In event(s) Together,Differently: Writing Collaboratively in,of,and Beyond the University

Abstract

In this paper, Helen and Mary share writings that emerged from a week in which the two found themselves, as Moten and Harney write, both in and of the university. Lured by the promise of a stolen space to explore what Manning refers to as the ‘fugitive elsewhere’ and ‘the conditions for new ways of encountering study’ with a scholar they had so longed to meet, somehow they are appointed the reluctant guardians of a hastily arranged doctoral conference, held in their visitor’s honour. Sooner and later, the writing wakes. They write as Deleuze describes with Guattari, ‘not ... together, [but] between the two ... never in the same rhythm, ... always out of step’. The writings divert on ‘lines of flight’ from the event/ful week and, excited by the layerings, a text begins to emerge ….

‘We’re all in on the event together, but we’re in it together differently’ (Massumi, 2015, p. 115).

In this paper, Helen and Mary share writings that emerged from a week in which the two found themselves both in and of the university (Moten and Harney, 2004, p. 101). Lured by the promise of a stolen space to explore the ‘fugitive elsewhere’ and ‘the conditions for new ways of encountering study’ (Manning, 2016, p. 27) with a scholar they had so longed to meet, somehow they are appointed the reluctant guardians of a hastily arranged doctoral conference, held in their visitor’s honour.

Sooner and later, the writing wakes. They write as Deleuze describes with Guattari, ‘not ... together, [but] between the two ... never in the same rhythm, ... always out of step’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002, p. 13). The writings divert on ‘lines of flight’ from the event/ful week and, excited by the layerings, a text begins to emerge ….

Holding her long-awaited just received copy of ‘Collaborative Writing as Inquiry’ (Speedy & Wyatt, 2014), she excitedly opens its beautifully glossy cover to endearing inscriptions ‘to dear Peggy’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002; Manning, 2016; Massumi, 2015). It slowly dawns on her that this is Peggy Styles’s book. ¹ She turns the pages previously touched, treasured, by Peggy, pages exemplifying collaborative writing in so many diverse ways that just to hold it, with Peggy, is heartening. She’s drawn to the last section, to the

questions about the agency and potency of the writing itself and of a poetics not only of human experiences, but of the spaces we leave between us and what we write and say, and of the myriad residual traces left behind and ahead of us as a map towards the collaborative methodologies of the future (ibid., p. 227).

A decade later, Helen and Mary are privileged to be invited to join with others in this special issue, creating speculative, experimental collaborative writing methodologies, resurrecting the responsibility ‘to take, amend and extend’ (ibid., p. 275) the collaborative writing practices of our ‘elders’ ( Gale and Wyatt, 2010 , p. 27).

Opening the Word document, she ponders the spaces between Mary’s writings. Openings. Invitations. She has been absent. Tumbling in the void. Lost in limbo. She has not written to or with or without Mary for months. She has fallen silent. Dumb. Numb. The words no longer come, bidden or not.

Erin Manning says that the university devours you. Chews you up. And spits you out.

She has spent 17 years slowly disintegrating in the intestines of an insatiable beast.

All the goodness in her has been extracted. Or excreted.

She feels like a dried-up turd.

The university is in ruins. Her university is in ruins. Redundancies abound. Cherished colleagues are going or have gone. There is a recruitment freeze. Budgets are being slashed. Programmes are closing.

Everything she has worked towards has been deemed of no value. She has been deemed of no value.

Senior managers insist they didn’t see it coming. No one saw it coming they protest. How could we have known?

We all knew. We all kicked away at the foundations and then turned our faces away when the cracks began to show.

The air is thick and warm. Oppressive. She begins to clear her office. She has been saved. A late reprieve. She has been ‘bumped’ into a new role. Her old job no longer needed in the new streamlined structure.

She has been erased.

