Revolt,activism and the posthuman university assemblage

Abstract

Revolt is a vital and transformative process of evolution and re-negotiation, Kristeva says, and, in the face of global/local, political, worldly and ecological crises, it is critical. This paper utilises the notion of revolt as an ongoing imperative to re-imagine activism through a human–posthuman framing. It conceptualises the university as a living, throbbing assemblage of beings, policies and practices that are closely and often indiscernibly entangled. In this assemblage COVID-19 is posited as an illustration of human and more-than-human life and uncertainty to provoke re-readings and reorientations towards policies and practices. Using revolt to refocus activisms in the university, the paper argues, blurs not only the human and nonhuman but also the policy–practice boundaries.

Introduction

This paper offers a reconceptualisation of the notion of activism in the university. Rather than suggesting how to do activism, or how to be an activist, the paper’s aim is to provoke a shift in orientations, both towards the university and its policies and practices, and towards activism. Pushed by the impacts that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on policy and practices in the university, the paper uses Julia Kristeva’s (2014) notion of revolt as both a method and a desired outcome, for meaning-making in what has been touted as a new normal. Using the concept of revolt is a response to Kristeva’s calls for the need for increasing revolt in society. The importance of revolt in this instance lies in its purpose to ‘first and foremost – designate an opposition to already established norms, values and powers’ (p. 14), which, she urges, requires increasingly deep and critical thought and questioning in society. In this paper revolt serves as a method to question what an activist university is and might be, by provoking ongoing questioning about activism and activists. Revolt, then, serves to avoid both idealisation and sedimentation in thinking about activism in the university, and bridges human and more-than-human entanglements within the university assemblage.

The paper begins by outlining some of the concepts with which it deals, including what is taken as a starting point: seeing the university as a human and more-than-human assemblage. It outlines what might be considered to be activism, in order to imagine the role that revolt can play in reconceptualising its ‘established norms, values and powers’ as Kristeva (2014) urges. The coronavirus that has led to the global COVID-19 pandemic is used as an example of a vibrant materiality and more-than-human organism that acts ‘in opposition’ to interfere with established policy and practices. The disruptive impact of the virus on world-wide norms in the university assemblage ruptures the human exceptionalism to which we have become accustomed and provokes the questioning of activism as human-imposed and instigated.

The university assemblage

The contemporary university can be conceptualised as an assemblage. The notion of assemblage draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2013), as a translation of their term agencement. Recognising that some uses of the term ‘assemblage’ have been critiqued in their translations of Deleuze and Guattari’s original idea, or as superficial applications (Buchanan, 2015; Savage, 2020), this paper uses an explanation offered by Bennett (2010). Bennett offers that intra-relational assemblages are ‘ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts’ (p. 23). These groupings include human and nonhuman elements, that are ‘living, throbbing confederations’ that operate because of and despite ‘the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within’ (pp. 23–24). When we think of the elements within the university, this description pushes to the surface considerations of human and more-than-human beings. It raises into our consciousness the affective impact of nonhuman material objects within buildings, such as desks, shelves, libraries, and so on, the buildings themselves as nonhuman structures and also the more-than-human elements that act and intra-act within open spaces, the space and place, grounds, the lawns, walkways and what lives and throbs within and between them (Arndt and Tesar, 2019). Bennett’s description of an assemblage allows us to imagine the university as a vibrant, active space of life (Arndt and Mika, 2018; Arndt et al., 2020) where things and beings intra-act, in intricate ways with, through and despite each other, and human-centric policies, practices and activisms.

Conceptualising the university as an intricate assemblage takes into consideration, as Gale (2016) outlines, that the university is not a simplistic and separated space where ‘research, teaching and learning engagements’ are made up of ‘social interactions of individual teachers and learners filling space and time with behaviours and practices’ (p. 242). Instead, the human and nonhuman elements within the assemblage are always intra-acting, their living and throbbing encounters occurring both as the components themselves act on the basis of their own capacities, and as they shape their acting together as a result of these capacities, acting upon and being influenced by each other (Arndt and Tesar, 2019; Savage, 2020). Conceptualising the university as a vibrant, living assemblage raises an element of precarity, then, as a result of re-thinking it through a posthuman lens.

