On Movements and Being Moved: Affective Politics in Academic Life (Shadow Conference, part 3)

Hanna was the name of a character through which The Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany illustrated the shortening of the time the contracts in order to assure innovation, creativity and circulation in a short animation. Hanna was portrayed as a young white, childless, middle-class person. In reaction to this, #IchbinHanna (I am Hanna) was the hashtag created in 2021 and widely used on social media to counter this image and protest increasingly scarce permanent positions and precarisation in the German academy. The precarity is intensified when one has children, performs care work or when competitive and dependent relationships arise between professors and others. One feature of German science is also its claim to ‘neutrality’, which puts any kind of so-called political engagement that restricts the contours of knowledge production. In this talk I give a public/personal account of catching up with ‘Hanna’ from an intersectional perspective.

Academia often seems overwhelming and potentially created to destroy us. Yet, it can also be a place to explore the possibilities of joy. In this paper, I draw on Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Baruch Spinoza’s concepts of joy as the ability to move. If we think about joy as the ability to move, what possibilities open to us? My experience in the lighting presentation last year crafted a shared recognition of the construction of academia today as a machine that attempts to inhibit our movement. But also, the presentations recognized points of hope, of the ability to make change and movement happen within our oftentimes oppressive systems. This paper will encourage audience members to think through where places of movement exist in their own lives as ways to cultivate and encourage joy.