Rewilding on slow sabbatical: Revisiting Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic”

Abstract

The human rewilding movement seeks to regain balance between humans and the more-than-human world through particular ways of knowing and doing. During a sabbatical, I engaged in rewilding practices and employed Terrapsychological Inquiry to understand my relationship with the more-than-human world. I sought to learn how this might support my work as a scholar, educator, and change maker in the face of managerialist neoliberal strains in higher education. While the problems of institutions require structural transformations, the professoriate itself must also access its own power. The authors of The Slow Professor suggest the possibilites of mindfulness, pleasure, and relationality. Audre Lorde’s ideas are supportive as she connects agency to the epistemic ground of erotic knowing. Through conversation between my field notes and literature, from the perspective of a white settler, I explore themes of the holding environment, reciprocity/relationality, sensorial attention, and wildness as decolonial pathways to re-existence.