Abstract
The matrix is a virtual reality that sets limitations on what is possible (Hilliard III-Baffour Amankwatia, 2006). The neoliberal university matrix reduces bodies to what they produce; it is built upon universal design principles that encrypt academic pathways and place physical paywalls in front of Black feminist scholars. The university matrix excludes Black feminist thought (BFT).
BFT is a body of consciousness that contemplates how knowledge production sustains social inequity and experiences of privilege and oppression in the university (Collins, 1990). It works to resist the ‘matrix of domination’ that privileges standardised scholarship and centralised power in the university (ibid.). This requires scholars to resist how the ‘business ontology’ of the neoliberal university perpetuates knowledge hierarchies and a boundaried worldview (Fisher, 2009).
The COVID-19 pandemic was a global glitch that drew attention to a broken university system (Cato, 2022). During lockdowns, scholars could circumvent physical barriers to participation in scholarship and the privileging of academic bodies by drawing on information and communications technology (ICT). Scholars were less restricted by time, cost and physical distance and drew on unconventional modes of scholarship in the hybrid classroom, on social networks and through video dissemination. COVID-19 lockdowns encouraged scholars to lean into Zoom meetings, Microsoft Teams chats, Slack channels, Twitter Spaces and Google Docs. Scholars who were working from home (WFH) were never away from keyboard (AFK). Although COVID-19 has been described as a trigger for the Cybernetic Revolution (Grinin, Grinin and Korotayev, 2022, p. 1), after social distancing measures were lifted, universities reverted to in-person events and on-campus learning.
A ‘glitch’ is a technological refusal to perform and a breaking down, or away, from a structured system (Russell, 2020). Glitches call for a reconfiguration of the university matrix and illuminate the beauty in the broken (Hammana and Klinkert, 2021; Gorke and Rocktäschel, 2022). Glitch Feminism (Russell, 2012, 2020) is a stream of BFT that embraces the cause of an error in oppressive systems. It rejects how built systems enforce labels and privilege on bodies, mining internet data and creative practice to generate radical identities. Glitch Feminism is a conscious return to the arts, culture and politics to engage with the personal, the political and the poetical.
BFT is a glitch in the university matrix; it rejects the individualisation and centralisation of scholarship and knowledge. BFT embraces errors in the neoliberal system, choosing to sit with and within the uncertain, illogical and unknown. BFT is abstract beyond the first 150 words. This requires an appreciation of situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988), generated both inside and outside universities. Neoliberal discourse suggests that greater access to digital technology is inherently liberatory. BFT reckons with the role of the internet in reinforcing oppression, power and control in ways that structure Black life (Noble, 2016). Scholars might choose to occupy the margins and to disrupt unstable binaries and transgress disciplinary boundaries for kinship and connection (Haraway, 1987). At the same time, they must resist their bodies being reduced to hardware, or the machine grinding them to dust (Lorde, 1984).
To do this, scholars of BFT embrace alternative means of information communication for the benefit of people who are ‘unable to access the language of power to enter conversations that implement change’ (Boyd, 2004, p. 134). BFT is an affective community that tunes in to the felt life of academia (Nash, 2018); it builds solidarity through affinity for new and newer ways of thinking, knowing, doing and being. BFT is a network and a mode of networking. For example, the #CiteBlackWomen network trivialises neoliberal emphasis on individualised knowledge production to connect Black feminist scholars, with access to the internet, globally (Smith et al., 2021). Through #CiteBlackWomen, Black feminist scholarship is crowdsourced. In this way, BFT is Community Informatics (Noble, 2009). Scholars can decentralise the university to develop and code community technologies (Hall, 2019). Black feminist scholars are designers; they generate new pathways and experiences to build new worlds and networks. BFT is an infrastructure for new matrices.
Still, access to the internet and digital information technology is not inherently beneficial for liberation and democracy (Dendere, 2019). Access to ‘free’ information is not freedom from the ways that knowledge production hierarchies restrict individuals, groups and communities who are positioned as ‘outside’ the university from accessing knowledge and information. As such, Open Access discourse ‘is obsessed with accessing the archive without considering how researchers, the public and “the economy” come to understand the archive as meaningful, significant and useful’ (Muellerleile, 2017, p. 137).
Black feminist scholarship bridges both the online and offline, to ensure that Black communities are empowered to develop meaning from new technologies (Noble, 2016). Black feminist scholars engage in ‘design justice’ to build liberation into technology that shifts the emphasis of technology use from the individual to the community (Costanza-Chock, 2020). They breach paywalls and firewalls to ensure that knowledges reach communities. BFT pushes and works for open and interactive access to information; this prioritises the process of knowledge production over the capitalised product. BFT reformulates methods and methodologies to source information and communication. It is a call to be creative, artistic and playful. For this, scholars and communities need more annotated playlists that queer temporality (Berwick, 2014); music albums constructed from research data; 1 invitations to listen to photography (Campt, 2017); objects that evoke community senses (Meckin and Balmer, 2021); art that glitches the archive (Women’s Art Library, 2020); visual maps of song moods (Van Gulik and Vignoli, 2005); hashtags that archive (Yeku, 2018); virtual clothing exhibitions that complicate girlhood (Smithsonian, 2020); and digital commissions that document self-preservation (Budge, 2022).
BFT thrives AFK (away from keyboard) and unplugged from the machine. Black feminist scholars might exit the university matrix to see that scholarship is more than shadows of ‘truth’ on university walls. Not all who leave the simulation will be lost.
