Among the members of any professional group, collegiality is by no means a given. Within the specialized world of graduate education, interpersonal cohesion cannot be at the top of a department’s recruiting criteria. However, collegiality is a prerequisite for the well-being of individuals and universities alike—although not always in the way that institutions might expect or desire. As students in an experimental, introductory graduate course at Rice University, we fostered a praxis of radical collegiality and precarious joy. We amend the traditional definitions of “collegiality”—companionship and cooperation between colleagues who share responsibility—and of “joy”—pleasure arising from a sense of ­contentment—to argue for a form of relationality that has the potential to reimagine graduate student well-being. We define radical collegiality as a generative, potentially aberrant, and interpersonal flourishing that can run counter to administrative forces; additionally, we define precarious joy as a satisfaction derived from facing difficult realities together.[1] We do not draw a causal relationship between these two terms, but we talk about them together, as each continuously shapes the other. We use these terms to articulate and also respond to the environment of crisis in the humanities.

Humanities graduate students work in a seemingly clear and loud discourse of crisis. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham notes, “[C]risis has become a way of life” and even the “rationale” for humanistic study itself in recent years (22). To be clear, humanities graduate students—who likely have been humanities undergraduates and continue to be part of the contingent labor force of humanities education—know well the many flavors of crisis in our ecosystem.[2] We constantly read reports noting the current statistical possibilities or impossibilities of securing tenured or full-time employment in our fields. We continue to train ourselves to enter these eroding academic markets, filling our CVs and portfolios with evidence of both competency and innovative interventions in our respective disciplines. In the model of neoliberalism, graduate professionalization often treats knowledge like a commodity, students like clients, and colleagues like competitors with whom we must contend for increasingly part-time and low-wage positions (see Giroux).[3]

Without downplaying the urgency of these crises, we argue that higher education has always relied on crisis as a ubiquitous term that can obscure more than it clarifies; the question is, crisis for whom? As Kyla Wazana Tompkins recently asked, “Is your crisis in the humanities my crisis?” (419). Taking a long view, we remember how universities have been founded on the physical and ideological legacies of enslaved labor, and, in our own discipline of literary studies, the work “has always been and continues to be, disproportionately, to uphold an Anglo-Saxonist tradition that while productive of some major critical movements seems barely able to ethically respond to our current moment” (Tompkins 419). We wonder how to hold power accountable while working within these disciplines and universities throughout these various crises. In the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities, including our own, slash budgets, halt graduate admissions, eliminate majors, and terminate members of the staff and faculty, including those with tenure (see Hubler). As COVID-19 cases were on the rise, our cohort was able to operate remotely, albeit from inadequate work environments. Meanwhile, the labor of university maintenance staff members continues to allow for our own, even as their numbers are reduced; all the while, university endowments sit untapped, in some instances growing (Onyechere). We question the impact of our work because of the disconnect between the stakes of our analytic inquiry and the material constraints of our capitalist realism. If we are to live and thrive in humanities ecosystems, and, most significantly, if we accept the role of reproducing the university, then when does our humanistic critique become merely a mode of inquiry that is, in effect, passive?[4]

To think through this question, we cocreate this piece on graduate education rooted in our perspectives as graduate students at a private, well-funded institution. Our position is complex and contradictory because we are vulnerable to these crises but also share uneven, privileged access to institutional resources. We are shielded and supported in ways that others in graduate humanities education are not: our English department matriculates small cohorts (an average of six students), supports students with a nontiered stipend structure for five years, and requires minimal service, including two semesters of teaching-assistant work and one semester as instructor of record. It is important to remember that these are the conditions from which we work and speak and that these conditions, in part, allowed our collegiality to flourish. Simultaneously, graduate education has the potential—bears the responsibility—of adapting our humanities ecosystem with graduate student well-being in mind. Supported by our experiences in our departmental introductory graduate seminar, ours is an argument for necessarily precarious joy, embracing a radical collegiality that we propose would open possibilities for the future of graduate education in the humanities.

