Abstract
Breaking Boundaries is an online flipbook that aims to bring to the fore “counter accounts” of the Covid pandemic, in contrast to the dominantly statistical and distant accounts prevalent in the public sphere which have been disproportionately focused on Western societies.
The project (BB) includes 73 contributions from eighteen countries and all continents. All the editorial chapters are included in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese and the contributions’ abstracts are also included in multiple languages. The accounts of pandemic included in the project are unique in terms of how they bring to the fore “minority voices” frequently sidelined in dominant accounts of the pandemic, ranging from people with disabilities and chronic diseases (pp. 84–89), to indigenous people of Amazonia (pp. 96–97), refugees (pp. 113–120), (PhD) students (pp. 353–356), nature/non-humans (pp. 76–79, 80–83, 104–107), and children (pp. 198–220). Such plurality of accounts is fundamental to sensing, debating, and deciding for/around organizational/social crises/issues with more justice, complexity, and compassion.
This volume questions the boundaries of academic publishing by accepting contributions that are not in typical academic publication form, that combine poetry and prose, that permit/invite personal, affective writing, that include both academic and artistic contributions that combine sound, image, video, and text.
The project’s content is accessible under Creative Commons and free of charge. The contributions are presented under seven modes of “breaking boundaries”:
(1) Breaking our silence; (2) Breaking connections; (3) Breaking geographical boundaries; (4) Breaking our ways of expression; (5) Breaking into a new normal; (6) Breaking our academic practices; (7) Breaking the system
This project can be situated within a wider body of work in critical accounting that reflects on the “other” of typical financial/managerial/statistical power-laden hierarchal, commensurating, distant forms of accounting (Dillard & Vinnari, 2019). “Account” in its roots means a story or fable and counter accounts focus on the emancipatory potentials of the personal, the poetic, the affective and the collective accounts that get marginalized through the dominant forms of accounting (McKernan & McPhail, 2012).
Experimentations such as this one, are a reaction to how publication especially in “top” and highly stratified and conservative academic journals has become an increasingly laborious process in which “the other” of good academic writing including the personal, the poetic and the affective has to be expunged from the work. An academic system which puts disproportionate emphasis on such “top” journals instead focuses our energies on engineering good papers that “fill a gap” and make a formal and highly sanitized academic contribution. The experience of publishing as a result has become increasingly one of taming and stifling the desires driving academic work. The pandemic and the break that it has offered has led to a more intense questioning of the pre-pandemic norms of academic work, publishing, and life.
Through the lens of this book, in the following sections I reflect on absences and how academic work can help to make it present and to give it political relevance. I reflect on how this volume’s attempts at “breaking boundaries” could be extended to provide more vitality to life/flows at the “borderlands” between our different academic communities and also between us and our diverse and mostly silenced insides and outsides.
On Breathing
A friend of mine once told me how for several nights he could not go to sleep because, at night, he heard a cat moaning, suffering. He looked everywhere but could not find it. The cat sounded close – but when he started to look for it – it stopped its howl. Finally, he realized it was not a cat but the sound of his own lungs, the friction of his breathing against years of smoking and urban pollution. The suffering cat was moaning from inside his lungs – “I can’t breathe”. He could hear her faint howls only in moments of silence and immobility.
This volume and many contributions in it reflect how the pandemic as a crisis of breathing exposed our longer-term suffocations. During this period, hundreds of thousands of people were struggling to breathe every day, and many died of it. All humans had to struggle breathing through masks made of the human product which is suffocating the rivers, oceans, soil, and animal life – plastic (see pp. 300–301 for a poem on plastic, suffocation, and the pandemic). It was no surprise that a major social upheaval during the pandemic was triggered by George Floyd’s cry “I can’t breathe.” Paradoxically it was also during the pandemic that we could question the pre-pandemic normal. The relative institutional laxity/dilution and possibility of expanding our intimate lives let us hear the moaning both inside and outside.
This volume is the type of contribution that aims to reclaim our academic breath. It is about celebrating our rediscovered human/academic lungs and cautiously breathing without our academic masks. Examples of some of the academic contributions that breach typical idea(s) and forms of academic writing are:
A polyphonic set of accounts of pandemic by refugees (pp. 113–120)
Various poetic reflections about academics’ experience of the pandemic (for example pp. 110–112, 150–151, 168–169, 236–240, 262–265, 280–281)
Dialogic/correspondence reflections about the experience of the pandemic (pp. 124–138, 317–321)
Various visual and multi-modal reflections/accounts of the pandemic (for example Francoeur and Duval’s (pp. 110–112) visual/poetic dialog about facelessness during the pandemic – but also Zou’s “A letter to COVID 19” (pp. 174–188).
