Slow Scholarship and the Public Good: An Experimental Curriculum for Academics in Higher Education

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Slow Curricula for Transformative Higher Education

Abstract

In the context of increasing inequalities within and between universities, this paper explores how a trans-institutional curriculum on Slow scholarship was developed by academics across universities to contribute to the public good. The short course on Slow scholarship, developed by academics together-with and for their peers across South African universities was designed to potentiate the freedom to pursue novel and transformative ways of doing academia differently.

In this paper we draw on a relational ontology to understand how movement, thought and writing are enacted through material entanglements that emerge in relationships constituted through and between space, time and matter. Relationality is a key conduit for our ethico-onto-epistemological becomings-with Slow encounters in this short course. We propose a Slow methodology that moves away from neoliberal higher education systems that valorize and prioritize measured outcomes and outputs. As Martell (2014) notes, referring to Treanor’s (2008) Manifesto for a Slow University (2008), “speed is in part an institutional demand, in which individuals will suffer consequences for their employment and careers if they do not comply” [para. 35]. The course that we proposed therefore was designed to disrupt the hegemony of market-driven academia and to attune the bodyminds of both the course participants and facilitators to the affective spacetimemattering as an essential move to re-establish pleasure in our work, affirming curiosity rather than critique, and difference rather than sameness.

The Slow scholarship course was initiated to offer academics in differently positioned universities the opportunity to explore novel and experimental ways of engaging with their own scholarship. The binary between course facilitators and participants was eschewed with invitations extended to all to present inputs and activities. All were informed that the sorts of activities envisaged would provide opportunities for knowing, becoming and doing together that might lead to possibilities of affective, pleasurable, imaginative and responsive ways of expressing ourselves. We invited participants to re-turn to a research artefact/aspect of their own scholarship in order to engage deeply through the guided activities in new and different ways. The focus of the course was on experimenting with alternative and heterogeneous ways of re-turning (turning over and over again) our writing and reading, using the activities participant/facilitators proposed.

The paper will provide examples of the Slow scholarship activities proposed by the facilitator/participants and the pedagogical documentation of the facilitators/participants’ work from the course , as well as a diffractive engagement with each others’ ideas.

The entanglement between innovative academic practices and the participants’ re-turning to their academic reading and writing pieces are used to substantiate propositions for how higher education curricula might be fruitfully trans/formed by Slow scholarship.

Following Barad's (2007) assertion that ‘our responsibility is greater than it would be if it were ours alone’ and Haraway’s (2016) provocations to ‘stay with the trouble’, the paper expands the conversations about Slow scholarship in curriculum studies by calling on an assemblage of facilitators/participants across higher education contexts to generate Slow activities in academia to contribute to the public good.

Authors

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape

• Nike Irene Romano, Cape Peninsula University of Technology