Discovering failure, failing thoughtfully: the wills and costs of academics

Academia is no abstract place. Today, it stands at a crossroads of an ongoing pandemic, the questioning of science and medicine, changes in learning conditions, global waves of protest, and calls for academic reparations. I see this confluence as an opening, and a possibility: now is the time to reflect on the academy’s public role and social responsibility, to think about the mechanics and ramifications of academic practice, and to consider how, in the face of dehumanizing, alienating world circumstances, academics might leverage their vocation to sow community. This is the work of Discovering Failure, Failing Thoughtfully: The Wills and Costs of Academics, an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods investigation into the relationship between modes of knowledge production and social relations from a decolonial feminist and cognitive sociological perspective. Discovering failure draws on three data sets: an archive of North American and Western European discourse from as early as the 15th century; two rounds of interviews with thirty-four academics across the Tristate Area and at different stages in their career; and autoethnographic field notes on my educational trajectory and experiences organizing academics within and beyond the university for social justice and equity. With this research, the tools of cognitive sociology, and following decolonial, Black feminist, Black radical, and Indigenous scholars, I outline academia’s normative ethical and ontological contours and elaborate approaches to higher education and research capable of effecting the anti-oppressive, humanizing communities to which academics have long aspired. Ultimately, I argue that standard academic practice and culture is liable to facilitate racist, sexist, and colonialist imaginaries and social orders. And yet, my work, through its thoughtful methods and applications, seeks to destabilize that legacy and create new humanizing futures for everyone. Discovering Failure thus recommends a thoughtful turn to those who have stayed the standard humanist course, which would entail a reimagining of authorship, authority, and academic excellence in the name of a new, more collaborative humanism that takes seriously, rather than simply pursues questions of difference.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference