Organizing for collective feminist killjoy geographies in a US university

Abstract

Amid broader discussions of the continuities of racism and sexism on campuses in the United States, we bring together Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘feminist killjoy’ with intersectional feminist geographers’ focus on the politics of knowledge production to suggest that the academic department is a key site for anti-racist feminist intervention. Specifically, we survey our organizing experiences as members of Women in Geography (WIG) at UW-Madison, a long-standing group that supports female, non-binary, and gender-queer graduate students, faculty, and staff affiliated with geography. We argue that departmentally-situated groups such as WIG can cultivate anti-racist feminist praxis as collective feminist killjoys through diverse tactics that identify multiple points for intervention. In this paper, we focus on two specific tactics that WIG developed between 2016 and 2019, which include organizing feminist academic professional development activities and conducting a climate survey for geography graduate students. Critically reflecting on WIG’s interventions in academic professionalization and climate, we find that a collective feminist killjoy orientation facilitates recognition of, and intervention in, shared - and differential - precarity.

Keywords:

• Academic climate
• anti-racist feminist
• feminist killjoy
• geography
• professionalization
• sexism

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our comrades in WIG and the broader Geography Department at UW–Madison who are involved in the work of organizing for collective feminist killjoy geographies. We particularly want to recognize Lisa Naughton and Erika Marín-Spiotta who both actively supported the WIG tactics discussed in this paper as faculty members. We also wish to thank Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Alessandra Radicati, and the Women’s Academic Writing group in Doha, Qatar, in addition to three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danya Al-Saleh

Danya Al-Saleh and Elsa Noterman, PhD Candidates in the Geography Department at University of Wisconsin-Madison, engage in work related to sexism, anti-racist feminist organizing, and the university as a site for productive political intervention. Together they have co-coordinated the Women in Geography collective at UW-Madison’s Geography, organizing and participating in workshops and panels that seek to cultivate relationships with feminist collectives locally and across the discipline of geography. In addition to their collaborative work on academic spaces and practices, Elsa has conducted research on critical pedagogy and the role of credit, debt, and finance in the restructuring of UW-Madison and Danya’s dissertation examines the internationalization of U.S. higher education in the form of branch campuses in the Arabian Peninsula.