Making Academic Kin: Composting Subjectivities In Graduate Research

• In Event: COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities 3: Pedagogies

Abstract

Reading and writing are central to most national education and research systems and are thus technologies that (can) contribute to reproducing the nation state. Operating simultaneously as education and research, PhDs epitomise this, and in Australia, like many other overdeveloped nations, they are situated in and co-constitute competitive, market driven ideologies (aka neoliberalism). This contributes to the ongoing cultivation and fetishisation of detached, individualistic, autonomous, rational, modern, white-heteromasculine subjectivities that STS, feminist, Indigenous, postcolonial, crip and queer scholars and activists have critiqued. Unsurprisingly, graduate students are often plagued by anxiety, stress and feelings of isolation in their journeys of becoming researchers in this socio-economic environment.



In this presentation, we take Composting Feminisms’ provocation to think of reading and writing as practices of composting ideas, and argue that learning more generally can be a process whereby subjectivities and identities can be composted. We discuss how forming a transnational, cross-institutional network of graduate and early career researchers in environmental education enabled us to compost ourselves through the PhD process. Collectively, we decomposed hierarchical, individual, competitive subjectivities and enabled more caring, collective, subjectivities to be composed from this compost pile. This process of making kin (Haraway, 2016) transformed our experiences of becoming researchers, and composed a form of refuge from the transnational, neoliberal driven academic stressors.

Authors

• Blanche Verlie, Monash University

• Sherridan Emery, University of Tasmania

• Maia Osborn, Southern Cross University

• Kim Beasy, University of Tasmania

• Kevina Kezabu, University of Tasmania

• Bianca Coleman, University of Tasmania

• Jennifer Nicholls, James Cook University