Karen Falconer Al-Hindi, Department of Geography and Women’s & Gender Studies, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Pamela Moss, Department of Human and Social Development, University of Victoria
Roberta Hawkins, Department of Geography, University of Guelph
Leslie Kern, Department of Geography and Environment, Mount Allison University
Investigating joy is our response to restrictive and compromising academic labor conditions. Our work affirms the radical potential of becoming joyful subjects; we investigate joy in academic spaces as feminist geographers using a collective biography methodology. Collective biography is a collaborative method innovated by feminists to examine the processes through which subjects emerge. Our collective biography work entails annual writing retreats and twice monthly videoconferences. During the retreats, we generate texts from our individual memories of formative moments. These texts then become the basis for scrutinizing the way in which we became subjects as well as the ways in which we continue becoming subjects. Our work on becoming a joyful academic subject has focused on various aspects of becoming: cultivating joy, methods for investigating joy, and becoming an intimate collective through work on joy. We extend this work by bringing together ideas about ontological positivity and power, and applying them to becoming manifest in the process of subjectification.
Twitter: @LellyK
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