A posthuman lens offers a conceptual framing of the university as a living, acting and active space that encompasses all human as well as the nonhuman actors, elements, energies and forces involved in it. It includes those elements that humans know of and those that they don’t (Malone, et al. 2020). It does not remove the human or attempt to negate human actions, powers or influence, but rather the aim of this stance is to de-elevate the exceptionalism with which human endeavours are commonly treated (Braidotti, 2013, 2019). A posthuman framing blurs the lines between the human ‘as organized in society’ and the more-than-human ‘life of all living beings’ (Braidotti, 2019: 10), placing relational connectedness on a ‘natureculture continuum’ (p. 12). Inserting into this continuum the conception of vibrant materialities (Bennett, 2010) muddies the distinctions between what is living and what is not (for example material objects rust, flake and disintegrate). Becoming aware of the presence of precarities occurring both by the elements themselves, and through and because of the relationships amongst each other, creates the space for a reconceptualization of activism in the university. In particular it creates the space for rethinking the human endeavour to organise the university through policies and practices. Through the explorations of this paper the university’s social contract (Pietsch et al., 2020) emerges as merely the human (educational, political) element. The dominance of human endeavours within the university – to exert power and control by creating and implementing particular policies and practices – becomes subsumed by the ‘vibrant materials of all sorts’ that form and operate beyond, alongside and entangled with the human acts and social contract (Arndt and Tesar, 2019).

University policies and practices

Questioning the university as an assemblage of human and more-than-human living throbbing elements, calls into question the nature and purpose of its policies and practices. Policies for example represent the human intention to ‘organise society’ by guiding and directing the humans within the university, and what they should, can or should not do. Subsumed into a posthuman view, however, policies become mere elements, de-elevated together with the humans directing them or directed by them. They become subsumed into the natureculture continuum with the non or more-than-human elements that make up the university assemblage. Policies aiming to direct and govern roles and responsibilities, in an educational policy environment ‘of policy ferment, of policy hyper-activity’ (Ball, 2019: 747) and educational policy reform illustrate the human desire to organise, dominate and control, which becomes unsettled by the complexities of the posthuman framing (Arndt and Tesar, 2019; Tesar and Arndt, 2020).

An assemblage approach cannot be taken lightly. Pointing to the danger of surface-level engagements, Savage suggests that in policy research it involves ‘(1) relations of exteriority and emergence; (2) heterogeneity, relationality and flux; and (3) attention to power, politics and agency’ (2020: 332). While a systematic study of the use of an assemblage approach in policy research is beyond the scope of this paper, Savage’s warning emphasises the precarities that arise in the entangled workings of educational policy and the university’s human and more-than-human elements and practices. What, however, is activism, within these complex relationalities, power and agentic engagements in the university?

Activism

From a human perspective activism is a ‘process by which individuals or groups use action to bring about social or political change’. In this view those ‘who take part in activism campaigns’ are ‘activists’, Boon (2020) outlines. Viewing the university as an assemblage of human and more-than-human elements offers a rupture to this way of thinking. It makes possible a rethinking of activism, by opening up to not only the human but also the nonhuman influences and influencers within the university. ‘Activism can take on many forms’, according to Boon, potentially supporting the idea of non and more-than-human actions being conceptualised also as activism, since ‘there are many different ways that activists can get their message across and influence change’ (Boon, 2020). While it may be difficult to discern the ‘message’ of some of the physical objects, structures and natural forces and elements that intra-act in the university assemblage, such a rethinking of activism, creates spaces for diverse interpretations of actors and actants and of what ‘influencing change’ can mean within this assemblage.

Human or more-than-human living beings within the assemblage can be seen as actors, while actants are more-than-human elements that have impact, modify other things and affect beings or behaviours. Bennett refers to this process as a ‘vital materiality’ (2010: vii). Such a vitality, she says, refers to ‘the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ (p. viii). The potential of more-than-human elements with ‘trajectories, propensities or tendencies’ of their own to influence change within the university assemblage push the transformative process of evolution and re-negotiation of activism. They provoke what might be seen as activism through Kristeva’s idea of revolt.