She fills bin bags with the detritus and debris of 17 years. There are overhead transparencies (is she really that old?) from the English for Academic Purposes course she took hoping it would open the door to a university career. There are the articles she read for her PGCE. Foucault. Freire. hooks. They are printed on pastel-coloured paper. Soft pinks, blues and greens. A cursory nod to the neurodivergent reader.

There are more from her masters. St. Pierre. Richardson. MacLure. They are scrawled with notes.

There is a box labelled PhD. Not so much here. The world had turned digital by then.

She strips poly pockets from their contents. Files full of paper handouts, materials made to be touched and held. Tasks that encouraged discussion, collaboration, negotiation. The mainstay of a language teacher.

There are certificates and awards. A hand-written card from the Vice Chancellor. Oh, she so wanted to be in. And of.

She still does. Sometimes.

But the of taunts her. When did the university turn its back on people like her? Like Mary? And all the subversive intellectuals (Moten & Harney, 2004) who inspired them both?

All gone. Or going.

When did it become necessary to adopt a strategic duplicity (Manning, 2020, p. 216) to survive?

Manning says the institution requires us to enter into a pact: ‘what we live in is also what we build, and what we take down. What is the pact the university demands? What bodies does it need to survive? What knowledges?’ (Manning, 2020, p. 215).

Not hers. Not theirs.

Mary has been writing. A file is shared: Academic Suicide.

Mary writes with and without her. Mary writes to live. Lives to write.

The writing is not this piece. But in a way it is. Everything gets tangled up together. They are constantly collaborating, even when they are not.

She reads Mary’s words. They tumble forth, filled with the pain and frustration Mary feels as she once again finds herself banging on the door of an institution that does not seem to want her.

But does she want it? Can she enter into the pact?

Perhaps she needs to remain ‘outside’.

But where is outside?

Helen has written! Jouissance turns to heartache as Mary reads through watering eyes. She encountered lecturer Helen 7 years ago attending the Introduction to Teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) course. With a PGCE and several years’ experience of teaching ESOL, she felt an imposter despite having no formal qualification, no piece of paper. She was relieved at Helen’s calm classroom presence, excited by her resources, inspired. She’s with her now, surrounded by bin bags and boxes bursting at the edges, filled with lecturer and student Helen’s writing. Beautiful writing, please don’t put it into bin bags, Helen, even if they do expand infinitely. She suspects the University prefers boxes. Perhaps being in a box would contain you safely in the institution . . .

17 years.

A lifetime: Eliot and Joey, her beautiful in every way tabby boys, lived for 17 years.

How is it possible for 17 years to end like this? Even knowing that another esteemed, cherished colleague was removed after nearly 30 years, without even a goodbye, Mary still wonders . . .

In 17 years, Mary has worked in eight educational institutions; Helen has remained faithful to one.

Oh Helen.

17 years and a handwritten card from the vice chancellor

but still chewed up and spat out elsewhere . . .

Mary scrolls up. She needs to insert a gap or two. If Helen writes like Mary, Helen will come back to this writing, and Mary doesn’t want her to find the gap filled, yet again. It can’t be satisfying writing together, if the other continually rushes in before the ink is dry, but she can’t help it; Helen’s words are so wonderfully crafted that they waken writing. When, days later, she had shared writing provoked by the shared event, she’d never imagined that Helen would be urged to write too, and that first a conference paper and subsequently this article would emerge.

And as she slowly, very slowly, rereads ‘the pact’ that Helen refers to, and what is offered ‘outside’, there’s a sudden yearning for,

The outside is an intuitive concept for the more neurodiverse among us. It is what accompanies all experience in the making: what leaves those traces that still vibrate on the edges of what we call objects ... It is the intensities that so many don’t seem to hear, those intensities that are continuously getting in the way of the human voice-that privileged site of human expression-the intensities that whisper to us that the world is lively and living beyond the space the human takes ... The outside is not the formed matter, the segmented, the archivable. It is the anarchic share of striated knowledge, the share of experience that resists scripting yet nonetheless affects what the script can do. Anarchival knowledge, neurodiverse knowledge, cleaves form and force, calling knowledge back to its edgings-into-experience. It is the diagram, the force-of-form, where knowing meets unknowing (Manning, 2020, p. 224).

