Affect, Space, and Waste in Academic Inquiry

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: Explorations of Waste in Academic Inquiry

Abstract

In this paper, we reconsider the waste—the static, inert, and disregarded—of academic inquiry. This reconsideration led to the study of space and its place in everyday academic life. We argue that space itself is the waste of academic inquiry. It is disregarded, deemed static and inert, or conceptualized in a way that fails to consider the dynamic vibrancy that undergirds its formation. Alternatively, we approach space and the larger issue of waste with an attention to affect, movement, and process. In doing so, we enact a non-representational theory (Thrift, 2008), focusing on the lived aspects of daily life and the everyday (Lefebvre,1991), seeking not to represent or interpret but to revitalize and extend academic work and life.

This work is guided by non-representational theory (Thrift, 2008). According to Thrift (2008), non-representational theory is an umbrella term for theories and practices that engage aspects of life that resist representation. These are theories that consider movement and process as generative of being. The aim is less about uncovering or reinterpreting the primary drivers of experience than about extending and opening possibilities for experience to unfold differently. The notion of supplement plays well here as the aim is less on reduction than on addition and extension. For Thrift (2008), the field of non-representational theory is demarcated by a series of tenets that foreground the “leitmotif of movement” in its many forms. In this paper we foreground three (everydayness, space, and affect) as a way to reconsider academic waste.

In three distinct analyses, one from each co-author, each of us took non-representational theory to study our own spaces of work. These are what we considered the spaces of the everyday, always more than themselves and latent with affect. It is here in our own work spaces that we sought to rediscover the waste of our academic work. We strove to write about our experiences in these spaces as they unfolded, a process which involved a combination of thinking with theory and feeling our way through affect. What results is not simply an analysis with representation but an extension of the spaces of academic work. In doing so, we respond to calls for “doing research” differently in ways that attune to movement without presupposing the contents of space and spatial arrangements (Bright, Manchester, & Allendyke, 2013). It is our contention that such an approach to space will reengage the rhythms, intensities, and formative practices that enable a kind of becoming, a kind of unfurling and exploration, that is often absent and wasted in academic inquiry.

Authors

• Tim Wells, Arizona State University

• Lauren Mark, Arizona State University

• Jorge Sandoval, Arizona State University