This essay speaks against the discourse that, in calling itself crisis, forecloses options for us and for the ecological health of the humanities.[5] For Kyle Whyte, “an epistemology of crisis involves . . . solutions that can occur quickly, maintain the current state of affairs, lack any sense of realism, and further entrench power” (61). Like Whyte’s alternative, an “epistemology of coordination” based on relations, we speak toward joy that, as Kandice Chuh proposes, “inheres . . . in the fact of being, and being together” (168). We offer precarious joy and radical collegiality as critical terms for speaking toward the possibilities of the otherwise in graduate education. We are buoyed—both anchored and lifted up—by the call of Chuh to “continue to proliferate the unlearning of inherited ways of knowing and being . . . to be ever attentive to the complex ways in which power operates to dis/organize life” (168). This chapter argues for a collegiality that offers a critical adjacency, that is founded in play, and that conditions the possibility of another university.

Critical Adjacency

Graduate students are positioned adjacent to the institution—both instructors and not instructors, students and not students, employed but not protected—whether recognized or not by themselves or the university at large. Yet graduate students are rarely taught how faculties and administrations function and interact. Entering Rice University’s En­glish PhD program in 2017, our cohort was the first to engage in an experimental introductory, two-seminar sequence focused, in part, on institutional awareness and negotiating the profession. Cotaught by four faculty members, these courses invited us to discover the various ways in which literary scholars, the English department faculty, and the university operate. After providing a brief survey of literature contextualizing the crisis in the humanities, our professors asked us to imagine our own fictional English department and to construct an undergraduate literary curriculum for our imagined institution. Beyond a general outline of course expectations and learning outcomes, including a presentation to the Rice English department at the end of the term, there was no established protocol for how we might undertake this project. The mere existence of this required, three-credit-hour course provided us with a unique intellectual space and an uncommon amount of time in which to examine and experiment with our position in the institution. In this unscripted space, we created our imaginary university, Ecalpon U (read backward: No Place).

Through devising a fictional university and English department, we created a collective imaginary adjacent to our home institution, writing an undergraduate curriculum as though it were speculative fiction. We soon decided that our work should be bound by realistic, institutional limits. Negotiating these limits, we both practiced and pushed at the structures that condition possibilities for curricular design and ­implementation—a process that, in turn, sparked our trajectory toward radical collegiality. We learned about how faculty members relate to one another on educational, academic, and administrative levels by constituting our own English department, rehearsing traditional departmental structures, serving as chair and vice-chair, holding committee meetings, and presenting individual and group reports. To truly inhabit these roles, we implemented voting procedures, minutes, and Robert’s Rules of ­Order—a parliamentary procedure toward consensus with lots of yea-ing and naying. To map our operating methods and overarching ethos, we adopted and revised Rice University’s English department bylaws and crafted a departmental mission statement, emphasizing a commitment to advocacy and community. As we imagined ourselves within a department, we negotiated producing a dream curriculum within the boundaries of a realistic university, including faculty politics and constraints. With this new understanding of departmental processes, we were able to produce a curriculum that troubled the edges of a traditional undergraduate English degree.

This act of imagining our university was productive in itself, because the exercise required us to reflect on what we value most about our discipline and its implementation. What ideals and pedagogical concepts would we prioritize most when designing our curriculum—­ periodization, textual diversity, student-centered pedagogy, or academic freedom? Our curricula emphasized personal growth, open dialogue, flexibility, and mentorship for Ecalpon English undergraduates. We integrated outward-facing course options, including a public-facing pedagogy specialization; proposed an introductory roundtable class; and engineered varying pathways through our undergraduate degree, including a range of honors options and a choice between traditional theses and flexible capstone portfolios. The process helped bring into focus the unique utility of utopic envisaging and speculative modeling—modalities of work that we suggest should be added to existing graduate curricula.

While certain elements of our final curriculum were insightful and convention-flouting, time and again this speculative work led us back to questions of ingrained disciplinary limitations. Despite our attempts to produce a creative curriculum, we still found ourselves mired in the traditional nomenclature of survey courses: “pre-” and “post-1800,” nationalist categorizations, and questions of canon. In particular, we were concerned about the ways in which jumping through the preordained disciplinary hoops of “British,” “American,” and “World” literature would continue to inscribe ideologies of American exceptionalism, colonialism, and white supremacy as norms of our students’ intellectual growth. With their own experiences crafting syllabi in mind, our professors noted students’ and parents’ expectations of a traditional combination of scope and specificity: a schooling in the “classics” as well as the requisite presentation of American and British cultural and territorial histories and their relationship to literary production. Additionally, if we insisted on a greater range of authors than typical of such survey classes, we should bear in mind the reinvestment of time and labor that would be required of most instructors to undertake these revisions and the universities’ necessary material investments in faculty hires.[6]

