137. Refusing Academic Alienation and Appropriation: Disruptive Approaches
Marina Johnson-Zafiris, Cornell University; Aspen Omapang, Cornell University; Beatrys Rodrigues, Cornell University; OS Keyes, University of Washington - Seattle;
Often the neo-liberal academy institutionalizes a settler-colonial logic of extractivism unto researchers. For example, instead of using our position to transfer power, resources, and access to communities, academics instead appropriate knowledge to gain high-status among peers. Black feminisms and decolonial scholar-activists have prompted us to do more than think and instead challenge Imperialism and Western thought. For this panel, we are directing this call to action squarely on power structures embedded in academic funding.
We seek to flip the extractive epistemologics of academia onto the institute itself - seeking ways to challenge the financial dogmas of utilizing research funds. As (Moten, Harney 2004) state, 'In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission…' Using our academic identities and affiliations as conduits for resource redistribution, we explore modes in which folks have wrecked, scavenged, retooled, and reassembled the settler-colonial university into anti-colonial contraptions (la paperson 2017).
We are accepting a wide range of submissions that play with the idea that the only ethical relationship with the university is a subversive one or 'The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today Is a Criminal One" (Moten, 2004). Submission formats include, but are not exclusive to: papers, work-in-progress materials, community engagements, case studies, art installations, speculative thinking, free technologies. We want to explore ways that scholars have been able to use the oppressive structures that they are entrenched in as a form of resistance.
