Academic Sterilization: Emotions, Bodies, and Knowledge Production

• In Event: Feminist Technoscience by Other Means: Reconfiguring Research Practices for World-Making Beyond the Academy - II

Abstract

Feminist scholars have challenged Western epistemology and explored the importance of recognizing the vital role emotions can play in the construction of knowledge. However, the demands of the neoliberal university and the everyday practices of academic life continue to normalize the suppression of emotions. We propose that these processes work in conjunction with systems of structural inequality and exclusion within the university. Bringing the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and LatCrit scholars into conversation with feminist technoscience, we explore the productive potential of emotions and highlight the need for understanding the complex and interlinked processes that work both on academic spaces and on the bodies of academics. We collectively term these linked processes as ‘academic sterilization’ and provide a model to describe how the removal of emotions from spaces of knowledge production works to diminish the generative potential of certain knowledge producers which in turn reinforces the suppression of emotions. By understanding these processes as interconnected, it facilitates identifying potential pathways towards interrupting the system. We assert that generating alternatives to academic sterilization is not only a question of creating more livable lives or about producing innovative scholarship, it is about the complex entwinement of the two. We conclude with a preliminary case study on mentoring relationships to illustrate one potential pathway towards interrupting academic sterilization and to demonstrate the productive and transformative capacities of emotion within and beyond the academy.

Authors

• Christina Crespo, University of Georgia

• Sammantha Holder, University of Georgia

• Sarah Jane Dillon, University of Georgia