Revolt

The notion of revolt used here draws on Julia Kristeva’s work. Kristeva distinguishes revolt from revolution, rejection or destruction. Instead, it is an ongoing thinking and questioning, where to ‘think is to question’, and ‘to question is to revolt’ (Roberts, 2005). Lamenting a dangerous lack of revolt in society, Kristeva elevates revolt as thought that is a ‘ruthless and irreverent dismantling of the workings of discourse, thought, and existence’, as, ‘the work of a dissident’ (1986a: 299). Practically and theoretically, then, revolt calls for constant questioning – as an ongoing re-negotiation, of the university and its policies and practices, for example. For Kristeva this includes elevating the ‘little things, tiny revolts’ that are necessary ‘to preserve the life of the mind and of the species’ (Kristeva, 2002b: 5). Rather than being some kind of movement, through a Kristevan lens revolt is a ‘temporal disposition of subjectivity’ (Sjöholm, 2004: 84). In this argument revolt propels us to beyond a purely human orientation, towards a humble attitude of tiny revolts, to reimagine a vital material university assemblage, in which humans become less-important, de-elevated subjects.

The role of revolt

Rethinking attitudes and orientations through tiny revolts follows and further develops Kristeva’s (1986a) positing of thought as a form of dissidence. When we consider the role of revolt in relation to the policies and practices in the university, such a rethinking that aims to de-elevate the human raises further questions. Revolt provokes a rethinking of both the aim and method of constructing, enacting and debating policy in the university assemblage. Like Braidotti’s (2019) point on the natureculture continuum, Ulmer claims, that ‘knowledge frameworks that privilege the human at the expense of the more-than-human could… be viewed as incomplete’ adding that in addition they are a ‘potential injustice to non-human entities’ (2017: 3). As dissident thought and ongoing questioning, revolt offers a re-reading of university policy and practice that acts as a bridge between the human (-ly knowable and controllable) and the non or more-than-human (Tesar and Arndt, 2020). Kristeva’s idea of tiny revolts calls for inner diffractive thought processes, where individual academics might respond to policy change, for example, by questioning and re-questioning, reading and re-reading to challenge and shift, rather than take for granted, their orientations. To do so revolt shifts orientations not only beyond language and its communicative aim for representation (in clear policy wording, outlining of processes, explanation of responsibilities and so on), in accordance with the university’s social contract, but to recognise the affective potential of beyond humanly knowable policy influences. A notable example of the more-than-human world effecting change within university policies and practices is through the impacts of COVID-19.

COVID-19 – a vital materiality

In a short space of time, the coronavirus that leads to COVID-19 ruptured the smoothness of university business as usual, policy as usual and practice as usual. It has shifted university and educational ontologies, affecting policies and practices as a vital materiality and more-than-human organism, acting ‘in opposition’ to established ways of thinking and doing things in the university. Its spread across the world has shifted university boundaries and pushed policies and practices beyond what were previously considered to be the limits. Almost overnight, COVID-19 caused academics to be ordered to work from home, and ‘even the most conservative institutions’ had to become ‘flexible to adjust their operations and outlook’ (Tesar, 2021: 1). As a nonhuman actant in the university assemblage, COVID-19 illustrates another important distinction made by Bennett (2010). That is, it illustrates a political agency and affect. In making this distinction, Bennett alerts us to the difference between a materiality that is connected with, seen through the lens of, human agency and that with which the virus acts, that is a ‘vital materiality’ of ‘nonhuman forces’ (p. xvi). It has both caused and offers universities an opportunity and a necessity to reassess what perhaps is simultaneously impossible to reassess.

Political capacity of COVID-19

Questioning orientations towards the coronavirus as a nonhuman materiality that acts agentically within the human-more-than-human assemblage of the university does not confront us with something new. Rather, as Bennett points out, this ‘interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity… this mingling’ has always been present but – as is the case with the far-reaching impacts of the virus – it has ‘become harder to ignore’ (2010: 31). Intra-acting with and affecting the displacement of expectations, adding a new vibrancy, life and throbbing within the university assemblage, the virus has demonstrated its political capacity.

One way of viewing the potential of nonhuman actants’ political capacity involves that they ‘contribute to human history and culture” (Bennett, 2010: 96). Making this argument Bennett recognises heterogeneous assemblages where agency is variously exerted and distributed across and through the multiple layers and elements of materialities within the assemblage. Seeing COVID-19 as contributing to human history and culture in this way recognises the way in which it affects assemblages to suit the conditions, converting humans and their culture to develop new variants, mutations – having no regard for human status, hierarchies or power, nevertheless ‘contributing to human history and culture’. Such nonhuman agency cannot be graded into levels of importance, Bennett draws out, given that these ‘“small agenc[ies]” make more of a difference’ at particular times and places ‘than the grand agency of humans’ (p. 98). Imagining activism through the ‘small agency’ of COVID-19 as a political power within the university assemblage becomes easily conceivable, when we see its politics as arising beyond our own being, power and sphere of knowing. The large-scale disruption of university policy and practices are likely to make a difference to university history and culture for a considerable time to come.

Reimagining COVID-19’s vitality as vibrant, political and simultaneously a living throbbing element within the university assemblage offers a space for revolt. As a form of ongoing questioning and renegotiation, it blurs boundaries, roles and previous understandings. Indeed, it raises the question whether COVID-19 itself could be a form of revolt? Might COVID-19 be a form of activism within the activist university? Let us tease out the potential of revolt and the knowable and unknowable university relationalities that embed us into what Braidotti (2019) calls the posthuman predicament. First, let us consider how COVID-19, in keeping with the expectations of revolt, has pushed the university assemblage into a convergence of thinking beyond humanist ways of knowing and being, and beyond an anthropocentric elevation of human exceptionalism in its design and enactment of the policy environment.

COVID-19 as a rupture

This virus has struck to the core of the university and its policies. What previously was deemed to be the non-negotiable way to be and act within the university has become uprooted. It has demonstrated its capacity for a ‘ruthless and irreverent dismantling of the workings of discourse, thought, and existence’ as Kristeva (1986a) suggests is the work of a dissident. Despite policies to the contrary, COVID-19 caused face-to-face teaching to move online, in-office meetings to move to Zoom, and coffee breaks to become solitary breaks within academics’ homes. Despite efforts to continue to engage in as ‘usual’ a way as possible, with positive intentions, adherence to strategic plans and faculty level regulatory policies, the enormity of the uncertainties arising through COVID-19 visibly and invisibly confound individual and collective responses to that policy environment. Suddenly what might initially have been seen as temporary policy adjustments have to be extended, beyond the semester, even into the new academic year. Any easy enactment, acceptance or indeed creation of new or already in process university policies becomes confounded with ongoing disruptions to students who remain stranded overseas, confined to small, shared living space, or unable to undertake the part-time work that previously supported them and their families: the devastation spreads in ways that neither policies nor policy makers could have foreseen or imagined just months earlier. As in Bennett’s vital materialist thinking, moving beyond anthropomorphic perceptions, beyond conceiving of the world through our own image, to ‘uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances’ COVID-19 represents a ‘“talented” and vibrant materialities’ (2010: 99) that affect the university everyday policy environment with its resonances and resemblances.

When COVID-19 is seen as an activist-rupture within the university assemblage, it exposes uncertainties that arguably already underpinned what was previously seen as ‘normal’. When COVID-19 is seen as this rupture, then perhaps this is the vital material activism that is necessary to reveal what is being touted as the ‘new normal’. When the ecology of the university assemblage is reconceptualised as a complex relational assemblage, that blurs the boundaries of university and university subject in terms of all former ways of knowing, being and becoming, this opens up to the potential recognition of more-than-human activism, through ongoing re-reading, re-activating (Tesar and Arndt, 2020). It opens up to questioning not only the human, knowable, controllable, but ongoing questioning and revolt validates potential below-the-radar initiatives and informal actions that might otherwise remain hidden within the university system – and perhaps always have – by elevating dissident thought (Kristeva, 1986a) and critical activisms at various levels and from various perspectives. Perhaps the virus itself is a crucial inspiration for engaging in future policy and/or practice for an activist university in ways that differently make way for human and more-than-human ways of being and influencing histories and culture? And in rethinking activism might the rupture caused by COVID-19 lead to an overall obliteration of future expectations of clarity, certainty or perpetuity in university policy and practices (Arndt, 2013)?

Rethinking activism in the university

COVID-19 causes a rethinking of activism and of the policy environment in the university. It shows us how a form ‘of nonhuman life… has emerged as central’ both as vulnerable and ‘as a productive and vital force’ (Braidotti, 2018: 3). Such vibrant forces, Bennett (2010) helps to elaborate, act on an assemblage as actants, where an ‘actant is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events’ (Bennett, 2010: viii). Seen as an intra-relational web of human and nonhuman subjects calls into question the relevance of university policies and practices for the university, as ‘a materially embodied and embedded community’ (Braidotti, 2018: 3). Whereas in its policy landscape the university traditionally met national and local regulatory expectations, such expected stabilities have become disrupted, overturned, and must now be questioned to an extent where some policies have become entirely irrelevant or renegotiated. COVID-19 ruptures the policy environment, affecting its university’s social contract, that ‘unstated agreement… reciprocal relationship, in which obligation and benefits rest on all parties’, based on established implicit or explicit hierarchies, which ‘aren’t always evenly distributed’ (Pietsch et al., 2020).

Adding to the complexities of these unevenly distributed impacts of ruptures, however, is a new hyper-activity of COVID-safe policies. New reciprocal relationships where the obligations and benefits, and the parties, aren’t always consciously observed, felt or known, due to the uncertainties manifesting themselves in questions such as how to keep staff safe, what is known about a new strain of the virus, who will be vaccinated, and whether or not a return to campus is safe or feasible. What if, for example, policy predictability evaporates in circumstances and occurrences that exceed the most vigilant policy forecasts? What if this invisible virus has crushed any prior or usual understanding of the university and what it means for it to be ‘fit for purpose’ (University of Melbourne, 2020), where we as human actors no longer know how to respond to policies and strategic plans? When the daily concerns surrounding what is or is not possible depend on where nonhuman actants act upon the university, what does that shift in the orientation towards previously common practices such as developing plans of action for operations and university goals for the next 10 years? As insightful as policy makers and the policies they devise may be, an activist university, following this posthuman argument, is unknowably intricate, affected and affective, intra-relational.

In a university context an ongoing orientation of revolt uncovers the ruptures of many supposed certainties. Conceptualising the university as a precarious and unknowable relationality of occurrences affirms that all that occurs within it only occurs through and because of the relationships amongst all of its elements (Arndt and Tesar, 2019). It implicates the educational policy environment, to push a more ruthless and irreverent interrogation of the nature and purpose of its hyper-activity, to question what is being taught and assessed and to what end, and to whom the university and its policy-makers are accountable. The vibrant materials of all sorts that form and operate beyond, alongside and entangled with the human part include all that affects, intra-relates, all that lives and throbs, including the virus.

Revolt as an approach to future policy and practice

Applying the notion of revolt as ongoing questioning and interrogation within the university assemblage aims to disturb any expectations of simplicity in enacting university agendas. In keeping with posthuman research methodologies revolt creates new insights, removes some confusions, and leads at the same time to new confusions (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016; Ulmer, 2017), by materialising the construct of the university. Braidotti suggests ‘[p]oststructuralism paved the way for this approach, but the posthuman turn materializes it and composes a new ontological framework of becoming-subjects’ (2018: 3). The impact of COVID-19 on university policies and practices offers an example of the way in which we could reimagine activism. It illustrates the ways in which nonhuman forces act upon educational futures, shaping new ontological frameworks (Tesar, 2021) and forcing ongoing questioning to make meaning in these new realities.

While a Kristevan conceptualisation of revolt lies in a poststructural human realm, shifting to a posthuman revolt requires a thoughtful questioning beyond this realm. It requires a confrontation of the posthuman predicament, and the exceptionalisms associated with it. Similarly, to Barad’s (2010) notion of diffraction, revolt involves digging deeper into meanings and questioning what we know about not only the university but its community, its policy environment and ourselves. Diffraction offers a framework for action that involves ‘reading texts intra-actively through one another, enacting new patterns of engagement, attending to how exclusions matter’ (Barad, 2010: 243). It draws our attention to the exclusion of the nonhuman, to implications of diverse spacetimes, and deeply ingrained anthropocentric exceptionalisms. While certain policies and practices may have slowly, over time, become the norm, COVID-19 has forced a re-reading of what is done with them. Perhaps students in initial teacher education programmes in a particular university have traditionally been offered certain experiences, face-to-face, in a classroom. Their assessment tasks may have reflected these experiences, and how they made sense of them in relation to their teaching practice (Arndt and Tesar, 2019). A Kristevan revolt means questioning all of their learning experiences, which may have been built on particular underlying onto-epistemological framings, experiences and reflective practices.

Re-reading the related policies through a lens that recognises COVID-19 as more-than-human activism involves revolt as asking more questions, re-turning to the origins and histories – ours, the university’s, the aim of the overall teacher education course, the surround environment’s (Tesar and Arndt, 2020). It means questioning all of what is human and more-than-human in relation to the policies and practices associated with the student experiences. It involves re-considering evolutions, and various turns and tangents of the known and unknown actors and actants, that is, the students, the lecturers, the droplets of the virus, it’s spread, through talk, proximity, laughter, touch, intra-acting. A Kristevan revolt opens us up to diverse interpretations of temporal, personal and spatial elements, as ‘interpretation’ Kristeva says, ‘is itself a revolt’ (Kristeva, 2002a: 414), leading to diverse meanings of COVID-tracing apps, QR codes, surveillance and vaccinations, in relation to the university assemblage. Such a revolt implicates humans in ‘unique, uncompromisingly questioning inner experiences’ (Kristeva, 2014: 3). Fitting with a diffractive framework for action, then, revolt urges attitudinal shifts that counter normalisations emanating from a purely and simply human focused policy landscape.

Beyond COVID-19

Importantly, adopting an ontological and epistemological inner questioning through revolt, could be expected to push beyond the disruptions caused by COVID-19. Perhaps it could lead to reconceptualisations of common university policy perpetuations of a dominant Euro-centric focus (Andreotti et al., 2011), beyond the limits of human knowability or clarity. That is, it might mean that unintended consequences benefit more inclusive understandings of particular policies leading to understandings of practices, that, once disrupted, no longer fit. Adopting revoltful questioning and humility, as not only our human but our knowable, definable ways of thinking and desire for stability and certainty become called into question could offer insights into new, human and more-than-human understandings (Malone et al., 2020). Perhaps the rawness of such a diffractive reading could elevate the intra-relationalities with/in more-than-human othernesses, pushing us further into the potentially not only accepting, but desiring a sense of comfort with the discomfort of not knowing.

If policy is intended to help us to plan, to develop procedures, to know ‘where we are going’ within the university, then tiny revolts question and shift our attitudes and our expectations. By pushing us to take the time to re-read policy in diverse, diffractive ways, revolt enables us to unplan, redevelop, unknow, policy and practice through an evolving sense of what to do, try, change, in the face of uncertainty. Such a re-reading may take time, to stay with the trouble, as Haraway (2016) might suggest, or to practice a little dithering, as meaning is made and remade (Haraway, 2016; Arndt and Tesar, 2020). Since activism can take many forms, thinking in tiny revolts influences orientations towards change in the university assemblage.

Ongoing revolt

When revolt is seen as a human and a nonhuman activism, as a re-turning, ‘patient and meticulous’ dismantling of the workings of discourse, culture and the institution, it is an ongoing process, which ‘requires ceaseless analysis, vigilance and will to subversion’ (Kristeva, 1986a: 299). It provokes an attitude as much as, and indeed as, acts of revolt, and requires a certain exile by the de-elevated humans. Exile, like thought, Kristeva says, is also already a form of dissidence, and dissidence, like revolt, occurs over time and as Peters claims, ‘being lost and at times… not knowing how to proceed or what to do’ (2008: 600). As students’ and academics’ realities become dislodged from singular or monolithic truths and strategies, rethinking a life-in-pandemic shifts the policy environment to transcend what is knowable, towards what might be unnameable, unknowable or unrepresentable (Kristeva, 1986a). This, Kristeva says, ‘is the real cutting edge of dissidence’ (p. 300).

Benefits and challenges emerge in the university-in-pandemic. A meticulous dismantling of previously adhered to norms and standards reveal challenges for example in the large numbers of international students of many universities that remain off-shore, and how this renders impractical those policies that require attendance, in-country placements, or practical on-campus participation in their courses. The potential future benefits of such rapid unforeseen change and incoherence potentially prepares the university for the uncertainty of future virus or other non or more-than-human activisms. Perhaps another benefit is to see the seeking of exile or of revoltful responses and questioning of activism as a questioning of knowledges. What knowledge, or whose, is valued, given space, or time, within the university, and what other ways open themselves up to make space for the unexpected and unknown richness that all beings, things and matter bring to the university? What if, for example, the rapid spread and mutations of the virus were seen as a desire to effect change, as a nonhuman knowledge? What if then, purely human forms of knowledge are inadequate to render meaningful engagements, in this complex and intra-acting university assemblage, where power is held by more-than-human forces? Rather than striving for knowledge or particular ways to be an activist, a more humble, de-elevating orientation towards the complexity and uncertainty inherent in an assemblage that is living and throbbing may indeed be the goal of revolt and of a renegotiated activism.

The coronavirus and its mutations have undoubtedly brought to the fore many uncertainties in the university assemblage. Human-centric, anthropomorphic attitudes have been usurped by the virus, as activism and participation in the university have been shown to play out in ways that far exceed the control, understanding and influence of human beings. Indeed, by unsettling the power and influence of human beings, the nonhuman effects and affect that this has had on the university policy environment elevates the necessity of a human humility and openness to the potential vitalities, vibrancies and uncertainties of the nonhuman and more-than-human within the greater university ecology. Ongoing questioning of the ontological and epistemological realities within our universities opens us necessarily to recognising that in the confluence of dissident thought, new forms of consciousness combine, as Kristeva insists, with ‘the pressure of desire’ (1986b: 307) for where we might lead, as we follow or disrupt various university directives.

Concluding comments

This paper has rethought the notion of activism within the wider university assemblage. By provoking an ontological shift towards a posthuman rereading of the university and its contemporary policy landscape, the notion of revolt has been posited as a methodological bridge that pushes beyond the human to elevate COVID-19 as a more-than-human form of activism and of responses to it.

Rather than offering an answer to the question of what is revolt, or of what is activism or even the university, the paper has posited revolt-as-activism and as dependent on the ongoing meticulous interrogation of attitudes and orientations. Such a stance involves a constant questioning of ourselves as always becoming-subjects, of the university as an always becoming, living throbbing assemblage, and of policies as fluid and changeable. In a revoltful activist university, practices and the policies by which they are governed become disassembled, rejuvenated and alive. Explicating the university context and its actors and actants through a shift from a human-centric to a posthuman paradigm, the paper has argued for an orientation towards activism as a human-nonhuman dissident diffractive and ongoing revolt.

This is an argument without conclusion. It does not provide future goals, comfort or certainty. Rather, as the ruthlessness and non-discriminatory nature of COVID-19 continues to affect university – and human – life as we know it, dissident diffractive revolt is suggested as a response to disrupted policies as we know them. By re-thinking the disruptions that the virus has wrought on ‘established norms, values and powers’, tiny revolts perhaps are the future for making meaning of this ‘new normal’ in the activist university.