What if the activities, which take place inside, could happen outside: teaching, researching, writing, reading, thinking, doin g . . .

She uses the university.

Unlike Helen, Mary heeds Moten and Harney’s (2004) call: sneaking in and stealing whatever she can; it’s easier for her than Helen, who is in, not out.

She’s amazed to be allowed a ‘researcher profile’ (after completing a form explaining why she needed one); she believes it to be ‘a jolt or shock out of those habituated modes of thinking and being’ ( Murray & Gale, 2022 , p. 202), until ‘Professional Services’ is added to the top in blue font. She’ll never be in.

Even when doing her beloved PhD, she was never really in.

Rebecca Solnit (2017) writes,

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you (p. 117).

Perhaps this is why she continues to sneak in long after she is forced to stop her doctoral studies, and why, 3 months after having the unimaginable privilege of spending 5 days with Erin Manning in Plymouth, she attempts to retrace their steps. She thought the magic that was Erin, Helen and Ken would have faded, but sitting outside the Boston Tea Party, it’s there in the rippling water, the graceful trees, the damp air, the gentle wind, the assorted boats, the green and yellow leaves on the ground, the intricate maze of branches above. As she walks, she realises space is always moving and so it’s not a ‘retracing’ of steps, but a ‘mapping’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2015a).

Entering the café for water, the negativity, the sadness, linger. With a sense of hope, and dreams-believed-dead resurfacing, she detours into a shop walked past 3 months ago; the glittery trainers lie abandoned in a brown bag at home, a memento of this visit ...

Waiting for a takeaway by the Quay, the hug with Erin is felt once more. It’s where they first spoke, with prompting from Helen, from Ken, about Mary’s book/thesis, Erin’s work, their teaching.

She’s been reading Ursula Le Guin’s (2024) ’The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’. A novel as a container, a carrier bag. Her thesis-book always a carrier bag of her PhD ideas, the becoming of a thesis-book so far, on a designated day, was only just submitted in time to meet the deadline. A carrier bag stretches out, expanding to fit its contents. The thesis and the book ( Garland, 2023 ) also pushed the word limits to the edge, the format, the rules, the conventions of academic writing, the discursively constructed structures . . . That ‘event’ pushed her to the edge, Helen and Erin Manning too. Knowing she was complicit in creating a conference which made their guest ill, which sidestepped the presenters, stays with her.

She enters the room. It is busy, overcrowded, too warm. She is later than she wanted to be. The desks are arranged in cramped rows. People are talking. Necks twisting to converse with those sat beside or behind them.

This is not what she had wanted.

We need to set up the Zoom call, someone says. She hesitates. She doesn’t know how to make it all work. How to hold it together. Heat starts to creep into her neck and face. She logs in. Boxes appear. Chat springs to life. We can’t hear you. You sound as if you are in a washing machine. She panics.

More people arrive. The presenters are waiting. She catches an eye roll.

This is not what she had wanted.

She feels as if she has been handed a broken vase. It is ugly. Cracked. The pieces have been glued together. But badly. Without care. She doesn’t want to hold the vase. She doesn’t like the vase. She does not think the giver of the vase likes the vase. She wants to break the vase. But it has been entrusted to her. So she does not.

A cable is plugged in. She smiles and offers apologies and welcomes. She makes a feeble joke about technological incompetence. She catches another eye roll.

She wanted to be early, but she comes from far and the traffic is the worst it’s ever been in impossible driving conditions. She arrives late and stressed to a computer, monitor and microphone owl refusing to connect preventing the sharing of doctoral students’ brilliant work; a cross, crowded, noisy room full of expectations and demands. Overwhelmed by the live(li)ness of the environment, her self crumbles.

She is co-chairing with Helen, and since Helen is struggling to set everything up, she should, as she is being signalled to do, simply apologise for the delay and announce that they are having technological difficulties. Paralysed by the paralysis of technology, she has no voice.

The

Stress

Heat

Noise

Anxieties

are overwhelming. She has never chaired in-person. The

Stress

Heat

Noise

Anxieties

overpower her.

Presenters present to their allocated time slots. But time has been squeezed and now there is not enough. The conference schedule is all awry. The coffee break has been swallowed. The lunch break eaten up. She signals to a presenter in mid-flow that they are out of time. She doesn’t know why.

A box of sandwiches arrives. A desk is cleared. People pick up the triangular packages. They eye them with disdain and put them back.

This is not what she had wanted.

Erin Manning sits pale and erect. There is no colour in her cheeks.

I am not feeling well, she says. She stands and leaves.

This is not what she had wanted.

She feels ashamed, depleted, exhausted.

This is not what she had wanted.

But what did she want?

Proclivities of expansiveness, capaciousness, generosity.

Not impositions, constraints, and shut downs.

Erin Manning says that the university is in ruins. But who ruined it?

As Foucault (1980) said, we are all complicit.

Desks in straight lines. Face front. Pay attention. Speak. Don’t speak.

This gives her no pleasure. Just pain. It is pain full.

The constraints of a classroom close in on her, everyone sitting facing forward, presenters presenting one at a time facing the audience facing them.

Helen, someone who looks like Helen, warns a presenter she is out of time. Helen is suffering too: Helen is doing what she feels she is expected to do.

Mary wishes she was somewhere else, somewhere for the unfolding concepts to play out, to become ...

Mary longs for the twitching of a Deleuzian witch’s broom (Deleuze, 1988) taking off in a whirlwind of energies and intensities, escaping the confines of the walls ...

There’s such movement in the presentations. Why sit still to listen, at a distance from the presenter, the chair?

She tries sitting in the audience to chair; she can’t be at the front. She feels more comfortable, less in the spotlight; she feels as though she is being judged and found wanting ... She doesn’t want to detract from the presenters.

Erin Manning leaves the room to lie down. Mary can’t think where she could go. Is she okay? Will Erin return for the afternoon’s ‘postdoctoral’ session?

Erin Manning (2020) says that all education is predicated on colonialism and that neurotypicality is nothing but whiteness at work. And, as Harney and Moten say, these white, colonial structures are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us: ‘this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly’ (Harney & Moten, 2013, pp. 140-141).

Capitalism is killing us all. Slowly, quickly, softly, violently: ‘[C]apitalism breaks bodies, its devaluation of qualitative difference at the level of aesthetic sociality so complete that bodies barely hold up. Exhaustion, anxiety, depression, and all their offshoots are everywhere palpable’ (Manning, 2020, p. 292).

She feels broken.

Smashed to smithereens.

Bodyings and worldings reduced once more to body and world. This body. This world. Self-contained pre-existing categories bear down.

In The University and the Undercommons, Moten and Harney (2004) write of the subversive intellectual whose path it is ‘to sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of’ (Moten & Harney, 2004, p. 101).

But this is no undercommons. There is no dancing in circles. No cartwheels in the classroom. No space to be cluelessly la dee da (Manning, 2020, p. 227).

Rebecca Solnit says that ‘in dreary times joy itself is insurrectionary, as community is in times of isolation’ (Solnit, 2002, p.215). The times are certainly dreary. And she often feels so alone. But collaborative writing brings both joy and friendship. Writing with Mary together-apart sustains her. Nourishes her. It is a means to negotiate the university’s ruins.

But she has been adrift for months.

To be more in and less of. She dreams of that; to this day, however, the need to be in puzzles her, but that need has driven her to continue to apply to universities, even though almost every job application is met with silence, or, worse, ‘Thank you for your application, but ...’. As friends take ‘voluntary’ redundancy one by one, live under the threat of compulsory redundancy, are troubled by a mysterious H-index, she too finds that collaborative writing brings both joy and friendship in these dreary days. Writing with Helen together-apart sustains her. Nourishes her. They do not need to be of the university to write, but do they need to be in?