These discussions and debates ultimately brought us back to our institutional present: the nationalistic and hegemonic limitations and expectations modeled in ourselves, Rice University, and the academy more generally. That we were unable to circumvent these patterns of curricular reproduction in our imaginary work required us to face the institutional role that humanities scholars play in reinforcing cultural and territorial colonial norms. Our answer to one such problem was to qualify our British and American literature survey courses with the pre-fix “Ideas of.”[7] For example, a course titled “Ideas of America: Literature Before 1800” leaves the door open for divergent interpretations and questions of nationalistic frameworks. But, as la paperson outlines in A Third University Is Possible, being able, or willing, to critique systems of power from within the university is not innately anti-colonial or decolonial. Indeed, la paperson sees “critique” as most often doing the work of “second worlding universities,” those “genteel,” humanistic institutions that live within “first worlding universities,” and helping them “actualize imperialist dreams of a settled world” (xiv–xv), tacitly reinforcing norms, such as “fees, degrees, expertise, and the presumed emancipatory possibilities of the mind” (42). Our ultimate compromise regarding survey courses reflects the dynamic to which la paperson speaks. While semantically elegant, our renaming was an easy way out, no more than a gesture in the direction of something more radical.

Ultimately, this essay is not a treatise on a radical overhaul of undergraduate English curricula. Rather, it is a discussion of how the tasks and conditions instituted by our graduate course helped our cohort become an adjacent network of joyful, mutually supportive questioning and resource sharing that moves within and beyond the bounds of the university. As our seminar required us to contend with the entrenched limitations and colonial underpinnings of the typical survey course we would eventually be teaching, we developed an appetite for pedagogical critique as a part of our shared collegial network. This collective questioning continued even when no one asked us to do this work, demonstrating how collegiality can become radical when its networks are adjacent to, but by no means neatly positioned within, the institution from which it has emerged. In 2020, we entered our fourth year, having taken our department’s pedagogy seminar and prepared our required courses as instructors of record. When the university radically altered its operations to manage the impact of COVID-19, we already had a valuable support network in place. We felt like we were not facing challenges alone; further, this collegiality made us more willing to take risks. We continue with the process of bending categories such as “American,” “British,” and even “Literature”; we attend mock classes to help one another prepare lectures and class activities; we share a constant stream of materials back and forth across e-mail and Google Drive folders; and we plan collaborative classes with one another. In short, when facing the challenges of the classroom, both political and logistical, we have continued to see our work as collaborative rather than as that of siloed individuals with privatized materials. At the current moment in humanities education, this radical collegiality can be vital in helping graduate students continue to bend the parameters of the institution, even as institutions demand exploitative levels of labor without equitable resources.

The position of critical adjacency that emerged out of that introductory seminar has given rise to reflexive self-training, which responds to, augments, and, in some cases, resists the official training we receive elsewhere. More important than the Ecalpon curriculum were the modes of collaboration and imagination we developed. Working to create a collective imaginary, more for each other than for our professors, we devised methods of working together that emerged from, moved parallel to, and retained the potential to pull away from the existing institution. In this way, the experience furnished us with an institutional bearing and practical skills that invite our participation in the work of la pa-person’s “third worlding university,” where “decolonizing dreamers who are subversively part of the machine themselves . . . wreck, scavenge, re-tool, and reassemble the colonizing university into decolonizing contraptions” (xiii). The radical collegiality we advocate for, and benefit from, can increase the likelihood that humanities graduate programs generate such subversive wreckers, scavengers, and rebuilders. The space and resources afforded us at Rice University and by the curriculum design of our introductory seminar clearly supported our development of a radical collegiality. It is vital that humanities graduate coursework makes space and time for this kind of relationality to flourish.

The collaborative methods and affective networks we devised to meet the seminar requirements created a space adjacent to the university that helped demystify internal department workings and the mechanics behind academic developments. As graduate students, we take courses and read publications by faculty members and peers, but the labyrinthine systems behind this work remain opaque. Left unexplained, this opacity papers over the processes of research with the myth of romantic scholarly genius—a myth that generates imposter syndrome, or even imposter training (see “What”). First-generation students, in particular, feel the effects of this opacity most keenly. For our cohort, this space has persisted and allows for systemic thinking rarely done within coursework. It also helps equalize inevitably uneven institutional awareness. Our enduring networks are not seamlessly integrated into the university’s structures but instead operate both within and outside the usual expectations of graduate school. As we enter our fifth year, the adjacent position of our collegiality has proved an enduring and radical trait, surviving multiple crises, from Hurricane Harvey to the COVID-19 pandemic, and persisting through the ever-present uncertainties within and beyond academia.

