On 16 February 2024, I presented research at the University of Essex with Dr. Ana Baeza Ruiz. Entitled 'Occupying the “not yet”: embodiment, hope and time in the neoliberal university', their paper explored themes of hope and care in UK Higher Education.
Abstract:
Since 2019, Dr Ana Baeza Ruiz and I have been collaborating on research around hope and care in UK Higher Education art and design pedagogies. Hope has long been a grounding concept in critical pedagogies (Freire 2017 [1973]; bell hooks 1994, 2003, 2010), and more recently it has been taken up in the UK context to query the university qua institution (Amsler 2016). Common to these propositions is the positing of hope as a place of epistemological incompleteness, whereby teachers and students jointly engage in learning towards the transformation of subjectivity. However, in the prevailing neoliberal landscape of HE there are signs that this ‘hope’ has been waning for some time. Working against the threat of increased surveillance, routinization and time-management, our interest lies in the possibilities for contestation through object-focused and emotion-based approaches that engage experience and reflection, plurality and relationality (Escobar 2018) in ways that can help generate critical affectivities.
In our talk, we built on our previous work to consider what it means to seek these values within neoliberal institutional frameworks in a time of uncertainty. When we are all “being overtaken by processes that are unmaking the world that any of us ever knew” (David and Turpin 2015: 3), how do we turn to ideas of actively making and of openly embracing the momentum of the unknown, and harnessing the critical urgency of the ‘not yet’? Ana discussed teaching approaches that sought to challenge the neoliberal logic of HE, thinking through a framework of care and embodied learning. I looked at the ways in which these notions of the ‘not yet’ might be activated via considerations of embodied writing and making practices, materiality, sensation and the more-than-human, and how these impact and are informed by pedagogical frameworks and collaborative research.