Description
Academic knowledge is produced within neoliberal comfort zones that demand increasingly surveilled, securitized, and commodified scholarship, cloaked in the language of engagement. In its neoliberal form, academic knowledge can sideline or serve carceral systems, obscuring the violence affecting the people and communities we – as differently positioned scholars working in the neoliberal university – collaborate with; from Afghanistan, Kurdistan and Palestine, to Germany, Switzerland and the United States. As such we ask: whom does our knowledge truly serve, when those we work alongside live in carceral presents where they are not only displaced but also labeled undocumented and rendered "illegal," or, if documented, forced into constant surveillance as they endure the violent journey toward formal residency or citizenship? This roundtable brings together interdisciplinary scholars in feminist, queer, trans, gender and sexuality studies, and grapples with the question of research methods and writing, centering how scholars, their co-travellers, and interlocutors experience and relate to border and deportation regimes. Underscoring the interplay between racialization, migration, intimacies, and ecology, under the policing eyes of institutions, agencies, and organizations, we pay attention to non-carceral methods. To do so, we reflect on the potentialities and strategies of organizing, as well as the challenges of rebuilding liberatory worlds alongside an academic praxis unbound from its carceral mode.
