Praxis of the undercommons: rupturing university conviviality and coded formations of diversity

ABSTRACT

The concept of the undercommons offers a lens for complicating the discourse of conviviality in education. In this paper, the authors draw on learning experiences opened through black feminisms, decoloniality and anti-coloniality, and new materialisms in an experimental graduate course. Presenting stories drawn from a shared educational space, they theorise fugitive convivial praxis and elucidate insurgent opportunities for intellectual study that nurture decolonial undercurrents of the university apparatus. Such engagements allowed for radical vulnerability in coming together through processes of ethical care, place-making, and counter-expressive thinking especially when coded formations of diversity insist on colonial logics and modes of operation in higher education. With curiosities and questions emerging in the undercommons, the authors also consider remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic toward future possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• fugitive convivial praxis
• undercommons
• otherwise
• learning
• neoliberal university

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the UnderCommons Constellation (UC2) in generating foresight, support, and intellectual practice in relational ways. UC2 has propelled various forms of writing, pedagogy, and inquiry that help to sharpen critical questions in our respective contexts. We are also grateful to anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback, and the team of editors for encouraging our contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For our purpose, we consider Katherine McKittrick’s invitation to ‘observe how black knowledge is continually cast as biological knowledge’ (2021, 45) and thus choose to write with lowercase b to rupture corporeal knowledge-making and excessive description that stagnate and steal livingness. Rupturing official citation style guidance regarding racial and ethnic identity, Bruce (2021) offers a nuanced intervention regarding his methodological and analytical choice to write with a lowercase b emphasising, ‘an improper blackness: … that is neither capitalized nor propertized via the protocols of Western grammar’ (6). The use of capitalised B in the paper honours previously published works and cultural movements.

2 The reference to cockroaches is both literal and figurative. The latter echoes a moment of being awakened from a dream, illusive as it was, yet so vivid like a convention of roaches expressed in Martín Espada’s (2004) poem, My Cockroach Lover.

3 See Harney and Moten (2013, 117) for context of this thinking and conversation.

4 See Grande et al. (2021). The Strike MOMA panel conversation, in which Fred Moten was a part, also included regulating knowledge through museum spaces.

5 Several works are also underway. For related writings, (see Carter 2022; Carter and McIntee 2021; Jean-Denis 2020; Jean-Denis and Jocson 2021; Jules and Scherrer 2021; McIntee 2022; Rashid and Jocson 2021). It is important to mention that prior to the publication of this paper we were all tied to one institution from which we derive the storying central to fugitive convivial praxis. A lot has happened since, including institutional shifts and geographic moves, and we carry forward lessons from our collective experience to further enliven what we do.