Play and Joy

This section reflects on our methods of shaping and sustaining our radical collegiality to demonstrate how graduate pedagogy can nourish networks of support among graduate students. Critical adjacency is precarious as a positional standing in academia, but it also is playful in its indeterminacy and its refusal to see graduate student life and its future as settled. The constant slippage of critical adjacency embraces the certain and uncertain place of graduate students while underscoring the possible playful connotations residing within it. J. Allan Mitchell writes, “Play recreates itself moment-to-moment as a volatile field of interplay, veering among the elements” (340). Like critical adjacency, Mitchell’s orientation of “play” does not play well with institutional logic: the changing from “moment-to-moment” in a “volatile” manner runs counter to the institution’s propensity to stay the same. However, Mitchell’s characterization of play does speak to humanities graduate students’ place in the university: “veering among the elements” of financial insecurity, a dissolving job market, a lack of institutional support or even acknowledgment, a constant reassessment of our careers in academia and beyond, and a sometimes harmful interrogation of our own selves. Mitchell’s version of play also spotlights the playful constitution inherent in humanities graduate students’ peripheral yet central positions in the university. This position, at once adjacent to and critical of the university, is one site of our fostering of collegiality: we find joy together because we are in this uncertainty together. While much of our movement as graduate students appears to be passive, to the institution and even to ourselves, we can and do actively form a collective of care and awareness, despite the noise of individualism and competition filling academia’s air.

Within graduate education, play and joy might initially seem to be ubiquitous terms that signify a lot while potentially pointing to nothing. Administering bodies, especially within the neoliberal or increasingly corporate university, valuing marketable skills over philosophical inquiry, tend to align play and joy with not only a floaty optimism but also an escapist character. As approaches to collective critical work, play and joy might appear as utopic responses to the unending pessimism that humanities departments publicly and legislatively undergo—as nice feelings with no critical charge.[8] However, play and joy inflect, form, and saturate the humanities’ analytic work, and they can renegotiate how we approach our individual and collective methodologies in graduate education. Many monographs in our discipline challenge their readers through playful prose styles; repeated referential loops and shimmery use of language are common in our readings and reveal play’s established presence in the humanities. This style of play diffuses across our experience as a cohort, a simultaneously performative and authentic collective; playful work frames our thought, pedagogy, and community and enacts precarious joy.

Our collegiality is both somewhat organic and constructed, but this seemingly contradictory nature opened us to playful modes of work and working together. Collegiality, and indeed friendship, must be carefully maintained while wading through the logistical minutiae of everyday life and general institutional operations. So how did our collegiality develop and, more importantly, survive three meetings a week and hours of extra administrative work? Remembering our first year’s minimal service requirements, its low-competition environment, and the loose structures of the introductory seminar’s curriculum, we point to our time together and the play that infused our performances of institutional structures. The unfamiliar formalities resembled inherited costumes we were trying on, testing lines like actors performing parts. We regularly strayed from the script and kept returning to it as a kind of game in which “seconded” began to sound like “bingo!” Taking the work seriously meant recording minutes and noting clear tasks. Memos of the general silliness that gave those meetings energy are interspersed through the fifty-four pages of minutes—in, for example, encouraging notes like “We are good at voting on stuff.” We also established a relaxed and accessible practice of resource-sharing as our modus operandi. In particular, our shared Google Drive folder, inaugurated during our introductory seminar, remains a key intellectual repository and a welcome venue for running jokes and whimsical excursions. The implications of this balance between playful performance and everyday face-to-face contact, along with the networks this work created, become more profound as we advance further in the degree.

This slippage between “play” and “reality” meant a recurring joke during that introductory seminar was that we actually were, surreptitiously, founding our own secret college on Rice’s quad. As we created our own imaginary department, a common question became “Wait, which university are we talking about?” Returning to the work of la paperson, our playful envisaging of a separate institution, with its own parameters and rules, took increasingly radical forms. Not only does Ecalpon U persist in the parasitic and deconstructive manner that la paperson outlines but as individuals have left the program, and our network of contacts continues to extend beyond those affiliated with the university, our experience of institutional parameters has become less rigid. We have colleagues and friends and peers, some of them formally enrolled in the institution and some of them not, but all in our university, a flexible, imaginative, and supportive space, linked to but not governed by Rice University. The fact that this network of interpersonal play and attuning persists across official university boundaries suggests one way that courses such as our introductory seminar might set graduate students on a path toward decolonial work. Requiring graduate students to play with the boundaries of the university allows for the persistence of a sense of porousness that might contribute to an actual opening up of the university, disrupting its patterns of exclusivity, knowledge impartation, and accumulation.

The time we invested in fostering a playful and thoughtful collegiality continues to influence our navigation of real-life institutions. Since the course’s end, we have come to see this endeavor as a process of becoming attuned, or sensitized, not just to one another but to our positions in a system. Sensitivity to workplace structures and colleagues also extends outside the university; thus, this attunement prepared us in our precarity, even before the pandemic and our interactions with the ever-plummeting job market. Like joy, this contingent awareness emerges from our radical collegiality precariously. Attunement to ourselves as individuals and as a group, to departmental functionings, and to academic administrative aims is precarious within an environment seemingly on the verge of collapse.[9] In this atmosphere of risk and uncertainty, we found joy by actively carving out our own space in our way. The course was partially a performance as a class but was also a community playfully forged beyond the course’s parameters. The seminar was a beginning, but certainly not an end, to our attuning to each other alongside social and personal challenges. In our openness to learning and unlearning from one another, our radical collegiality takes the unseriousness of play seriously in humanities graduate education. The play and joy infused into radical collegiality can serve as a method of explicitly recognizing the collective critical work that already happens and will continue to do so, if humanities education allows for these spaces of play to endure or even occur. Through play, we can precariously push against bureaucratic forces and crises while joyfully pushing and pulling up ourselves and others along with our work.

A Radical Collegiality

We argue that the collegiality we have developed is radical in that it is able to be disruptive rather than only complicit. While learning the histories of academic institutions, we practiced and debated how to critique and disrupt those inherited structures. Throughout our work together, we have asked ourselves how our collegiality—inside the bounds of academia, in the service of professionalization, and under the guise of ­innovation—can diverge from reproducing the structures of critique that neglect the social. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten identify this problem, asking, “Does the questioning of the critical academic not become a pacification? . . . [D]oes the critical academic not teach how to deny precisely what one produces with others, and is this not the lesson the professions return to the university to learn again and again?” Harney and Moten counter this position of negligence with “a nonplace called the undercommons—the nonplace that must be thought outside to be sensed inside . . . wary of critique, weary of it, and at the same time dedicated to the collectivity of its future, the collectivity that may come to be its future” (38–39). Like the potential of what Harney and Moten call the undercommons, a kind of sociality and building work can take place within a practice of radical collegiality.

Key to our development of radical collegiality was making a kind of “nonplace” through taking institutional space, a disruption spilling beyond the bounds of the classroom. As we continued our collaboration on Ecalpon U, we increasingly inhabited department and university common areas and other accessible, porous, sometimes necessarily secret spaces difficult for the registrar to get ahold of or even categorize. Under the guise of Ecalpon U, we negotiated meetings with members of the departmental staff and faculty. We grew confident in these physical spaces and in speaking with administrators. While we worked toward the nebulous course assignment, we engaged in nonproductive social acts just as often. This practice in particular—using space and time to move adjacently to the goals of the institution—has stuck with us. We claim this practice as establishing the conditions for necessary disruption and affirm the precarious joy within this work. Though kindling a “nonplace” can feel uncomfortable, this is our revision of joy and collegiality: it is not always pleasant. Our disruption was thrown into relief when we were told our collaboration was “weird” and wouldn’t last, that we should “just wait” for the inevitable falling-out, and that our “own” individual work was our “real” work. This pushback is the neoliberal institution vocalized through our instructors and our peers, people we like and trust. The university would like our work to be profitable, efficient, smooth. Our collaboration is often rough, time intensive, not sustainable.

