‘Essays in refusal’: Decolonial feminist strategies that subvert and refuse the politics of the neoliberal university

Abstract

The theories underpinning gender/feminist studies, alongside critical race studies and queer studies, are rooted in historic, intersecting, radical social movements, driven by communities who were and remain oppressed by states, societies and institutions. Individuals who work in these fields therefore hold an ambiguous relationship with the university, often experiencing it as a site of both material potential and co-optation. In this article, I explore whether, and how, those in this contradictory position can carve out space and time from within institutional thresholds to engage in decolonial feminist praxes. Abolitionist theorists have sketched the figure of the ‘subversive intellectual’, whose labour is paradoxically indispensable to and disowned by the university. Seeking the material existence of this figure, I held conversations with subversive intellectuals. My analysis of these interviews follows queer and posthuman feminist thinkers who invest in the political potential of the body – and the multiplicity of its possible relations with space, time and other bodies – for counter-institutional action. In this article, my aim is not to determine what role, if any, the subversive intellectual has in the university’s abolition, but I do share and make connections between the stories of individuals who are re-orientating relationships, spaces and time towards an imagined future, and who are collectively embracing a queer uprising from within the university.

Introduction

‘Worry about the university. This is the injunction today […]’, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013: 26) wrote in 2013, describing urgent but ‘polite’ calls for the reform of US higher education. More than a decade on, this remains the injunction in the UK, where anxiety over the university’s function rattles between mainstream media and university boardrooms. In the academic year of 2022 to 2023, when I was a postgraduate student at a central London university, the UK saw a period of heightened industrial action. Academic staff undertook unprecedented national strike action over pay, pensions and working conditions, culminating in a five-month-long marking and assessment boycott (Lewis, 2024). This strike action took place within a context of mounting student fees and increased commercialisation of higher education in the UK (Naidoo and Williams, 2015).

In this context – a context of conflict but also of persistence, care and community – I became interested in how my anticolonial and Marxist feminist lecturers were navigating the daily realities of being employed by an institution that, as socialist and Marxist critics have long theorised, is a business operating in a competitive market and is thus reliant on the labour of expendable individuals (Giroux, 2009; Hill et al., 2015; Maisuria and Cole, 2017; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2000). In the same way, decolonial thinkers have drawn a connection between the colonial roots of universities and their current marketisation (Bacchetta et al., 2018: 48). Melanie Bowman and María Rebolleda-Gómez (2020: 30) highlight the discordant reliance of the university upon individuals who face poor working conditions, precarity and intersectional inequalities while the institution simultaneously promotes equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) strategies in an effort to ‘attract student-consumers to cosmopolitan centers of knowledge production’. As an integral cog in a consumerist system of education and beyond, decolonial thinkers argue that the university joins the ranks of ‘capitalism and the state [as] technologies of colonialism’ (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 4).

To make sense of this seemingly impossible daily reality that students and university employees navigate, my supervisor pointed me towards the work of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Harney and Moten (2013: 26) sketch the image of the ‘undercommons’, a fugitive community of ‘subversive intellectuals’ who refuse the professionalised expectations imposed on their labour, who are ‘in but not of’ the university. Crucially, the subversive intellectual stays, continuing to work within an institution they are not necessarily for, in a state of ‘indecision’ that itself goes unrecognised by the institution (Harney and Moten, 2013: 31). The coming and going of the undercommons, Harney and Moten say, disproves the societal image of the university as the only natural site of knowledge production, as an enclosed space and as a necessary and pre-given singular entity.

Searching for the material possibility of the undercommons, I sought information about the day-to-day experiences of worker-activists in UK universities through conversations. I hoped to find out if they were able to embody this state of indecision, to identify how they might be standing against the university from inside it, refusing the colonial harms that today’s marketised model of academia upholds. In this article, I outline the strategies that emerged from this research, analysing the findings via a queer posthuman feminist theoretical framework that embraces the radical potential of the body. The ‘maroons’ who inhabit Harney and Moten’s (2013: 30) undercommons are ‘always in hiding’, which means that to uncover the ways in which they ‘strategically inhabit’ university spaces is risky, if not impossible. But my hope in this article is to find a response from within this tension to the ‘theoretical-practical questions’ of the abolitionist university by retracing the heritage of the abolitionist university back to bell hooks’ (1994: 75) call for there to exist ‘no gap between feminist theory and feminist practice’ (see also Boggs et al., 2019).

Methodology, or how to find hope in the body

This article centres on five semi-structured interviews with individuals based in UK universities in 2023. Among the interviewees, Sophia was a lecturer; Sachi and Norah were, respectively, PhD and undergraduate students involved in activism; Kerry was a race and decoloniality advisor at a university; and Jessica was a full-time community organiser. ¹ A key aim of this project was to locate the queer potential in ‘[challenging] the erasure of bodies and affect’ by institutions (Shefer and Bozalek, 2022: 31). To do this, I tried to extend my analysis beyond that which ‘counts as authoritative knowledge’, often turning to social media as a source of theory from primarily abolitionist thinkers (Shefer and Bozalek, 2022: 31). In valuing social media content as theory, I aim to disrupt normative, Global North academic mechanisms that manage who and what can take part in and as theory (Chamas and Allouche, 2022: 234).

Black abolitionist thinkers have long imagined other possible ways of learning and sharing knowledge outside the commercial and exploitative realms of the contemporary university (Bacchetta et al., 2018). For instance, in ‘Black study, Black struggle’, Robin DG Kelley (2016) follows the trajectory of groups who have embraced an abolitionist future of education – from Patricia Robinson, Patricia Haden and Donna Middleton, who organised and studied with community residents of all ages in Mt. Vernon, New York, to current UCLA doctoral students – whose ultimate goal is to ‘create in the present a future that overthrows the logic of neoliberalism’. Within the university, too, queer academics of colour have traced their experiences of ‘staying’ within corridors and classrooms proliferated by ‘recurring racial, gendered, and sexual macro assaults and macro aggressions in the areas of employment, labor, housing, health, hiring, and admissions’ (Bacchetta et al., 2018: 50).

Therefore, despite investing in the premise of staying in the university, I am wary of leaning into a ‘nostalgic’ critique that assumes the university as the natural home of progress and social justice (Boggs and Mitchell, 2018: 434). Seeking to understand the contemporary university ‘as a historical entity’ (Boggs et al., 2019: 9), I adopted a queer feminist approach to this research, centring Sara Ahmed’s (2012: 39) guidance ‘that we do not reify institutions, by presuming they are simply given’. Ahmed (2007: 163) has made sense of institutionalised whiteness as an iterative accumulation of habits, leading to the ‘extension’ of spaces to white bodies. The institutionalisation of whiteness therefore ‘involves work’, through which ‘institutions become given’ and, at the same time, become exposed to the potential for change (Ahmed, 2012: 39). In paying attention to the affective and bodily experiences of subversive intellectuals, it becomes possible to see the university as a space in which bodies matter.

In Western history, the feminised body and the Black body have been differently but connectedly (re)constructed as vessels. Silvia Federici (2004) has shown how the construction of certain bodies as a vessel for labour was instrumental in the shift from feudalism to capitalism in colonial states of the Global North in the 16th and 17th centuries. Federici (2004: 142) argues that this mechanisation of (certain) bodies, as they were captured for labour, forced the erasure of any existing ‘qualitative conception of space and time’ which would enable them to escape this ‘regularisation’ of labour. What if the body could recapture this ‘qualitative’ or flexible approach to space and time – could this open up a refusal to participate in (even institutionalised) labour processes?

Positionality and limitations

My position in relation to the university at the time of the research as a fee-paying student (and later, as a university employee) shaped this work. I could bend academic expectations only so far through this research process; only so far could I ‘refuse’ my inclusion in the systems that my interviewees were trying to dismantle. However, I could ‘refuse to refuse’ (Harney and Moten, 2013: 31). I refused to propose a model for others to follow, refused to ‘speak from a position of mastery’ (Star*Fem Co*Lab, 2022: 7). At most, this was an exercise in my own learning: a place-space-time in which I was able to learn to reach towards ‘different ways of inhabiting our scholarly domains’ (Singh, 2018: 8) from the creator-theorists with whom I engaged. I also learned from Ann duCille’s (1994: 624) ambivalence towards the academy’s pressure to approach marginalised theorising as terrain, as land to be won. An ambivalence towards conclusive findings helped me to embrace a counter-normative research path by seeking ‘what might come from an opening in not knowing’ (Page, 2017: 21).

My intention is at most pedagogical: this is an exercise in the political potential of staying within the temporal, spatial and relational thresholds of the university as a mode of queer uprising. This is an ‘essay in refusal’.

Messiness

Throughout the conversations that fed into my research, the university emerged as a hierarchical network of pre-mapped relationships. Sachi, a PhD student, explained to me that interacting with someone ‘like a supervisor that you’re trying to impress or are marked by or who can upgrade you is different to someone at your, or closer to your, hierarchical level’. Faced with these institutional maps, Ahmed (2014) has suggested that ‘in spilling out of the rooms we have been assigned, [we might] mess things up’. Through messiness, individuals might be able to embrace the non-linearity and multiplicity of places, spaces and times. Several of the interviewees were ‘messing’ with the institution’s expectations, spaces and timelines, refusing the institution as a given entity, creating new maps or ‘queer maps’ (Ahmed, 2020).

The university’s relationship to mess

Norah, an undergraduate student, described their campus as a home to lively student spaces that had built up over decades, from murals to yearly discussions of their university’s colonial past and present. Throughout their degree, however, Norah told me that these spaces were being incrementally ‘gutted’. Colourful, political murals that had been created by students in communal spaces were being covered up with blank white paint and corridors were being paced by security guards, all this generating, according to Norah, a sense that ‘the whole history of the place … [was] getting cleansed’. As the ‘second skin’ of students, these spaces appear alive and breathing, giving them a vulnerability that rendered them susceptible to being, in Norah’s words, ‘gutted’ (Ahmed, 2015). In perceiving historically student-led spaces as innately creative, radical and communal, do we risk investing in the ‘university’s goodness as an analytical a priori’ (Boggs and Mitchell, 2018: 436)? The words that Norah used to describe these spaces, though – ‘cleansing’ and ‘gutting’ – bring to mind an aliveness and a messiness, qualities that are, Ahmed (2015) shows, generated by the continuous interaction of bodies with each other and with spaces. There was a messy multiplicity of possible meanings for Norah’s campus, according to who was allowed to take up space. The aliveness of these student spaces also serves as a reminder to approach space not as a thing with an innate purpose but as the ‘accumulation of past decisions’ (Ahmed, 2007: 157). Spaces take a messy path across time, reminding us to invest in the ‘possibility of habit changes’ (Ahmed, 2007: 165). Put another way, it is possible that, by accepting spaces as ‘messy’, we open ourselves up to a present in which an institution is not simply a ‘given’.

The messy interactions of living bodies in and with spaces were something that Jessica, as a community organiser who had partnered with a local university to convene a module in practical community organising, was familiar with. Jessica told me that ‘organising is messy, it truly is messy, people have kids and lives going on’. Local organisers, for example, would not always be able to join a Zoom call, and their perspectives would not always fit into an evaluator’s coding framework or a graduate student’s timescale. The ‘true’ messiness with which Jessica described organising spaces outside the university suggested that there was a disconnect between the metrics of the university and how, in Jessica’s words, ‘real change is made’.

Where does this leave change in and of the university? For Michel Foucault (1991: 84), critique ‘isn’t a stage in a programming [… it is] a challenge directed to what is’, a process of confrontation rather than a conclusive plan of next steps. Central to the university’s ‘appearance of necessity’, Boggs et al. (2019: 3) say, is its ability to categorise, to compartmentalise and to hierarchise. Perhaps ‘true change’ in the university would not be recognised as such from within, due to the nature of the institution’s own language, tidiness and labelling? The messiness of organising, of a decolonial feminist praxis, of the undercommons might be too illegible for the university, even when it is happening within its spaces.

Messy care

Faced with ‘institutional maps’, those I spoke with were carving out different maps, often ones of care. On the picket line, in university bars and at organising meetings, Norah described a ‘shared level of moving beyond the sort of roles the uni assigns us’ by developing relationships outside of the university’s expectations, for example with staff who had been made redundant and agency cleaners employed by the university. By disrupting these hierarchical race- and class-informed identity labels, Norah found community in a messy approach to relationships, showing an ‘unprofessional’ disloyalty to the university (Harney and Moten, 2013: 28). This sense of belonging for Norah was especially possible with people who had been through shared experiences of being ‘kicked out, told they don’t belong, made redundant’. By strengthening relationships, by creating caring spaces, by messing with the positioning of student as consumer and teacher as seller, it seemed possible to refuse inclusion in the system and to find both safety and power in exclusion.

Over the years, however, these safe, messy organising spaces increasingly were held away from the securitised campus. This spatial shift, Norah acknowledged, had placed limits on the accessibility and inclusivity of their campaigns, with a tendency towards ‘cliquiness’. In the context of an increasingly marketised university education, Norah described how security was portrayed by the university as ‘a natural thing they need to do to protect their product’ of gatekept knowledge, and how it was becoming less possible to be physically ‘in but not of’, i.e. to work against the system and its technologies while inside. Indeed, the abolitionist Jess A Goldberg has argued, via the social media platform Twitter (now known as X), that it is not possible to work in an institution and not reproduce its injustices and harms, ‘unless you work in such a way that the institution by necessity has to get rid of you’ (KempoJesse, 2022). It is interesting, though, that workers whose replaceability had been confirmed – i.e. those made redundant – continued to defy the binaries of being in/out and with/against by building relationships with other subversive actors who continued to work and study in the university, thus revealing the falsity of the impermeable university.

Similarly, Sophia described how subversive friendship had enabled her to reduce the institution’s ability to harm. A former student had approached Sophia, then a teaching lecturer, after experiencing Islamophobia upon accessing the university’s mental health service, a space meant to provide care. Sophia supported the student by ‘creating more breathing space’ and, from here, a friendship grew that outlasted both their affiliations to the institution. Akanksha Mehta has reflected on the ways in which spaces categorised by the institution as ‘for teaching’ and ‘for care’ are in fact infinitely ‘messy’, to an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) extent:

[…] my office becomes the classroom; the café becomes the classroom; the corridor becomes the classroom; that little tiny space outside the door of the classroom becomes the classroom; the bus-stop becomes the classroom; my phone, my email, my Skype become classrooms; my smoke break in my secret spot behind that building under that tree becomes my classroom. (Mehta, 2019: 28)

Mehta here draws on bell hooks’ (1994) concept of ‘engaged pedagogy’, which prioritises the wellbeing of both students and teachers, and refuses the dualistic Enlightenment-originating professionalisation of the teacher through a ‘mind/body split’. As a lecturer, then, Sophia could carve out a place-space-time for an engaged, care-centred pedagogy in an institution that devalues care and does not recognise care as pedagogy. This refusal to attend to the time-bound nature of institutional affiliation is at the root of many of these subversive relationships. By forming subversive friendships through ‘fumbling’ approaches to teaching/care, Sophia seems to be embodying an ‘unprofessional’ disloyalty to the institution’s hierarchies (Harney and Moten, 2013: 28; Mehta, 2019: 28).

Yet, Mehta’s (2019: 29) article also highlights the ways in which this subversion of professionalised pedagogy can be co-opted by the institution; she recalls being asked by white and male colleagues, ‘why are you doing so much?’, her experiences compounded by the institution’s perception of her ‘assemblages’ in identity, as a woman teacher of colour providing care for students of colour (Puar, 2007). This imbalanced distribution of care falls towards the ‘captive maternal’, with exhausting and deadly outcomes for women-of-colour scholars (James, 2021; see also Nash, 2019). Without neglecting the tiringly imbalanced, racialised and gendered conditions from which these friendships grow, Mehta (2019) suggests that subversive intellectuals like Sophia can counter the way the institution uses time to ‘organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity’ (Freeman, 2010: 3). By refusing to refuse the institution, by working within it and forming friendships that transcend it – and by using its time to generate this kind of theorising – these scholars exist in a present that surpasses the institution. This, I think, is one form of a queer, counter-institutional care through which, in claiming new place-space-times, it is possible, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2020: 117) writes, to ‘feel buoyant on illegal terms’.

Porosity

The institution and its whiteness, Ahmed (2006: 2) suggests, portray a mirage of permanence via ‘repeated and habitual actions’. For an institution accumulating capital, there is a value in promoting its image as a distinct space that exists separately, impermeably, from the outside. During our conversations, however, interviewees frequently sidestepped the often-assumed binaries of working ‘inside/outside’, ‘with/against’ a system. In fact, Sachi directly described these binaries as ‘false’, splintered in reality by ‘so many links, relationships’. There are openings through which ‘labor always escapes’ (Harney and Moten, 2013: 28).

