[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week 04 : Prieto-Nanez and Pérez-Bustos

[Tania Pérez Bustos]

The place of care in academic and scientific settings is a marginal place
(lets clarify that in the South those two settings are basically the same)
... sometimes I wonder if care even has a place in this scenarios, in the
sense that the notion of place implies to me some sort of of recognition.
>From what I have studied academics in the south, in particularly those
belonging to minorities of different sorts, embrace care but they do it in
spite of how the systems of science and higher education are shaped. In
this sense to embrace care as a critical practice, not as a moral
statement, is something that happens in the aulas or in relation to other
communities of groups that define who we are beyond being academics. When I
speak of care here, I am recalling the classic idea of care defined by
Fischer & Tronto (1991) as any activity that we do in order to sustain
life. I have to say, sometimes universities (as labor fields) are very much
in favor of productivity, measurement, competition, prestige, but not in
favor of sustaining relationalities, in this sense performing a caring
science is somehow a way of also performing a counter-ethos of what it
means to be a scientist, an academic.

Scientific ethos demarcates boundaries, it exists through those
demarcations, symbolical and physically they give it a particular public
status (no matter how many studies STS scholars have published arguing the
diffuse existence of those boundaries). Thinking of this I recall a
graffiti that was written on one of the main exit entrances at the National
University of Colombia, which warranted people exiting the campus "Cuidado
la realidad está afuera" (which could be translated as "Be carefull,
reality is outside"). Scientific fields do not grow (though get fat sounds
better to me) through those relations we establish with the "outside", it
is a very endogamous field (anthropologically speaking). Even when many of
us study things that do not belong to our daily life context we do it in
order to be read by other like us who do belong to the academy ...
conferences are thought that way, so are journals, books, graduate and
postgraduate programs ... Care however brings relationalities and
interdependencies to the core of academic knowledge production, it allows
us to think, speculatively, with others, those others that we are not, but
that to some extent also define who we are. I believe it brings back the
idea of thinking with and dissenting within which we brought in a previous
email exchange.

In spite of how enriching and useful this becoming scientist through those
touching encounters might be, it represents a double burden to those who
perform it. Caring practices are sustained by different rhythms than the
ones promoted by scientific productivity: teaching, weaving solidarities
with causes, becoming part of processes in order to shape them (not just to
observe them), are practices that take time, that belong to a temporality
that happens now, but that is also connected to the building of the future,
world making practices (responsible with and embedded to colectivities, to
continuities ...). To be caring scientists, we then have to cross-dress or
as Hill Collins would say to play the role of outsiders within. What I
would like to point out, thinking with transgender scientists in Colombia,
is that doing this cross dressing in order to perform care in science, and
continuing to be scientists --considering how scientific fields are
shaped-- does come with a price, which we would have to see if it is worth
to pay ...




2015-03-27 10:05 GMT-05:00 Prieto Nanez, Fabian Mauricio <
prieton2 at illinois.edu>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks again Tania for your response. I believe that your last question
> make us move into considering this approach in the university. However, I
> think we must keep moving tactically, as we as scholars from latin America
> acknowledged the particular genealogies of our universities. I wonder how
> your approach, which also has connections with critical pedagogy, has
> shaped your practice as a teacher. I believe your teaching work have also
> considered the place of care in academic and scientific settings, and
> especially, the way it can shape learning environments. What do you think
> about current educational settings as spaces to perform this mutual
> knowledge production?
>
>
> Fabian Prieto
> Fellow Research "Learning to see Systems" INTERSECT Program
> http://seeingsystems.illinois.edu/
> PhD student, Institute of Communications Research
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
>
> ________________________________________
> De: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au [
> empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au] en nombre de Tania Pérez
> Bustos [tpbustos at gmail.com]
> Enviado: miércoles, 25 de marzo de 2015 17:53
> Para: soft_skinned_space
> Asunto: Re: [-empyre-]  Engineering the University : Week 04 :
> Prieto-Nanez and Pérez-Bustos
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>



-- 
Tania Pérez-Bustos PhD
Profesora Departamento de Antropología
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
Edif. Manuel Briceño of 322. Tel 3208320 ext 5934

http://taniaperezbustos.jimdo.com/
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