Because sustainability and productivity are not the goal, radical collegiality has the capacity to foster a collective awareness that can counteract the pitfalls of institutional gratitude. Too often, it is expected that graduate students will merely be grateful: for example, to have funding or to work on research with lauded academics. At our well-funded, private university, we are reminded frequently to be grateful that we have more than graduates in other programs, and we have internalized that voice, policing and repressing our own critiques and judgment. Ultimately, this institutional gratitude cultivates an expectation of compliance. We are primed to think of the needs of the university, and those in positions of power within it, before our own.[10] This expectation of gratitude coincides with exploitative and violent cases of sexual harassment on college campuses. In the Me Too era, crowdsourced documents listing thousands of mostly anonymous reports of sexual harassment demonstrate rampant abuse by faculty members.[11] Many of these reports identify that exact expectation of gratitude: star professors show seemingly genuine interest in their students’ work while predatorily crossing physical, verbal, emotional, and psychological boundaries, implicitly demonstrating their power to advance or end student careers.[12] We can counteract institutional gratitude with radical collegiality by continually investing in a collegial unit as a support network adjacent to the institution. The critically adjacent work of radical collegiality can include sharing stories and evidence, establishing witnesses and networks of support, and developing strategies to respond to trauma and retaliation before harassment becomes “egregious” in a community (Hill). This work is already being done yet remains consistently undervalued and unrecognized by the institution. Graduate student bodies across the United States have been working together against institutional gratitude by staging protests and walkouts, setting up mutual aid funds, or sharing open letters and petitions.

The radical part of our collegiality can also respond to the unforgiving teleology of graduate school. Progress to degree relies on diminishing financial, social, and emotional support, often punishing graduate students for deviating from the strict teleology. This rigid process is part of the neoliberal university’s investment in churning out clientele. Radical collegiality can augment this experience by encouraging us to be sensitive to one another, to listen to one another, even when the conversation is difficult, and, most importantly, to attune to risk. Being sensitive to one another and to risk is not necessarily a deviant practice in humanities education but currently seems like an uncharacteristic one. If we know that positive peer groups and communities reduce tendencies of isolation, perfectionism, and procrastination, then we also posit the intervention of radical collegiality as a creation of cofuturities, both academic and personal, professional and otherwise. Without practices of interdependence, dissertation isolation is more likely. From one perspective, radical collegiality means safety in numbers with a cohort refrain of “We’re going to make it”—“it” being the completion of our degree and “we” being our cohort members, dragging, carrying, and nurturing each other through professional and personal obstacles. For vulnerable students, radical collegiality can establish a peer group that explicitly and implicitly deems one’s work necessary, one’s personhood important, and one’s presence welcome.[13] From a different perspective, a radical collegiality pushes back on the idea that progress to degree is more important than individual needs and well-being. This form of peer networks can support a decision to drop out of a program and the increasingly inevitable pursuit of a nonacademic career. With established modes of caring for and with each other, our collegiality extends beyond academia’s bounds and helps us find joy in one another, no matter how precarious, uncertain, or unsettled matters are or become.

As we continue to reflect on our introductory graduate seminar and its ongoing effects, we end with a question: Does this introduction to the profession of literary studies provide a platform from which we can critique the neoliberal institution, or do we risk being absorbed into the object of critique?[14] In a way, learning how to adopt appropriate industry poses within the institution is an important outcome of professionalization. Already in relation to the university, graduate students benefit from understanding how institutional expectations shape an academic department. In fact, the somewhat invisible work that maintains a functioning department is often meant to remain hidden, simply the nature of the university, part of the unexamined background in our ecosystem. Our seminar made visible these mechanics, and this denaturalizing had a distinct effect: rather than becoming completely absorbed into the neo-liberal machine, we became sensitive to its operations. We continue to acknowledge the effects of this dangerous proximity—an articulation, itself, that is important work.

Our argument is not a defense but rather an expectation: radical collegiality will be necessary for unlearning and relearning. It is not a defense, because that would assume the crisis, or an offense, in the sense of aggressive, competitive innovation; rather, radical collegiality is a bricolage creation that arises on site, through play and interpersonal relation. We try our own motions, contingent upon our collective, that are risky but also exciting. China Miéville finds possibility in “motion that seems for a moment quite new, but that we realize we have seen before. When we watch bats crawl. Faced with unusual difficulties, certain animals move in deeply strange, unfamiliar ways, ways that seem abruptly alien, and/but that remain absolutely theirs” (184–85). We repurpose like this, taking what we have and remaking it, using it to crawl along, to make something happen, weird but together. Radical collegiality forces us to understand that interdependence and moving differently are not only things to ask for but conditions that should be assumed.[15] As the university moves beyond tenure-track faculty positions, this repurposing helps reimagine a thriving humanities ecosystem.

“If we are to develop political vision,” Donna Haraway suggests, “some sense of living and dying with each other responsibly . . . I think the practice of joy is critical. And play is part of it. I think that engaging and living with each other in these attentive ways that elaborate capacities in each other produces joy” (252–53). If we are to persist in these violent, unequal systems, Haraway suggests that play and joy are “critical.” By joy, we do not mean the imperative to be happy. Indeed, we are cynical and know that happiness can be a shiny distraction. In “The Uses of the Blues,” James Baldwin helps us think about making joy from an experience of struggle or from within a system that tends, at best, toward exploitation. “Joy,” Baldwin argues, “is a true state, it is a reality; it has nothing to do with what most people have in mind when they talk of happiness” (57). For Baldwin, joy comes from the realization and acceptance of experiences of life that may be full of anguish. His picture of humanity involves joy and incremental steps toward that joy (66). For our co-hort, precarious joy emerged incrementally from the collegiality fostered among six people. Ecalpon U was not a high-stakes project but a high investment in each other. Our collegiality was built slowly and gradually, so it is easy to miss or mistake its value. Rather than merely a course outcome, our collegiality is a radical place for our realities to be voiced with the joy of being heard. With this project, we crawl toward joy.

Notes

For their guidance and support, we thank our seminar leaders, Betty Joseph, Alexander Regier, Emily Houlik-Ritchey, and José Aranda, who gave us the space to experiment and grow. And we are thankful to the Rice English department for encouraging this collaboration.

[1] When we began this essay in 2018, these difficult realities referred to Hurricane Harvey, declining humanities enrollments, and the collapsing academic job market; they have now come to include an ongoing global pandemic that has further exacerbated the challenges we face together.

[2] These crises include underenrollment, under- and exploitative employment, lack of political praxis, and lack of academic freedom. These claims have been put forward by a variety of sources with differing agendas, many of which we are suspicious of. For example, we might ask, Academic freedom for whom?

[3] We also note the statement by the American Association of University Professors that, today, over seventy percent of instructional positions in American higher education are non-tenure-track, and more than half of all faculty positions are part-time (“Background Facts”).

[4] Here, we follow Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in thinking about possibilities for subverting structures of conquest even as our labor maintains sites of expert individualism.

[5] As Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber note, “The discourse of crisis [both] creates a sense of urgency . . . which makes us feel even more powerless in the face of overwhelming odds . . . [and] also inadvertently encourages passivity: if it’s too late, why bother?” (11).

[6] We are asking for a structural change here, but we also note the unequal resources individual professors have available to put toward these revisions, even at a privileged, private university. As Tompkins argues, the arguments over literary curriculum “are not method wars: these are resource wars. Every ‘war,’ if we even want to use that term so loosely from here on out, is going to be a war of resources pretending to be something else” (419).

[7] We thank our colleague Elena Valdez for conceptualizing this phrasing with us.

[8] For a critique of the assumed apolitical nature of minor feelings, see Ngai.

[9] See Stewart for a similar use of this critical term. Stewart defines “atmospheric attunements” as “palpable and sensory yet imaginary and uncontained, material yet abstract. They have rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, and lifespans. They can pull the senses into alert or incite distraction or denial” (445).

[10] See for example, Solomon and Luther’s discussion of an academic culture of favors. See also Ahmed on the importance of being “ungrateful” (Living 246).

[11] On a recent visit to Rice University, Anita Hill explored Me Too’s potential for significant social impact through such steps as progressing intersectional coalition building, establishing procedures prior to an “egregious” peak of sexual harassment, preparing for and expecting retaliation and hostile environments, and—quite simply—firing people.

[12] For a detailed individual account of this implicit power and its overlap with sexual threat, see Solomon and Luther.

[13] Students of color, in particular, can benefit from a graduation-oriented support group; according to recent MLA studies of humanities graduate students in their third through tenth years, “only African American and white doctorate recipients show completion rates over 50% at year 10. Hispanic doctoral students have an especially low ten-year completion rate of 37%” (MLA Office of Research 2). Across graduate degrees, “on average, over half of all black graduate students leave their programs of study before completion compared to 25% attrition . . . of white students” (Sullivan i).

[14] This question is adapted from Ahmed, who writes, “I want to think about . . . how critiques of neoliberalism can also involve a vigorous sweeping: whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of critique” (“Against Students”).

[15] Critical disability studies reminds us there are many ways to be able, many ways to do a thing: “Disability is part of the reality of living in a body—any body”—no body innately knows the way to do the thing, and no body can do the thing by itself (Taylor 142).

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