Slacking for Social Justice
It’s the latest thing, according to Riyad A Shahjahan, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and whose areas of expertise include “social justice theory” and “pedagogies of dissent.”
In recent years, scholars have critiqued norms of neoliberal higher education by calling for embodied and anti-oppressive teaching and learning. Implicit in these accounts, but lacking elaboration, is a concern with reformulating the notion of ‘time’ and temporalities of academic life. Employing a coloniality perspective, this article argues that in order to reconnect our minds to our bodies and centre embodied pedagogy in the classroom, we should disrupt Eurocentric notions of time that colonise our academic lives. I show how this entails slowing down and ‘being lazy’.
Yes, comrades. We must “disrupt Eurocentric notions of time.” And temporalities, obviously. Postcolonial theorising is the only way to challenge the “neoliberal higher education climate” – hold that thought – and those “colonial binaries such as superior/inferior.” We must “dislodge higher education from neoliberal personhood.” As the exact nature of Dr Shahjahan’s problem has been buried under rhetorical rubble, I’ll translate as best I can. You see, being expected to keep up with the pace of lessons and deliver course work on time can induce feelings of discomfort and inferiority in those less able and conscientious, thereby resulting in “exclusionary effects,” which, it turns out, are oppressive and unjust:
These internalised temporalities may have especially exclusionary effects on bodies and selves. For example, Brandt (2008) found that the hurried pace of homework, exams and research associated with molecular biology laboratory class conflicted with a Navajo student’s sense of time. Thus, Navajo students internalised a sense of ‘being less than’ and felt guilty.
However, armed with our postcolonial theorising and postmodern bafflegab, and by stressing the mystical exoticness of people with browner skin, we shall set the people free from the “dominant culture of disembodiment” and the “temporal colonisation of our bodies” – i.e., expectations of punctuality, attentiveness and general competence:
To undo this colonisation of our bodies, we should strive to ‘embody’ ourselves: inhabit our bodies fully, acknowledge the interconnection between mind, body, spirit, and contest the insertion of the body into the market.
Yes, we must contest the insertion.
To re-embody the body in the learning environment, we need to slow down, be mindful, and embrace present moments… How can we embody ‘laziness’ in the classroom?
Well, according to our expert in education, “we” should work more slowly and distractedly – say, by pondering the “parts of our bodies” that are “rendered invisible.” Like stomachs and knees. And we must embrace “sensorial ways of knowing,” which are, we’re informed, “tactics of resistance,” along with “the burning of medicines, cleansing ceremonies and/or the telling of personal stories.” “Music, dance and artistic expression” are also recommended as classroom diversions. Because the way to “disrupt” stereotypes of dimness and sloth among “indigenous and subaltern individuals” is to behave in ways that suggest dimness, sloth and a serious lack of focus.
Those of you itching to read the whole thing, preferably in a slow and half-arsed way, can do so for a mere £26. Or just click here.
Via Damian Counsell.
I’m too lazy to read the whole thing. What do I win?
You see, being expected to keep up with the pace of lessons and deliver course work on time can induce feelings of discomfort and inferiority in those less able and conscientious, thereby resulting in “exclusionary effects,” which, it turns out, are oppressive and unjust
They always want to level down.
In recent years, scholars have critiqued norms of neoliberal higher education by calling for embodied and anti-oppressive teaching and learning.
So they want neo-illiberal education.
If by disembodied teaching they’re referring to online education, yeah I can see why they want to hold on to the model that has them as gatekeepers.
I stopped after the third buzzword. Of course, that’s the point: to try to keep regular people from understanding.
I stopped after the third buzzword. Of course, that’s the point: to try to keep regular people from understanding.
Oh, it’s dismal writing, and dismal thinking, and something close to racist; but it’s typical of its type. It’s a pile of assertions, glib citations, question-begging phrases and status-hungry chest-puffing, all of which makes it wearying to read, practically opaque. And intentionally so. Stating things clearly would invite correction. Half the terms used are never defined, but declaimed as if self-evidently evil or self-evidently virtuous. It simply assumes the reader’s political agreement, which itself may be telling.
Though the standard of the article may offer clues as to why our assistant professor seemingly thinks that tardiness, distractedness and slacking are somehow virtuous, something to encourage. For the sake of those brown kids.
the “neoliberal higher education climate”
Actually laughing.