Writing a month after the event, she’s not alone in thinking they need ways of taking the week forward: thinking-with Bodies-without-Organs ( Deleuze & Guattari, 2015a ), the structures of the disastrous doctoral conference, the centrepiece of the week’s events, could be shaken up, arranged differently to enable something else to happen. Might another spacetime have created a ‘plane of immanence’ ( Deleuze & Guattari, 2015b ), of composition, somewhere for the unfolding concepts to play out, to become . . . A twitching of a witch’s broom and a witch’s ride ( Deleuze, 1988 ), in a whirlwind of energies and intensities, escaping the confines of the walls . . .

She cannot continue doing what she’s been doing. How could she have created a conference without space to think, a conference caught up in the clock, racing against time after a delayed start?

What if they had questioned, with Manning (2023 , p. 6), ‘How to keep the process neurodiverse, to avoid overcoding it with neurotypical expectations?’

What if they had also questioned, ‘How to retain the attunement towards the minor. Such that the coming-together can also thrive in a sidling posture?’ (ibid.).

Knowing now that she is being complicit in neoliberal, neurotypical practices, in whiteness, especially when she didn’t think she was, has shocked her, unsettled her, as indeed this knowing should.

But knowing is not enough.

The rigid structures of the doctoral conference need to be shaken up, arranged differently to enable something else to happen. It seems, however, that she/they only ‘dream of finding other ways ... we can’t quite reconcile ourselves to other modes of living’ ( Manning, 2023 , p. 166). If ‘Parapedagogies of Resistance cannot be schools’ ( Manning, 2025 ), Mary wonders if they also cannot be conferences because these too ‘produce methods for encountering value. And they tether us to them’. For whereas the conference was steeped in structure and constraints, it is ‘[a]cross, alongside, in the interstices, [that] craft makes worlds, and it does so well in . . . experimental environments’ (ibid.) like the reading group’s first doctoral event perhaps? There were no Chairs. She remembers Helen presenting with everyone sitting in an almost circle feeling connected, photos of detritus seen in Sutton Harbour and elsewhere changing intermittently on the screen to the side of Helen; she missed the beginning, if there was a beginning, because she was presenting – it was her first time – participants threw and unfolded paper planes (with lines from the becoming-thesis folded inside) as students had folded and thrown grammar worksheets in an English class many years ago; fellow PhD students Mandy and Caroline each had fascinating objects set out to be touched, felt, encouraging play. Whilst rooms inevitably created divisions, there was a sense of a Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘plane of composition’ unfolding with these different becomings involving the more than simply human. Helen and Mary were in that event together differently, too. Why have the subsequent events been so formal? Technology? During the pandemic, the conference moved online and there it has stayed. It’s an international event now, but she mourns the loss of its uniqueness, laments the wilting witches’ brooms, which no longer (t)witch . . . Erin Manning (2025) writes about change ‘felt in the shade of a colour, in the surprise of a line. And then life went on’. Perhaps that’s what happen ed?

***

How does it work?

Two faces peer into hers. She is not sure what the question means. Collaborative writing, they say. How do you do it? How do we do it? What’s the secret? The formula? The blueprint?

She is standing in a crowded conference space. She and Mary have just presented some of their collaborative writings.

The performance has drained her. She longs for a decent coffee, a quiet smoke. I’ll be back in a moment, she says.

How does it work?

She has no answer to give. But she tries. It’s like catching a wave. Surfing a crest. Barrelling through water. It’s like sinking. Drowning. And finding your breath.

The four blonde brows furrow slightly.

Do you have a structure? A time frame? Do you write together? Or apart? Who starts? Who finishes? Who is in charge?

No. No, well sometimes. Yes and no. No and yes. We, she, they. They, she, we. No body.

She cannot explain the fleeting moments. The words that come and don’t. The joy. The pain. Collaborative writing spaces are elusive. Unpindownable. The magic is lost the second they are named and tamed.

It is Manning’s ticcingflapping pocket practice, ‘writing toward a time where the voice that speaks in the acrossness of experience in the making is finally heard’ (Manning, 2020, p. 288).

It is Cixous’ incitement to ‘[l]et yourself go, let the writing flow, let yourself steep; bathe, relax, become the river, let everything go, open up, unwind, open the floodgates, let yourself roll….’ (Cixous, 1991, p. 57).

Collaborative writing is writing beyond where language knows its place (Manning, 2020, p. 288). It is getting to know things by letting ourselves be known by them (Cixous, 1991, p. 57).

How does it work? Mary wonders what she’d have said, knows she would have blundered in, not allowed the question the thoughtfulness it deserved.

She did that with a question immediately after the presentation, why do you write in the third person? Whereas ‘she’ and ‘Mary’ emerged in those early tentative stages of this collaborative piece, ‘I’ became ‘Helen’ and ‘she’ just moments before its premiere. She, Mary, found it too painful to be ‘I’, she needed distance to write the event she was in with Helen, differently.

But, how does it work? Mary anxiously asked a similar question of writing collaborators, Helen and Ken, when writing a book chapter together. This was Mary’s first and only other experience of writing collaboratively and she was relieved, and confused, at the suggestion that we were doing it, we were making it up as we went along ( Bowstead et al., 2025 ). Perhaps it had simply seemed too simple? Receiving new writing from Helen and Ken always excited her, she read it greedily, opening it immediately if possible, saving it until she could savour the words if not. And then waiting. Waiting for the words to flow in response. The never knowing which lines would take flight, and how, keeping the writing al ive.

But, how does it work in this writing with Helen and Mary?

Adopting the term used by Jane Speedy, Ken and Jonathan, Mary’s blundering answer would be that they ‘riff’ off each other; Mary writes, writes and writes, leaving gaps for Helen to write or not, Mary worries Helen doesn’t like the writing, Helen writes sometimes in a gap, sometimes not, Mary rejoices and, inspired by Helen, writes and writes, leaving gaps for Helen to write or not, Helen writes sometimes in a gap, sometimes not, Mary writes, Helen writes, they reach the imposed word count, Helen and Mary carry on regardless: the writing isn’t ready to stop ... She’s written this, but there is no formula to their writing. It is, as Helen writes,

like catching a wave. Surfing a crest. Barrelling through water. It’s like sinking. Drowning. And finding your breath ...

Collaborative writing spaces are elusive. Unpindownable. The magic is lost the second they are named and tam ed.

She stops writing and shares this whole document, with gaps, where she thinks Helen might like to write knowing that Helen might not be moved to write there, might create other gaps to write into, but she’s no longer sure that they are seeing the same writing and has added three paragraphs or so that Helen possibly cannot see ... This is the way they write, sometimes, but Mary knows she should stop and read when the writing spirals as it is now.

Into a gap, Helen writes.

It is 2010. Or 2011. Or not. A time of optimism and adventure. ²

There has been a shift. A change. A transformation.

Her writing. The writing. Writing will never be the same again.

It is a cool Autumn evening, or perhaps it is a warm summer afternoon, she cannot really remember.

The room is too brightly lit. The desks and chairs, pulled from their regimented rows, cluster. We are there to write. Together. Apart.

She loses herself to words. To a moment suspended in time.

She reads her piece to the group. She cries. She doesn’t know why.

Ken smiles.

Bronwyn nods.

The master’s dissertation writes itself.

In this letting go, she senses something at work beyond words. It is vibrating in the ‘between-the-two-ness’ of Ken and Jonathan’s collaborative thesis (Gale & Wyatt, 2010).

It shifts and shimmers in Mary’s writings.

And in the gaps she leaves.

