Praxis of the Undercommons: Beyond University Conviviality and Coded Formations of Diversity

• In Event: Conviviality, Coloniality, and the Making of the Other

Abstract

Objectives and Purposes
Universities rely on exploitative labor that repairs, renews/kills off, and expands its machinery (Harney and Moten, 2013). Across institutions, we have witnessed the sanctioning of academic programs or research centers to perpetuate scholarship that is framed within individualistic competition, pitting graduate students against one another, and reducing learning to prescribed productive labor to maintain their neoliberal modes of operation. For this presentation, we offer some perspective beyond the scope of pre-sanctioned rhythms of learning. Our deep curiosities toward intellectual study (McKittrick, 2021) were, and continue to be, supported by processes of sustained care, kin-making, and counter-expressive thinking.

Theoretical Framework and Modes of Inquiry
To complicate the university’s practices of conviviality is what we are calling “fugitive conviviality” – a place-based ethics of care carved out within neoliberal colonizing universities where the values of collective praxis supersede the individual’s needs. That is, in fugitive convivial praxis, we think with an array of ideas, and more so, it is our array of people who further one another’s action and scholarship. In response to the ways in which university conviviality plays out within the colonial university (la paperson, 2017), we argue that the practices are in many respects anti-convivial in nature and center the individual. Methodologically, we draw on retrospective storying and shared stories to illustrate some possibilities of fugitive convivial praxis across educational spaces. We do so to (re)claim experiences within and outside a university where conviviality—the illusion of the powers that be and those they suppress (Mbembe, 2001)—lurks in many spaces and frames of operations. University conviviality can produce and perpetuate unequal and inhumane modes of representation, expectation, and relationality in the different spaces and places navigated by graduate students and faculty of color. We contend that the consistent reproduction of tiered and unequal colonizing educational practices demands new ways of engagement, which will emerge when we stop disciplining ourselves. Or when we allow Black thought and method-making to guide us in undoing and exceeding the categories we are expected to use for measuring, defining, and containing ourselves and the world (Gilmore, 2017; Kelley, 2020; McKittrick, 2006, 2021; Moten, 2003; Silva, 2015; Wynter, 2001). For us, it has been important to draw parallels between the university and our broader society, to consider how governing bodies treat ‘Others.’

Significance
What the undercommons teach us is that, together, in study (Patel, 2021) and in fugitive convivial praxis, we can do the work that needs to be done. When collective praxis supersedes that of the individual’s, we find ourselves doing things differently in ways that feel good and joyful in the process. Our desire to know relies on collective scholarship, often (re)composed outside and in between college programs and courses. The undercommons also teach us that collective thinking about our experiences prompts collective writing/presentations, pushing us to further pay attention to the changes in our work and how we approach it. In line with AERA’s conference theme, the significance of our work illuminates how university undercommons can remain a place of refuge and curiosity for interrogating colonial legacies.

Authors

• Mariam Rashid, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  Presenting Author

• Benjamin D Scherrer, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chalais Carter
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kimberly McIntee, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alisha Smith, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  Non-Presenting Author

• Olga Correa, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  Non-Presenting Author

• Korina Jocson, York University
  Non-Presenting Author