These internalised temporalities may have especially exclusionary effects on bodies and selves.
Especially? What else would these ‘internalised temporalities’ have an effect on?
What I’m taking from this is anything he calls ‘neoliberal’ is really bad. Because capitalism or something.
I doubt if he would be any more enthusiastic about archeoliberalism.
Maybe what he really wants is some goldilockseoliberalism
Would taking 7 or 8 years to complete an undergrad degree “disrupt Eurocentric notions of time”? It would certainly “contest” (or at least, delay) “the insertion of the body into the market” or, as the oppressors call it, growing up and getting on with your life. Or is this theory only for the professors’ professional life?
If you can stomach the needless jargon and relentless pretension, there are some rather odd assumptions in there, most of which are mouthed as if self-evident. Apparently, planning ahead and making effective use of one’s time are merely “Eurocentric notions,” tools of “colonial logic,” and therefore bad. (Because, er… capitalism, obviously.) And the way to “disrupt” stereotypes of dimness and sloth among “indigenous and subaltern individuals” is to behave in a way that suggests dimness and sloth.
As to the kind of person we’re dealing with, I think the first clue is the proud use of the phrase “pedagogies of dissent.” It practically screams “self-admiring tosser.”
What would his view be if his payroll department adopted such a position, or the fire brigade and rescue services?
And the way to “disrupt” stereotypes of dimness and sloth among “indigenous and subaltern individuals” is to behave in a way that suggests dimness and sloth.
That. 😀
That.
If you can disentangle the verbiage, a thankless task, it does sound rather silly.
I wonder if he reverts to the colonialist sense of time when his paycheck is late.
Employing a coloniality perspective…
At first glance I read that as “colonic perspective”, then realized I must denounce myself first for misreading, then for realizing that the word fits better than the original.
Perhaps I should click over and read the article, but I’m too lazy. Nonetheless, I have questions. How does one implement this theory in the classroom? Does the professor just allow students to turn in work whenever? Never? Does he just hand out credits willy-nilly without any objective criteria upon which to judge performance?
‘I think the first clue is the proud use of the phrase “pedagogies of dissent.” It practically screams “self-admiring tosser.”’
He’s probably too fucking lazy to turn up to classes he’s got to teach, or to mark essays, and is treating ‘post-colonial theory’ as an excuse.
What a chunt.
Reading these posts is a little like Tantalus’s torture…the meaning just keeps slipping away.
It often makes me quite angry, especially as I lost my position in academia because I hold a conservative Christian worldview and in the world of the arts, few things alienate more than that.
Still, the comments often cheer me up so I persevere. Keep up the good work of exposing the fraudulent nature of so many down the academic rabbit-hole David.
PS the ‘colonic perspective’works well I think Farnsworth…well done.
I’ve updated the end of the post with a tiny bit more. Apparently, the university classroom should be enlivened with suitably anti-capitalist diversions, including “music, dance” and “the burning of medicines.”
It’s the only way to re-embody the body.
Western-educated brown guy becomes professor to teach how western education is racist while getting paid racist western money.
Do I have that right?
Does he just hand out credits willy-nilly without any objective criteria upon which to judge performance?
Well, any such degree would be utterly useless anyway. So it’s a variation on the old Soviet workers’ gripe: we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.
I can not count the number of times when that thought occurred to me when I was a student.
Down with linear time!
“Your marking is late again. And you missed the department meeting. That’s the third time it’s happened.”
“Didn’t you read my essay? I reject your Eurocentric notions of time.”
Perhaps the regular deliver of his paycheck should released from the Eurocentric notion of time. Heck, why does he not forgo a paycheck entirely and free himself of the colonisation of his bank account and the eurocentric notion of actually earning ones keep. I wish he’d have this discussion with me at the pub and I would gladly liberate his spirit from the burden of its colonized body.
The word ‘lazy’ has “racist connotations,” says Dr Shahjahan. Though how students of any colour are supposed to challenge such connotations while behaving in ways that confirm them isn’t clear to me.
Incidentally, Dr Shahjahan and his wife consider themselves “activists” (but of course) and declare their “life project” as being “to slow down the world and/or help those who want to slow down as a means to advance social change and healing.” Though readers may not be entirely convinced that their advice – e.g., classroom “cleansing ceremonies” and “the burning of medicines” – will help students find academic success or lucrative careers.
I grow weary of such lefty-drivel, no matter how entertaining it is superficially.
But one thing I have learned from it all: if we in the west (aka white people) are so nasty, so horrible, so racist, why do people flock here to live among us? If I were so unsure about the horrid patriarchy, dirty capitalism, the displays of privilege and all the rest of it, I wouldn’t go there in the first place and if I made the mistake of doing so, would soon head to happier places.
As I am a despicable white male, I would not go and live in, say, a country ruled by islam or dominated by machete-wielding tribes. I doubt I would be welcome anyway, so I don’t go there.
So if these oppressed people are so much better than me and deserve better than the likes of me and my kind, why settle here at all?
I keep thinking that higher education in the humanities will implode due to its political advocacy, lack of value for the student, and shear ludicrousness, leaving only a few enclaves where serious scholarship has maintained a toe hold.
So far I see little evidence of this implosion.
neoliberal higher education
Er, no.
http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/01/social-psychology-a-field-with-only-8-conservatives/
“why do people flock here to live among us?”
How dare you ask such an insulting question, you horrible, racist [INSERT INSULT HERE]?
Also, no.
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/01/09/professors-moved-left-but-country-did-not/
This is just a rephrasing of white privilege and it is not surprising that we would see it come up at a time when more and more minorities (well, minorities in the West. Curiously, they’re majorities in all the less developed countries. But I wouldn’t want to draw any conclusions from that) are being put in competition of sorts with the white majority thanks to affirmative action. There is a significant body of academic work that shows that “over-matching” in a university setting, i.e. the practice of admitting “disfavored” minorities to educational institutions for which they are not objectively qualified, leads to worse results than if these candidates had instead been admitted to institutions in which their qualifications are in line with those of the other students. The cries of white privilege as this has become the norm are only to be expected. Imagine a minority student whose GPA would qualify him to be admitted to Podunk State U. suddenly finding himself at Harvard or Yale. His “peers” are significantly brighter than he is, they have no trouble following course work that is incomprehensible to him, and, lo and behold, these people who run rings around him are all, almost to a man, white (Note: I use “man” in its archaic sense – as human, non-gender specific). Clearly they must be benefitting from some special privilege, a secret handshake, that allows them to understand what is going on while the poor minority student flounders on. The system is rigged! By white people! What Riyad Shajahan is doing is to take affirmative action to its logical conclusion: having admitted candidates who can’t compete with their “peers” on the merits and are thus in peril of not getting their degrees, we should now change the graduation requirements for these candidates so that they don’t have to be judged by the same criteria as their peers and they will still get the certification of the educational institution rather than having to drop out.
Analysis: 99.357% pure bullshit.
This is just a rephrasing of white privilege
It did remind me of Dr Caprice Hollins, who was paid $86,000 a year to tell Seattle educators that “students of colour” needn’t learn the grammar and fluency she herself enjoys – and which employers generally expect of job candidates – and that foresight and punctuality are “white values,” and expectations thereof constitute “cultural racism.” Instead of encouraging “students of colour” to articulate their thoughts and plan ahead, we must, said Hollins, see people as “racial beings” and “teach [children] to view the world through a racial lens.”
David,
re Dr Caprice Hollins:
There is nothing undemocratic, though there may be something unreasonable, in expecting a great deal from the butler, and being filled with a kind of frenzy of surprise when he falls short of the divine stature. The thing which is really undemocratic and unfraternal is to say, as so many modern humanitarians say, “Of course one must make allowances for those on a lower plane.”
G.K.Chesterton had their number, all those years ago.
In the case of Dr Hollins, it’s hard to think of an educational worldview more likely to ruin the life chances of students with browner skin than mine.
“…we must, said Hollins, see people as ‘racial beings’ and ‘teach [children] to view the world through a racial lens.”
…and I thought this kind of thinking went out of fashion in 1945.
Dr. Hollins doesn’t appear to have included Prof. Shahjahan in her white privilege scheme.
She’s clearly doing her part to insure that her offspring don’t face status or academic competition from the brown kids and their uppity desire to better their situations in life. She’s busy handicapping them in order to reinforce white privilege and to insulate her children’s social and class standing. How better to that than to ensure the poor brown dears can’t read or write?
Except, well, by teaching them that punctuality and rational thought are to be shunted behind dancing and incense.
None, really. Or at least, none that doesn’t involve an even more overt expression of racism.
These people are to human progress what termites are to woodframe homes.
Coherent news from an actual scholar has turned up regarding how different cultures interact . . .
As noted earlier, Gwynne Dyer has also commented that
. . . and in parallel, he also points out that the New Years attacks in Cologne are an issue, but particularly There will be rotten apples among refugees
For the most part, Shahjahan spews woolly waffle that can’t be argued with because there’s no there there; a content-free load of hogwash and a series of greatly overextended metaphors that have become disconnected from the facts.
But sometimes he makes a fairly clear claim that can be evaluated as true or not:
And promptly demonstrates that he’s historically illiterate. I guess this is why that sort of person mostly sticks to bullshit. When he traces dualism to colonialism I can say with confidence that he’s wrong; when he talks about how our bodies ‘navigate colonial time’ I can only say he’s talking nonsense, and he gets to enjoy the privilege of being offended.
If you can’t tell time maybe it’s not such a bad thing that you feel a little ‘less than’.
The only way these chronically pampered idiots are going to be able to pay off their student loans will be by inserting their bodies into the market – in one fashion or another.
When you take in one million refugees, that number of people will include a considerably larger number of ignorant hicks who think that it is not a crime or a disgrace to attack non-Muslim girls sexually.
No good deed goes unpunished, and this is part of the price Germany will pay for its generosity. It’s not an unbearable price
This coming, I suspect, from someone who has never been sexually assualted.
“Eurocentric notions of time”
It’s obvious ain’t it?
– Euro for Euros
– Africa for Africans
– Asia for Asians
etc.
Kick out everyone who doesn’t “conform to the norm”
This coming, I suspect, from someone who has never been sexually assualted.
Oh, y’mean, like Dyer’s wife, as he does note in that same article?
So, the point remaining, When you take in one million refugees, that number of people will include a considerably larger number of ignorant hicks . . . . and in a couple of years most of the young Muslim men who attacked women in Cologne will have figured out that . . . .
. . . Particularly noting that the number of refugees that have come to Germany keeps being stated as about one million, where the New Years’ attackers get stated as about one thousand . . . Noting one particular representative of that remaining most of a million;
Definitely not any of that basically only a thousand, that one . . .
Hedgehog: “these people who run rings around him are all, almost to a man, white…”
Actually, no, lots of them are east and south Asians. Nearly all “prestige” American universities have secret quotas to hold down the admission of hyper-qualified east and south Asians.
(Also secret quotas to increase admissions of less qualified blacks and hispanics.)
As the exact nature of Dr Shahjahan’s problem has been buried under rhetorical rubble, I’ll translate as best I can.
That could be the most badly written essay I think I’ve ever read.
That could be the most badly written essay I think I’ve ever read.
It doesn’t quite match the Dadaist jive of Dr Caroline Guertin, but it’s certainly awful. And apparently it’s what now passes for scholarship – a comical mix of New Age voodoo (deep breathing, listening to your stomach) and the standard leftist posturing (post-colonial ‘theory’, race and gender ‘privilege’, everything being ‘neoliberal.’) As noted above, there’s not much there there, almost no substance or logical structure, so it’s difficult to parse. At no point is it entirely clear what point Dr Shahjahan is trying to make, or what his reasoning is, beyond some glib, question-begging citation that’s meant to impress us.
And remember, this type of opaque language – which hides so many sins – isn’t arrived at by mere incompetence or some neurological accident. It’s something that’s been taught and encouraged. It’s basically an exercise in signalling, in conformity.
It doesn’t quite match the Dadaist jive of Dr Caroline Guertin,
*speechless*
@ Caroline
This coming, I suspect, from someone who has never been sexually assaulted.
Caroline, you must realise that in order to cook the omelette of multicultural utopia you have to break a few hymens. And remember – as Barbara Spectre would say – without multiculturalism “Europe will not survive”. So be quiet and take your medicine, ok?
RE: internalised temporality – this sounds like something you deal with the day after a bad curry.
norms of neoliberal higher education
He’s lost me already.