Later, as she tries to articulate the ineffable, she revisits a conversation with Ken. He talks of collaborative practices as spaces for escape and for change. As spaces that possess a ‘nascent fertility’:

I have a feeling that when I encourage, or when Jonathan and I collaboratively encourage people, students, participants, in workshops whatever, to write, a shift happens, and it’s not irrespective of, but it doesn’t matter so much what is written, it’s the fact that writing has been done, and I think the fact that writing has been done shifts the space, there’s a ‘processual sensualism’ there, there is the kind of nurturing of moments where the ‘assemblage’ shifts where the notion of group becomes redundant and the notion of ‘assemblage’ becomes much more meaningful in relation to the space. Somehow or other the writing does something and as I’ve said, it’s less significant what the writing says, more what it animates. What it animates in terms of the space (Gale & Bowstead, 2013, p. 10).

Collaborative writing animates. It is animating.

Solnit (2017) writes,

[c]ertainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar (p. 5).

That’s what writing with Helen does for her: in these dreary times of uncertainty, as they lose themselves, collaborative writing surprises, awakening the unexpected, offering glimmerings of the not yet known. Writing with(out) Helen gives Mary confidence and inspiration – both easily lost when alone. The writing, which had faltered in the gaps and silences in-between revived after meeting on campus – the Reservoir Café – with their drinks, fishes swimming, and pigeons pecking. They sit below a tree offering welcome shade a month before this paper is due. Inspired by their conversations, Mary returns to her desk and, while Helen is in a meeting in the building opposite, discreetly writes a few lines: Helen and Mary are still talking about the event over a year ago now; she still laments the loss of a week that should have been wonderful, but was actually traumatic; she remains confused, unable to make sense of the week, and yet she learned so much about how to question, about so many things; but being complicit, even if unintentionally, in neurotypical practices, is like stabbing herself in the heart ...

Erin Manning says that the university is beyond rebuilding, beyond repair:

The outside is pushing in. Outside doesn’t mean a space already created. Outside is the undercommons working it, eating it from within. There is no pre-existing space that can replace the buildings in ruins. The undercommons must always be invented anew. It is a question of moving sideways, of attuning to the sideways movements already there, following their line of flight (Manning, 2020, p. 216).

The undercommons must always be invented anew.

The adventuring spirit of the reading group that sustained Mary and Helen, that nurtured their thinkings and writings feels like it has been appropriated by the neoliberal and the neurotypical.

Time for us to step aside. To side step. To step sideways.

The University is in ruins.

The reading group that supported, sustained and inspired Helen and Mary over the years has been crumbling since that (moment)ous event. With its rupture, there’s a sensing that the University may no longer value their interests. And, since Mary has been kept firmly outside of the University since finishing her PhD 42 months ago, she begins to wonder what she has to lose by trying to publish Academic Suicide, which does, at times, rail against the academy, critique its neurotypical ways, its apparent lack of encouragement for creative and innovative practices. And so, she resolves to stop banging her head on the now-not-so-ivory tower, to accept that after 42 months and the forced departure over the last year of most of the lecturers who have supported and encouraged her, she, Mary, will never be allowed entry. And as she types those words, wondering how else she might sustain an otherwise shattered soul, she knows, that writing collaboratively, will save her from ruin, will encourage her to continue sneaking in and stealing from the University (Moten and Harney, 2013), to not give up, but to continue the fight for ‘parapedagogies of resistance’ (Manning, 2025), for justice, for an education not limited to churning out students ready to be employed, but teaching thinking, reading, writing and doing . . .

Writing with Helen affects her writing, lifts it, makes it more careful, considered, crafted; writing with Helen helps her accept that she doesn’t understand what happened and why at the event, that something beyond Helen and Mary happened that they were nonetheless a part of.

And gradually Mary realises that Helen has joined her in this writing for there is new writing interspersed, writing which calms and excites Mary, but it is late now so she will save it for tomorrow ...