Higher Education and Love by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030823719
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Writing Collaborations

Writing collaborations have always been central to our academic practices. For Susanne, collective and collaborative inquiry have formed her academic subjectivity. Writing has opened experimental textual spaces for the emergence of the not-yet known, for heterogeneity and difference, for a vitality that comes from thinking beyond the self (Wyatt et al., 2018). Covid-19 has provoked a long collaboration with writing and art-making friends in Australia and the United Kingdom. The invitation to participate, initiated in England by Jane Speedy and in Australia by Bronwyn Davies, came on 30 March 2020 and we are still writing, weekly or fortnightly, within our pods of three in each location, and periodically as six. What we write has no form, or has found its own form, week by week with the shifting affective, material and pandemic conditions in our locations and globally. Art-making practices have also varied in their intensities and resonances. Some of us are professional artists, others are less skilled. We have become a transversal mobile writing assemblage as tropes and images migrate and pick up speed as they move amongst us.

We call these Corona Diaries, or Quarantine Conversations, but lately we have mobilised the figure of the migratory Arctic Tern, a bird known for its long and convoluted route spanning journeys from Wales, UK, to New South Wales, Australia. Although the demand to write, to think, to create might sometimes seem a burden—for Susanne it is usually last minute and late at night—and although we have said we don’t know what we are doing, the reasons why we are doing whatever this is that we do are that it is essential, it is life-giving. It has made a virtue of and held open a space for the impossibility of knowing what we are in, and what the future might hold; our feelings, fears and furies; for the intimacies of all our everydays. Vulnerability and exposure wend through our work as we are variously positioned by age, geography, health, intimacies as ‘at risk’ in some ways or other. Sometimes, theory slides in and tangles itself up but the practice has been the thing, each of us writing/making in response to the infinite capacities and provocations of those others—trees, fathers, dogs and much more—that have become part of our expanded imaginaries. This is a decentred self-propelling feminist materialist pedagogical practice, a ‘collectively drawn creativity’ (Braidotti, 2018, p. xvii).

For Carol, the conditions of possibility for writing during the pandemic have been reconfigured in some unforeseen ways. Writing during the pandemic has gathered new rhythms, intensities and modes of existence. Here are just two. The first concerns emails. When lockdown first hit in March 2020, daily work emails diminished to the almost non-existent for a few weeks: I was getting four or five emails a day, whereas in usual times I receive between 40 and 80 emails a day. Writing and responding to emails takes up a significant portion of my day and I am always ‘behind’ with them; the email flow is endemic

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