Teaching and writing in the slipstream: aphorisms of precarity in Chinese higher education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Reconceputalizing the work of teaching

Proposal

"Not everything is lost." (Nye, 2008)

I mark the completion of my first decade in China's Normal System with an exploration of precarity in teaching in higher education at the intersection of exophony (1), "fugia hacia adelante," and autoethnography. This is a slipstream (2) exploration in the form of a structured performance of precarities that I witness in my praxis—geopolitical, emotional, health, for example—based on micro and macro material. I aim to illustrate the potential of humanities-infused social science writing to translate emotions and experiences around precarity that are ‘in the room’ in higher education teaching (Rohrer, 2018), such as disorientation, messiness, anxiety, urgency, and disruption, as well as possibilities to cultivate mindfulness, connection, and transformation—"not everything is lost” – even when the outcomes of any single day or week appear acutely unpredictable.

A word about my approach to experimental pieces like this one: I often write first in Mandarin and then translate the text into English. Sometimes, the reverse is true. I rely on a native speaker of Mandarin to ensure that the tone and nuances of what I have written correspond to my intended meaning. This approach reflects my ongoing interest in the integration of lifelong language learning and higher education teaching (author, 2023, p. 5).

The result is a bilingual Mandarin-English essay in which I employ Cesar Aira’s "fugia hacia adelante" ("fleeing forward"), a technique of demonstrated improvisation (Davidson, 2014, p. 3; Malone, 2012), as an extension of my previous work (author, 2022). I further expand upon my previous work in “the ‘guerrilla’ form of a noncommittal written performative autoethnography,” concepts I explore in this paper (author, 2018, pp. 87-88).

Autoethnographical reflections focus on teaching graduate courses during the 2022-2023 academic year during a six-month wait for a new job contract and visas, diplomatic breakdowns while in transit to China, two room-quarantines, severely delayed pay, national uprisings, and iteratively precarious repatriations and departures. I am guided in this experimental piece by a persistent commitment to making ethical decisions in my writing and praxis (e.g., intentional gaps, silences, ambiguities, omissions). That commitment is rooted in respect for the complicated opportunities that are present in international teaching contexts—not just despite of, but because of, precarities.

My reflections in this grounded exploration are rooted in the idea that “uncertainty can be very creative” (Hale, 2014, p. 153). This means that rather than produce a traditional, linear narrative about precarity, I demonstrate precarities—from the micro to the macro—using poetic form and tone as a lens through which to reflect on international teaching during the pandemic.

In a think-piece style epilogue, I argue that writing at intersections of the humanities and social sciences is more than rhetorical; it is a “pedagogical methodology” (Burke, 2018; author, 2017; Burke & Lumb, 2018) that has the potential to encourage concrete transformations of praxis. I propose that perhaps our best teacher is precarity itself and our best teaching is done in precarity.

In response to the CIES 2024 Subtheme 3: Theories, Methodologies, and Protest, I will discuss how my piece functions as a form of protest. For example, after my two decades of work at the intersection of the humanities with social science and comparative education, the question some confused CIE academics have asked me is, “will you be doing more of this or will you go back to doing ‘comparative education’ again?” It is in this context that, since its inception, the Post-foundational Approaches SIG has provided a space of praxis in which to move beyond simply naming and describing perpetual issues of epistemological misrecognition in the field (e.g., Holliday’s argument that “the problem is not with the West, but with positivism” (2013)). Instead, its apparent goals are to *show* expressions of epistemological difference, and how such expressions can serve as a protest against aesthetic dullness and against aesthetic failure (Ball, 2012; Riles, 2000). This is the aim of my paper.

The fact that the term “humanities” is not even mentioned in the Call for Proposals, nor in the Submission Keywords menu, is a clear sign that there continues to be a need to open spaces within CIE for post-foundational understandings of the field and of what counts as legitimate knowledge in these conference spaces. Despite the participation by some of us in the art exhibition in past years in genres such as poetry, this year’s call is for “visual art” only. This is notable as poetry is a genre in which both Luxemburg and Mandela engaged – both quoted in the Call for Proposals. Finally, it is remarkable that “translation” is also missing from the Keywords, a glaring omission given that critical translation is at the core of CIE. Once again, it is important to reflect on these gaps because global professional associations, conferences, and position reports have the power to shape knowledge creation and outputs such as curriculum and instruction. In a precarious moment in which book bannings are increasingly prevalent (of course as a product and symptom of much larger structural crises), my modest intervention—to consider other ways of teaching and writing about CIE—joins the slipstream.
(927 words)

(1) "Exophony" is a literary and cultural studies term that gained importance as a way to examine, among other phenomena, the cultural and political implications of migration, diaspora, and exile and the creative, linguistic, stylistic possibilities of creative writing in a non-native language (Arndt, Naguschewski, & Stockhammer, 2007).
(2) "Slipstream" "does not define a category, but suggests an approach, an attitude, an interest or obsession with thinking the unthinkable or doing the undoable. Slipstream can be visionary, unreliable, odd or metaphysical" (Priest, 2003).

Author

• Lauren Ila Misiaszek, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University