The university and its borders

That is what you are being framed as, a container, a vessel, a body, you have been made a body, all those years ago, before your lifetime …

(Azumah Nelson, 2022: 141)

In this passage, the protagonist of Caleb Azumah Nelson’s (2022) novel Open Water recounts the historic yet persistent mechanisation of the Black body for the purposes of racial hierarchy and capital accumulation. During my research, the mechanisation of the racialised/queered body as a vessel was a recurring theme. People who were not accommodated by the white spaces of the UK university had experienced being ‘made a body’ through specific technologies. The increased securitisation and surveillance of Norah’s campus made them and their peers feel less safe each year, and ‘very watched’. The new ID card monitors at each entrance disproportionately affected trans and non-binary students, whose IDs were less likely than their cis peers’ to match their current presentation. Norah also described witnessing both verbal and physical hostility from security guards towards students of colour and students from outside the UK. Routine verbal and infrastructural questioning – e.g. ‘Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing?’ – acts as a ‘stopping device’ for people to whom these spaces do not extend (Ahmed, 2007: 161). How might such tangible technologies be subverted?

‘One can only sneak into the university and steal what one can’

For Norah, sneaking and stealing was one way to undermine the mechanised borders of the university. Describing this as ‘being a passive consumer’, Norah explained how ‘stealing resources, pirating stuff, sharing stuff [and …] trying to organise fee strikes’ enabled them to reject the mechanisation of the student as a consumer. Norah saw in this the potential to disable the university’s capacity to gatekeep knowledge for those paying fees and for those who speak the language it speaks. Space and time, Norah said, were also stolen through the use of a classroom for two minutes before a seminar, for instance, to recount to classmates a recent eviction of student organisers. Refusing to engage in its normative processes, Norah was ‘forc[ing] the university to consider them a problem’, a threat to the accumulation of capital – and doing so with some success, to the extent that some students who were particularly active in this work became marked as ‘threats’ by security guards (Harney and Moten, 2013: 30).

Norah described teach-outs as a second strategy through which subversive actors passed through the university by stealing knowledge. Informal seminars that became frequent occurrences on the university’s picket line, teach-outs were described by Norah as a ‘non-hierarchical space’ that enables ‘learning that is in our image, that is designed by us, is free, is politicised […] it’s saying that we don’t need the university to function for us to still get the same study’. By re-purposing the liminal space between academia and the community, those on and in solidarity with the strike against pensions, pay and working conditions materially falsified the university’s ‘appearance of necessity’ (Boggs et al., 2019: 3). This use of the picket shows how strategic use of space enables individuals to subvert the violent norms of institutional knowledge processes, leaning into a ‘beyond of teaching’ (Harney and Moten, 2013: 28).

However, the picket line was also a space of contention, whose borders and capacity for what Norah called counter-institutional ‘sting’ could be overridden by the institution. After over five years of union disputes, teach-out organisers – who were losing pay and many of whom were at risk of losing their visas – were burning out. In Norah’s words, ‘there’s only so many teach-out schedules you can make’. The space of the picket, in one year, shifted from a joyful site to a boundary zone, a space of contingency for the undercommons, ‘always at war, always in hiding’ (Harney and Moten, 2013: 30). Despite this, Norah continued to join the university’s picket line and non-academic strikes, contributing food as well as political solidarity. They understood their institutional subversion of the university as inherently tied to other justice-centred systemic change, such as trade union and anti-genocide movements.

Norah also began finding openings in the university’s boundaries by funnelling their experiences of organising into their studies. They described bringing issues of workers’ rights into seminar discussions, co-opting classroom spaces to dissect the university’s active role in upholding a hostile immigration environment. Study can take place differently outside the university, but it can also take place differently inside the university – perhaps vessels can go both ways, ‘hands full’ (Harney and Moten, 2013: 28).

Can vessels go both ways?

What can be gained by staying in, by navigating the trodden path that ties the university, despite itself, with the community? Kerry was part of an independent grassroots anti-racist movement whose members had since been formally contracted by their university to provide advisory services. This group exemplified what Kerry described as ‘pockets of real critical scholar activist-supported spaces’, constructed via an informal tapestry of activist-scholars who, weaving between institutions, appeared to embody the unprofessional, fugitive disloyalty of the undercommons. Members were employed part time while working full time elsewhere. This enabled them to take more risks, since their livelihoods did not depend on their jobs, although it also put them at greater risk of burnout. As employees, they had the institutional knowledge, relationships and advocacy power of the ‘ac.uk’ email address. They hosted an external blog to raise awareness about racist teaching practices and materials in the institution. The blog enabled the group to leverage the risk of reputational damage in order to influence institutional decision making – a means of ‘strategically inhabiting’ spaces for justice-orientated education (Boggs and Mitchell, 2018: 459). This group was funded by the institution and formed by its staff, students and alumni, but it remained ‘autonomous’. In this way, Kerry’s position offers a concrete example of how the labour upon which the university relies ‘always escapes’, and it suggests that this escape can happen online, where knowledge, strategies and relationships can leak out.

