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape