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.

As it’s Monday, I thought I’d cheer you with another chance to marvel at the mind-shattering talents of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, a performance artist whose adventures with lettuce and underwear have previously entertained us. Being as she is so fearless and uncompromising, her latest work entails,

A series of research based actions in public spaces that explore automated systems that are triggered by human movement.

Specifically, Ms Schaefer is filmed walking past automatic doors, repeatedly and radically, and much to the indifference of passers-by:

Says she:

Through this enquiry, I hope to discover new possibilities for collaborations with these everyday machines.

So there’s that to look forward to.

Kevin D Williamson on Obama’s vanities: 

In a pre-vacation interview with NPR, the president argued that (as the New York Times decodes the message) “some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African American to hold the White House.” I.e, “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” This is kind of clever, in a way. The president says that much of the unhappiness with his administration is “pretty specific to me, and who I am and my background,” which is slippery in that by saying it’s about him, he’s really saying it’s about his critics, and their bigotry and prejudice. “It’s not me, it’s you.”

Heather Mac Donald on crime, policing, and the “Ferguson effect”: 

The media and many politicians decry as racist pedestrian stops and broken-windows policing — the proven method of stopping major crimes by going after minor ones. Under such conditions, it isn’t just understandable that the police would back off; it is also presumably what the activists and the media critics would want. The puzzle is why the activists are now so intent on denying that such de-policing is occurring and that it is affecting crime.

Theodore Dalrymple on pretentious outrage: 

Outrage supposedly felt on behalf of others is extremely gratifying for more than one reason. It has the appearance of selflessness, and everyone likes to feel that he is selfless. It confers moral respectability on the desire to hate or despise something or somebody, a desire never far from the human heart. It provides him who feels it the possibility of transcendent purpose, if he decides to work toward the elimination of the supposed cause of his outrage. And it may even give him a reasonably lucrative career, if he becomes a professional campaigner or politician: For there is nothing like stirring up resentment for the creation of a political clientele. Anti-racism is a perfect cause for those with free-floating outrage because it puts them automatically on the side of the angels without any need personally to sacrifice anything. You have only to accuse others of it to feel virtuous yourself.

And via Ace, a student recounts how he “de-converted” from the mentally dismal crab-bucket world of the “social justice warrior”: 

I realised it wasn’t going to get better. I was in a university class about feminism, overrun with SJWs, and they had worse arguments than I’d seen online. There was no smarter next level to feminism that I was just too stupid to see. That was it. I was at the top and our arguments still sucked.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

This letter [from the Communication Graduate Caucus and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Student Union] is a textbook illustration of the typical logical fallacies that first year university students are supposed to learn to avoid… [It] was presented as a joint effort and was presumably the result of collective deliberation, with sufficient time to craft and reconsider. That it is so muddled suggests in my opinion something about the arrested intellectual development induced by the feminist worldview.

Janice Fiamengo pokes through the mental wreckage of some standard feminist boilerplate, in which facts are either absent or inverted, questions are begged at a rate of knots, and criticism of feminist assumptions is equated with both racism and “co-ordinated campaigns of terror.” 

George Will on the terminal stages of leftist academia: 

A Washington State University professor said she would lower the grade of any student who used the term “illegal immigrants” when referring to immigrants here illegally. Another Washington State professor warned in his syllabus that white students who want “to do well” in his “Introduction to Multicultural Literature” should show their “grasp of history and social relations” by “deferring to the experiences of people of colour.” Another Washington State teacher, in her syllabus for “Women & Popular Culture,” warned that students risk “failure for the semester” if they use “derogatory/oppressive language” such as “referring to women/men as females or males.”

Janice Fiamengo on the same:  

What we are witnessing on university campuses across North America is not by accident or incidentally about the rejection of reason and of the Western intellectual inheritance. Its central object is to destroy the past and remake the present through the practice of the raised fist.

See also this collection of “social justice” demands by suitably processed students. And remember, it isn’t a spoof.

And Jonathan Haidt on the high school roots of this Idiot Weeping Fever™: 

As long as many of our elite prep schools are turning out students who have only known eggshells and anger, whose social cognition is limited to a single dimension of victims and victimisers, and who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings, it’s hard to imagine how any university can open students’ minds and prepare them to converse respectfully with people who don’t share their values. Especially when there are no adults around who don’t share their values.

As regular readers will have noticed, “social justice” dogma leads not to moral sophistication but to a kind of mental coarsening; a mix of vanity, unrealism and an absurd reactiveness. All cultivated and indulged by so-called educators who imagine themselves as radical and enlightened. And as Glenn Reynolds notes, 

A cynic might say that academia became fiercely supportive of free speech when such a stance was useful to protect leftists within its ranks, and lost interest in free speech once the leftists took control.

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.