Practicing slow scholarship in a hard world

I feel surrounded by a special sense of gratitude, one that I’m unsure I have ever felt before, exactly like this. I am sipping the coffee Carlos brought me from Colombia, reading book titles gifted to me that I’m sure were hotly contested and wondering why these won out over others. I have read the card with the beautiful well-wishes and thanks. There are flowers on my table, bought at Queen Victoria Markets just yesterday morning by Amanda, her husband Kyle and 2-year-old daughter Bea as she enjoyed running down the street in the freshness of the Melbourne morning air, so different to the humidity of Singapore.

Last night eight of us played Cards Against Humanity at the end of a week of eating, hiking, being-in-close-quarters, whip-smart discussions. This way of being, what us and others have labelled “slow scholarship”, might not be for everyone.

CARD 1: Mr and Mrs Diaz. I have called you in to the office to talk about your daughter Cynthia. She has…

CARD 2: Put shit in her laptop and closed the lid.

Over the course of a week-long residential retreat we have laughed (a lot), we have talked (possibly more), we have become exhausted, we have seen baby emus, wombats, wallabies, brush tailed possums, and experienced the wild ocean and the rocky hills of Yirik Wamoon, known today as Wilsons Promontory or heartbreakingly as “undetermined land” because colonialism did its job so well First Nations people no longer have memory of who walked this place. All of us travelled far to be here physically and/or mentally. Many amusing photos, videos and selfies have been taken and shared. While this was the first time, we have all gathered in person, we have been working together since March 2024. Since then, we have met in monthly online meetings from time zones spanning the globe; we have introduced ourselves and each other in numerous different, surprisingly enlightening ways; we took time to read each other’s work and actually think about it; we sent WhatsApp voice notes about how we found work useful and generative. We will write a number of posts for AllegraLab, we have produced a podcast, and hopefully a special issue and an edited volume. As Vivienne Bozalek (2021) said in an article for Education as Change, ‘Slow scholarship does not necessarily mean operating at a more leisurely pace or doing substantially less, but engaging in educationally worthwhile activities, which are enriching and complex.’ We are now some type of community-in-relation. Perhaps we might be bold and eschew disciplinary boundaries by labelling ourselves, as Hannah Arendt has done, “political thinkers”? Or perhaps we are closest to what we learned from Amanda Kearney the Yanyuwa people of northern Australia call likili nganji – most trusted companions.

A video of a wombat from our residential retreat at Yirik Wamoon/Wilsons Promontory National Park from Sunday 17 November until Wednesday 20 November 2024.

WhatsApp voice note from Nasia Hadjigeorgiou on 11 June 2024 reflecting on the writing of Miki Sosnowski, Sonia Qadir and Amanda Blair.

Among our likili nganji we have resident introverts, extroverts, calm people, those with a low social budget, those that drink too much, talk too loud and party too hard, strong women, chivalrous men, we have brown people from the Global South, we have gender diversity. There are anthropologists, sociologists, legal historians, socio-legal scholars, political scientists, scholars studying war and transitional justice practitioners. If academia hired the United Colors of Benetton marketing company, it might look something like us. Our work together seeks to better understand how people experience the law at an everyday level after world-shaping events in a range of contexts including Myanmar, Colombia, Cyprus, North Korea, Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Germany and Australia; and how these afterlives map onto first-hand encounters at checkpoints, with sexual and gender-based violence, with access to documents and citizenship rights, in frozen conflicts, with movements for peace, transitional, youth and criminal justice. We are a bit of a cliché. It would make me sick if only I didn’t like and admire everyone quite as much as I do.

Academia can be a tough game. It can make PhD candidates want to cry; it exhausts all of us at different times and in different ways. The academy seems to have a penchant for production and individualism. The increasing neoliberalisation of academia over the last two decades has meant that the demands on scholars have become more and more oppressive with the institution taking little to no responsibility for questionable decisions. In the name of academic freedom, the institution accepts funding for dual-use technology that is used for fighting bushfires but also to commit genocide; it cuts funding to arts and humanities programs because we are now into IMPACT; it implements staff hiring freezes due to student enrolment numbers while posting million-dollar surpluses. It can be suffocating and intense. It can be impersonal and cruel. It can hurt us, sometimes a lot, and whether these scars are new or whether it is only opening scars we already held anyway and whether any of these scars will ever really heal remains a mystery. Whether they need to be healed also remains an open question.

And yet… in the oft-times stifling atmosphere of the neoliberal academy there is space to breath and find community to breath with. Eve Tuck has written and spoken (2024) in her vulnerable, eloquent and powerful way about “biting the university that feeds us” and about how academic labour and its systems might be refused in order to generate new possibilities. What we have been doing for nearly a year in our slow scholarship project is to take Tuck’s advice seriously in seeking out how the impersonal and technocratic nature of the neoliberal academy can be turned on its head to create spaces for resistance. For example, the institution accepts that there is value in “residential retreats” (maths and sciences have been doing them for years) and then we get to decide the location, content, and format of those retreats. The institution values production – so why not write a methodological paper about slow scholarship as a mixed bag of lollies for others to choose and learn from in order to, in small ways to be sure, undermine it. The institution likes IMPACT so how about a podcast which incorporates the personal into the political and back again questioning why we cannot easily dissect ourselves from the topics we find ourselves drawn to research. The impersonal nature of the modern academy provides all of us with the space, right now, to prioritise and hold dear relationships and the collective nature of knowledge generation in all that we do. Make no mistake, actually caring for each other, making and taking time, being likili nganji, most trusted companions, is hard work – and it is a deeply political act.

And because time is our most precious resource, in this project I have been guided by Priya Parker’s (2018) directive to first and foremost think about why we are gathering. It can be whatever you want it to be but for me it is to: create a small collective that generates a joy of learning and where those involved can share wisdom, stories and insights in different forms. The form, format and essence of everything else in this project has stemmed from this premise.

In April 2025 we met for the second time in person at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law. There, we invited others into our likili nganji: Rebecca Sutton, Marnie Lloydd, Alice Wilson, Agathe Mora, Arne Harms, Veronica Ferreri, Amanda Kearney. We did not play Cards Against Humanity. But still…

Featured image: A thank you card I drew for our intern Kira Todd who transcribed many of our WhatsApp voice notes.

Acknowledgments: Thanks for the support of Legal Afterlife of War and Revolution project members Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, Birgitte Holst, Carlos Antonio Díaz Bolaños, Amanda Blair, Anuja Jaiswal, Izzy Rhoads, Jenny Hedström, Sonia Qadir, Nasia Hadjigeorgiou and Charlotte al-Khalili.

References

Vivianne Bozalek, ‘Slow Scholarship: Propositions for the Extended Curriculum Programme’, Education as Change, Vol. 25. 2021.

Priya Parker (2018) The Art of Gathering: how we meet and why it matters, Riverhead Books.

Episode 8 of the White Noise podcast: Education, future orientation and theories of change with Professor Eve Tuck, 3 September 2024. Available at: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/iljh/resources/white-noise-of-settler-law-justice-talks/white-noise-podcast/white-noise-episode-8-building-treaty-relationships

Abstract: Some reflections on the conditions of slow scholarship.