Presentations

November 11, 2020

Nerds, Bullies and Nannies: Breathing care into the post covid-19 university

Divine Fuh

This paper takes as its cue recurrent critiques of academia as a toxic enterprise. It asks what it will take to breathe care into the “university”? Nerds, bullies and academic nannies are foregrounded as typical examples of poisonous neoliberal academic subjectivities requiring radical transformation. Through these typologies, I intend to demonstrate the various ways in which the university has been asphyxiated, and also how through its praxis continues to strangle its subjects. I conclude by advocating for a future university where care, human dignity and ethics are deliberately injected as central organizing principle.

 

Divine Fuh

About Divine Fuh

Divine Fuh is a social anthropologist from Cameroon, and Director of HUMA – Institute for Humanities Africa at the University of Cape Town. His research focuses on the politics of suffering and smiling, particularly on how urban youth seek ways of smiling in the midst of their suffering. He has carried out research in Cameroon, Botswana, South Africa and Senegal. His new research focuses on AI and the ethics of being; and on the political economy of Pan-African knowledge production.

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