Void

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

Abstract

Void, lifting off from Barad’s (2017) contemplative reading of Derrida, is described as a spectral domain where life and death are entangled, where being and nothingness collide, and where yearnings and the imaginary of what might yet have been reside (Barad 2015). Thinking with Barad, the void is a concept that troubles the grammar of time by collapsing neo-liberal mechanistic notions of time in favour of Quantum Field Theory (QFT). In troubling the grammar of time, the very notion of being in time is necessarily also troubled. Barad offers a philosophical entry point for challenging the fixity of institutional time in higher education, where mechanistic time is understood as a product of human invention, and where learning is linked with time-tables, deadlines, and pressured outcomes without allowing for slow learning or accommodating the diversity of student experience. We ask if and how time could be attuned to decolonial, posthumanist-oriented forms of epistemic justice. What are the murmuring silences held within the potentiality of the void that we have not heard, but that through a new attentiveness, can lead to a well spring of fulfilled yearnings, to the next best step and contribute to a manifesto of for social justice in higher education.

Author

• Susan Levine