Telling it slant with side curved head and curiosity: posthumanist/feminist materialist creative activations in university spaces

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes off from the tiny injuries that accumulate, calcify and shape our academic bodies and which live in university spaces and places. The paper moves analytically with the question: how may we insert our non-normative bodies into the material architectures, places and spaces of the university, and disrupt it by our very presence? Composed in post-authorship mode, we discuss the post-personal autoethnographies, research activations, their diffractive renditions and the speculative fabulations this question generated. Drawing theoretically on posthumanism/feminist new materialism, affirmative ethics and musings on bodily disposition, we propose the slow tempo of nonchalance as a theory-praxis. In telling it slant with side-curved head and curiosity, the article offers ways of imagining otherwise, making an appeal for the university to become a more capaciously hospitable place for bodies excluded by exceptionalist hu/Man/ism and extractive knowledge practices.