‘Not in our Name’

Emily Jay Nicholls,Jade Vu Henry,Fay Dennis

doi:10.5324/njsts.v9i1.3549

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on our collaborative work running a salon for thinking about care in STS research, which quickly became more about fostering an ethico-politics for thinking with care as a mode of academic intervention. Not dissimilar to the origins of the salon in nineteenth-century France, the salon provided a provocative and disruptive space for early career researchers (ECRs) to think together. As attention and critique increasingly point towards the unequal distribution of harms arising from marketization and the vulnerability of ECRs in the ‘neoliberal university,’ we have witnessed a surge in activities that promise a supportive space, such as pre-conference conferences, seminar series, discussion forums and self-care workshops. In this paper, we ask not only what these modes of care might make possible, but also what exclusionary practices and patterns they mask or render more palatable (Ahmed, 2004; Duclos & Criado, 2020; Martin et al., 2015; Murphy, 2015). Reflecting on our experiences of organizing and participating in the salon, with the stated purpose to explore ‘ecologies of care’ as an embodied socio-material practice (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), we move from care ‘out there’ in STS research to care ‘in here’. We follow threads spun by and out from the group to rethink our own academic care practices and how to do the academy otherwise.

Highlights

In Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret (2014) draw on Virginia Woolf’s (1938) Three Guineas to reflect upon the failure of the academy to shift in accordance with the needs of new entrants to the university
We offer our experiment with care and the salon as one small way of ‘taking up the baton’ initially proposed by Virginia Woolf (Stengers & Despret, 2014)
While more and more actors across the sector are recognizing their responsibility to care about and for Early Career Researchers (ECRs), we argue that much of the actual burden of change remains with new scholars

Summary

Introduction

In Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret (2014) draw on Virginia Woolf’s (1938) Three Guineas to reflect upon the failure of the academy to shift in accordance with the needs of new entrants to the university. Given the relatively low profile of our collaboration within the wider institutional context, and the manner in which caregiving and care-receiving (Fisher & Tronto, 1990) blurred our public and private worlds, we embraced the notion of the ‘salon’ as a apt and generative lens – or better yet, a transducer (Barad, 1998) – for thinking and writing about the ecologies of care which circulate through our lived experiences as ECRs. In the ways described above, our salon interactions were guided by a feminist ethos drawn from a shared repertoire of academic literature Unfettered by funding priorities and disciplinary boundaries, our rather unassuming and interdisciplinary salon has given us a glimpse of what Woolf might have imagined when proposing an ‘experimental’ and ‘adventerous’ college: one which seeks ‘[...] not to segregate and specialize but to combine’, and to ‘[...] explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to co-operate’ as well as ‘discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life’ (Ibid., p. 27-28)

ECRs as Objects of Care

Author biographies