Kerry was the only interviewee with whom our conversation took place online in the evening, due to busy schedules. She seemed familiar with engaging with abolitionist and other radical antiracist theorising over Zoom. It is possible that online communication, especially since COVID-19, has deepened the cracks in the institutional boundary, facilitating both disruption and, in the terminology of the undercommons (Harney and Moten, 2013: 27), theft.

However, when we spoke in 2023, Kerry felt that the group’s leverage over the institution, which had gained momentum at the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, had subsided. What she described as the group’s original ‘radical antiracist praxis’ was now ‘running the risk of liberal antiracist praxis’ through financial co-optation. Formal contracts of employment, although needed to prevent burnout, had changed the group’s relationship to the institution by shaping its goals to fit the university’s funding metrics. Kerry described the boundary between institutional funding for antiracist research support and its potential co-optation as a ‘quagmire’, saying ‘we’ve had really, really poor [antiracist collaborations] that I think have been really successfully co-opted by actors within the institution. But you know, it’s all about power. It’s all about the funding’. Kerry was pointing to the limitations of ‘reactive activism’ which, through its focus on the measurable achievements of the here-and-now, foregoes any ‘imaginative engagement with the future that can shape our politics in the present […] by orienting them to the not-yet-here’ (Chamas, 2023: 8). The balance between subversive decolonial feminist praxes and the ‘material conditions’ that make them possible – that is to say, institutional funding – proved a tricky path to walk. Kerry was buoyed by what she described as a dynamic ‘madness’ generated by her own ‘personal obsession’ with the institution at hand (Boggs and Mitchell, 2018: 437).

During her time as a PhD student, Sachi had created a seminar series that convened academics to critique participatory research methods that risked exploiting marginalised populations. When we spoke, she was seeking funding from the institution to continue this. As a student, Sachi could gather ‘the people that need to be around the table’ through relationships she had purposefully ‘carved’ out. Through her access to the institution’s physical resources, she could map out the harms that were being induced by its processes, for example the lack of meaningful compensation for marginalised research participants. She could reserve rooms in which to design tangible alternatives to these processes collectively. Sachi described her navigation of the university as a process of building ‘my own personal toolkit … I’m trying on this hat’. ‘Wearing hats’, for Sachi, who had previously worked in community organising outside the university, was a way of ‘strategically inhabiting’ it in order to understand it and, from there, to ‘work with [her] other friends’ (Boggs and Mitchell, 2018: 459).

So, university spaces are multiple and porous. They are not only managed but recreated moment by moment by individuals, some of whom seek to position their own labour against the workings of the academic industrial complex. ‘To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission’, the porosity of institutionalised spaces can be exploited quietly, by stealing, pirating and sharing resources, the tactics of which Norah called ‘passive consumerism’ (Harney and Moten, 2013: 26). It can also be done loudly, by gathering in a seminar room, by generating pressure through internal and external friendships. Integral to the ability to abuse this porosity, though, is a mode of being in between. The subversive intellectuals of the undercommons are there and they are stealing; they are a teacher and a friend; they are wearing one hat one moment, and another hat the next.

Ambivalence and uncertainty

Finally, those I spoke to often felt a sense of ambivalence towards the university’s focus on academic attainment. Turning towards failure seemed to enable subversive actors inside the university to ‘refuse to refuse’ their professionalisation (Harney and Moten, 2013: 31).

Ambivalence towards failure: Academia

On Twitter/X, Jess A Goldberg recounted their response to a question they were posed by a graduate student: ‘How do you do the kind of work you want to do without reproducing the unjust power hierarchies of academia?’ (KempoJesse, 2022). Goldberg responds that professionalised teachers ‘should stop pretending like [they] can be pure radicals’ in the university and redirects the student to a more urgent question: ‘how do we act ethically knowing we cause harm?’ (KempoJesse, 2022). For Goldberg, radical antiracist action ceases to be once it is approved of – i.e. given space, time and funding – by the institution. Instead, they guide those seeking to ‘act ethically’ from inside the university to avoid the institution’s attempt to ‘monopolize our time … clock out at 5 and go do other things’ (KempoJesse, 2022). Making time to do this ‘other’ work requires the individual to refuse a culture that expects their labour to extend out from their contracted time to ensure academic success. For Sophia, clocking out of her work as a lecturer – although often after 5 p.m. – consisted of joining cop-watch and anti-raid organising. Spending a night monitoring police conduct via an anonymous messaging app, instead of finalising a manuscript for publication, can be seen as one way in which the undercommons do their work: by managing her labour in this way, Sophia shows how it might be possible to simultaneously evade the university and dismantle the global industrial complexes in which it plays a role.

Along a similar line, Kerry described feeling that activism inherently operates outside of one’s profession, requiring you ‘to prioritise something above your own career’. Taking this further, Goldberg suggests that the work of the ‘pure radical’ can only take place outside the university’s walls and schedules (KempoJesse, 2022). This, however, sits in opposition to Sachi’s belief in the falsity of the inside/outside academia binary, and in her strategy of ‘wearing hats’ while inside. So, if ‘the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one’, my research surfaced a myriad of different potential crimes that the subversive intellectual can commit (Harney and Moten, 2013: 26).

What might a university that permits failure look like? I want briefly to draw attention to the political potential for failure in the classroom, this magical place-space-time that Sophia described as ‘something you have an opportunity to build […] from scratch’. Mehta (2019: 26) recounts how, during a seminar on the works of Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon, the class came to collectively realise that the experiences and stories of students of colour were being ‘consumed’ by their peers, and in response, the classroom went quiet, silence emerging as ‘the best way to (un)learn and to teach’. Mehta’s story contributes to the idea that failure in the classroom – i.e. failure to discuss, to follow lesson plans – might embody a collective, disorganised study of the undercommons: this ‘beyond of teaching [which] is really about not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing’ (Harney and Moten, 2013: 28).

Ambivalence towards failure: Activism

From my conversations with activists, it seemed that a pressure to succeed was felt not only in academia but in activism too. The question of capacity, Norah told me, was often a point of discussion in their organising meetings, in relation to different people’s ‘risk profiles’, such as their ethnicity or visa status. As part of their strategies to prevent burnout, collectively they would regularly ask themselves whether they had capacity to undertake a certain action, ‘and if the answer is no, maybe we shouldn’t do it’. Norah described how campaigning was becoming increasingly difficult, especially when co-organised with burnt-out lecturers and outsourced workers, and even more so in the context of COVID-19, unprecedented strikes and increased securitisation. At the same time, Norah explained, reducing campaigning also ‘kinda feels like letting the institution win … that’s [their] intention’. For Norah in particular, as a key organiser, it was difficult not to feel ‘responsible … this weird sense of duty, obligation’ to the campaigns’ success and popularity. Sophie Chamas (2023: 9), following Jack Halberstam (2011: 9), has linked this felt need to fulfil a defined and measurable ‘purpose’ through activism with a ‘ubiquitous neoliberal rationality that satisfies the question “what did you do today?”’. Instead, Chamas (2023: 8) proposes a ‘politics of transtemporality’ that can enable a shift, if ‘counter-intuitive’, away from pragmatic activism towards ‘an imaginative engagement with the future that can shape our politics in the present to be more egalitarian and inclusive by orienting them to the not-yet-here’. Alongside a concern for the future of organising at their institution, Norah appeared to embody this position, telling me: ‘I have a confidence that these sorts of ideas and disputes will win […] I say no borders and no prisons in a way that I don’t think that’ll happen overnight or in my lifetime but imagining alternatives’.

Essays in refusal

When I asked Sachi about the abolition of the university, she responded, ‘For who? … A lot of prison abolitionists are working and talking at university spaces’. This was a reminder of the contradictory situation in which the university simultaneously hosts, in Sachi’s words, ‘a powerful space’ for abolitionist thinking and disowns it as ‘fundamentally oppositional’ (Gilmore, 2011: 252; Mohanty, 1989: 184). So, Sachi pointed this project in one final direction: what can we make of abolitionist, decolonial, radical anti-racist and other thinking that is critical of the university, that is produced from within the university? Can it ever avoid what Kerry described as its ‘elite capture’?

