Disrupted Feelings: Sensing a Latent "Undercommons" of Time at the University

• In Event: Disquieting Higher Education: Foucault and Contemporary Theories in Education

Abstract

How can attending to sensations of time help us reimagine pedagogical approaches for a more diverse, equitable, vibrant, and ethical education? This paper explores the affective dimensions of feeling time in educational spaces. Through new materialist perspectives with Harney and Moten’s (2013) covert spaces of the undercommons, I examine my participation in a loosely structured reading group to critique the academic temporalities of the neoliberal American university and the constrained feelings of time it reproduces. I suggest that the habituated refusal to acknowledge emerging sensations wrought by shifting temporal landscapes signals a need to imagine other approaches to sensing time in the university, which an attentiveness to how time feels in the latent undercommons of the university can engage.

Author

• Amy Sojot, University of Hawaii - Manoa