Abstract
This chapter attempts to hail love back into view in pandemic times. In searching for how love appears and what love can do, it asks how enactments of love in learning and teaching, in our work as journal editors, and in our writing collaborations might work as a potentially hope-full feminist materialist response to the desperate and damaging times we currently find ourselves in. Grounded in an acknowledgement of interspecies relationality, in an affirmative ethical commitment to zoe (Braidotti, The posthuman. Polity Press, 2013) and in an attentiveness to the mundane matterings of everyday life (Stewart, Ordinary affects. Duke University Press, 2007), this chapter proposes love as a form of entangled aimance. In this, it brings together work by Barad (Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, 2007) on entanglement and Zembylas (Love as ethico-political practice: Inventing reparative pedagogies of aimance in 'disjointed' times. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 14(1), 23-38, 2017) on aimance to advance a line of feminist materialist and posthumanist theory to think and do higher education differently (Gannon et al., 'Working on a rocky shore': Micro-moments of positive affect in academic work. Emotion and Society, 31, 48-55, 2019; Taylor & Gannon, Doing time and motion diffractively: Academic life everywhere and all the time. Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(6), 465-486, 2018) and to speak into the separation, solitariness and seclusion that the ongoing time of pandemic has forced on us. We elaborate entangled aimance as a relational condition which offers some resources of hope in a time of destruction, despair, coping and survival, and ponder how entangled aimance may sustain us in our everyday work as academics. The chapter threads personal examples through its theoretical elaboration. In these examples we write from our two different locations one of us in the United Kingdom and one in Australia to consider how entangled aimance can work as a minor but significant feminist materialist ethico-political practice of hope in utterly changed higher education times.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Higher Education and Love: Institutional, Pedagogical and Personal Trajectories |
| Editors | Victoria de Rijke, Andrew Peterson, Paul Gibbs |
| Place of Publication | Switzerland |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
| Pages | 111-135 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9783030823719 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9783030823702 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© Te Editor(s) (if applicable) and Te Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2022. All rights reserved.