From the interviews, a final kind of ‘essays in refusal’ emerged (Foucault, 1991: 84). Norah, as an undergraduate student, described how they had used what they learnt from their experiences of radical antiracist campaigning to write a number of module assessments, including a case study about a specific minoritised population in the university context. In this way, they felt that ‘the activism stuff has given tools, for want of a better word, to be in formal [educational] spaces’. Norah was ‘refus[ing] to refuse’, writing inside the university about the university, ‘generat[ing] languages that the university can never fully discipline or incorporate’ – and this seemed a brave yet strategic stance of indecision (Bacchetta et al., 2018: 54; Harney and Moten, 2013: 31). The material value of a Microsoft Office subscription, of a library or a desk, of five minutes, even, can enable subversive intellectuals to create counter-institutional knowledge productions. It is this ‘indecision’ between the university and an alternative place-space-time, co-created by collective abolitionist thinking, that, Harney and Moten (2013: 31) reassure us, ‘the university will not recognize’. And this powerful stance of ambivalence underscores what the undercommons may have inherited from the deep lineages of theorising about active ambivalence by Black feminists: ‘I am not quite certain what to make of the ground I have covered […] or where to go from here’ (duCille, 1994: 629).

By thinking, writing, publishing and all the while refusing to conclude or to decide one singular position, the subversive intellectual can disrupt the requirement for marginalised academics’ theorising to be legible, to be ‘readable as maps’ (duCille, 1994: 592). Essays in refusal present a strategy through which to ‘refuse to refuse’ the institution, to enable a decolonial feminist praxis that in the here-and-now embodies a justice-to-come learning (Harney and Moten, 2013: 31; Shefer and Bozalek, 2022: 32).

Towards new dimensions

The desire for findings can even reduce or limit what can be found.

(Ahmed, 2012: 10)

The university is experienced through assemblages of gendered and racialised dimensions, and when we take account of the affective and bodily nature of these experiences, cracks begin to appear in the institution’s ‘homeland security’, and an alternative place-space-time springs up (Harney and Moten, 2013: 28). Looking closely at how space and time came up in the conversations I had with the individuals I interviewed, we see how subversive intellectuals disprove the image of the university as a singular space with a linear timeline. A teach-out on a picket line unlocked a place-space-time in which the image of the university as the natural seller of both education and justice was proven false, in which people inside and outside the institution came together to imagine its alternatives. A place-space-time that opened up between a minoritised student and her feminist lecturer led to a friendship that outlasted their institution. And, in response to an assignment, a student uncovered a place-space-time in which they could critique the very university they would submit this to for assessment.

Crucially, a ‘politics of transtemporality’ enabled an activist kind of unprofessionalism through which subversive intellectuals mixed the present with a collective future, foregoing traditional kinds of success to re-orientate themselves towards an inclusive imagining of justice-orientated study (Chamas, 2023: 16). The undercommons exists because of this indecision – a refusal to refuse – and those who seemed most able to resist absorption by the institution showed a conscious persistence in walking this risky path, buoyed by relationships that were often subversive themselves, a prioritisation of care for care’s sake and an approach to study that allowed people to be ‘together in brokenness’ (Harney and Moten, 2013: 12).

The potential for opening up these alternative presents was limited, always facing the risks of co-optation and absorption. In this article, I do not intend to decide whether inhabiting the university can have a role in its abolition. Given the political potential that can be found in ambivalence and failure, I am not sure what success in this approach would even mean. ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’, Audre Lorde (1984: 113, 123) told a conference full of mostly white feminist academics and advised instead that they follow ‘the personal as the political’. To steal the university’s tools, whether they are material or immaterial, will not dismantle it. It will, though, point towards its cracks. It will illuminate the potential for a queer disruption of space and time through a renewed agency in the body as a vessel to re-orientate institutionalised spaces towards a collectively imagined future. This in turn suggests that there is political potential for the subversive intellectual who stays inside the temporal, spatial and relational thresholds of the university to embrace modes of queer uprising. Investing in both historic and new forms of counter-institutional knowledge, this project itself was able, within limits, to refuse to refuse the metrics of the academy (Harney and Moten, 2013: 31). I do not have the answers to a material strategy for a decolonial feminist praxis inside the university, for ‘what claims could I make’ on behalf of the warring, hidden undercommons (Page, 2017). But I can present an essay in refusal.