The vibrancy and diversity of the contributions in this volume remind us of what we lose under the mask of academic pressures, of measures and targets and of sanitized publishing processes. The forceful beauty of these academic contributions inspires questioning by each one of us – of how we are breathing and how we are affecting the others’ breaths.
Hopefully such bodies of work will also lead to more radical reflections by editors and academic publishers of our “top journals” about how from gateways imposing conservatism and conformism they can move towards inspiring liveliness and multiplicity, and providing more spaces to inspire “writing differently” (Gilmore, Harding, Helin, & Pullen, 2019).
On Absences
The pandemic was a period heavy with absences of beloved people, relations, and liberties – and it was also a period when questioning of longer term, taken-for-granted absences of what mattered in our lives and societies became more visible and open to questioning. A key focus of this volume is on providing a space for accounts of absences that were intensified during the pandemic. Such absences include voices not heard (of children, of the indigenous people, of refugees, and so on), but also life trajectories not lived because of the pandemic; for example, an accounting doctoral student’s account of his unlived PhD lives due to the pandemic (pp. 353–356), absent modes of expression and absent lives, and also impossibility of mourning for those taken by the pandemic (pp. 49–52).
Recent reflections in organization studies (including this journal) have brought to the fore how absences are a central force in organizing (Giovannoni & Quattrone, 2018) and how the inherent failing of the attempts to make absences present is what sustains their effects. They highlight how the unlived set the contours of the lived experience (Scott, 2020), and how ghostly absences lurk around us and condition how we act and how we organize.
This volume is an act of commemoration of what is usually left out. Politics of absence is central to how exclusions, marginalizations and deprivations are organized and maintained. Volumes such as this one are important reminders as to how the unlived, unheard and the lost can be made present (in an inherently incomplete and open-ended struggle) through our academic work.
On Boundaries and Borderlands
This volume is focused on breaching, on increasing flows across disconnected communities, knowledge forms, languages, and geographies. Currently our academic, artistic, political identities are segregated with rare, chance flows between them. Projects such as this, enable a connecting, mending, leaking across our different modes of existences.
Several of the contributors present themselves as “academic/poet”, “academic/activist” and accountant/part-time painter or musician. Projects such as this one thanks to their openness and multi-modality help bring to the fore and fuse our multiple identities. As a result, they lead to increased vitality of the borderlands of our academic lives. This expansion occurs through increasing numbers of us acknowledging our borderland and multiple, or “mestiza” identities (Anzaldúa, 1987) but also through the flows and connections these borderland actors and activities enable between academic, artistic, literary and also political and social worlds. Examples of such contributions in this project are:
An accounting professor who is also a musician has turned (with a colleague) the public statistical accounts and discourses of pandemic and cries about the pandemic from marginalized and indigenous communities into a musical composition (p. 170)
A group of accounting scholars building an in-between space called The Seed for interaction between artists, academic and the local communities (pp. 284–310).
To move towards much hyped but usually arid ideas of inter-disciplinarity, projects such as this one that invite, enable, and reinforce the queer and the multiple in all of us can play a crucial role. It is by living fully the borderland academics that we all are that we can nourish the flows and possibilities beyond and across the stifling disciplinary/paradigmatic boundaries. Such queer identities and breaching flows (Barad, 2017) are foundational to reinvigorating the relations between academia and life’s other arenas.
Can We Avoid Returning to the Pre-Pandemic “Normal”?
Several contributions in this volume highlight the ways the pandemic has led to an exceptional window of possibilities for an urgent rethinking of humans’ relations to nature, to other humans and to work. As if we needed to withdraw from the public realm, to be able to question it (pp. 399–401). This volume is one of many “maracas” (pp. 96–97) during the pandemic, that cry out the need for a fundamental rethinking of our pre-pandemic “normal” (p. 392): The lockdown has set us a challenge, that of not going back to that normal that now vividly seems so absurd and undesirable. The question is whether we will all and collectively be up to that challenge. If we are, then those thousands of lives will not be lost in vain. But this is already what we normally say in order to go back to our normal lives, and we should therefore find a new vocabulary and a new language to narrate the world to which we do not want to go back and we instead aspire.
So, the urgent question is, how to seize this exceptional opportunity of collective awareness and political possibilities enabled by the pandemic. Some directions that this project points towards are: the importance of creating spaces for experience, experimentation and collectivization (in contrast to the individualizing and normalizing processes of mainstream academic publication), of learning to listen to the voiceless or absent both inside and outside of us, and of reconnecting beyond the abstract and the calculative regimes of knowledge that mislead our engagement with the fundamental crises of ecology and justice that define our times.