The Disinterested Teacher

In the vital traditions of women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, and aligned projects disidentified from majoritarian worlds, this Element focuses attention on how we continue to work in and with the attenuating conditions of academic life.There is, it suggests, hope to be found, nurtured, and elicited amid the difficulties of the present. This Element does not romanticize or assign nobility or moral purpose to teaching or to scholarly life more broadly. Rather, it elaborates an understanding of teaching as a name for how we go about building collectivities, sensibilities, and social formations organized by and around mutuality, reciprocity, and solidarity. This Element remembers the classroom to be any space dedicated to the work of collectively thinking hard, and one in which we rehearse the forms of relation, social being, and collegiality we wish to proliferate.