Fugitive Study at University: Moving Beyond Neoliberal Affect Through Aesthetic Experimentation with Space-Times

Abstract

The article proposes a relational pedagogy centred on study, to contest the affective condition of the present and how it shapes narratives of young people being disengaged and with a lack of future. In doing so, it draws from affect theory and black radical studies to outline a more complex approach to affect in university experience. It mobilises the concept of study, advanced by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in their book The Undercommons, to direct attention to less linear and transparent space-times where study, a practice of affecting and being affected by what others do to you and what you do with it, exceeds the frameworks of the university. Further to this, the article connects study and fugitivity to what Moten calls an aesthetics of the break practiced across black studies. In doing so, it links affect to complex spatial-temporal relationalities that emerge from sensuous experimentation and creative speculation, which engage both in university and its escape. These ideas are explored through a participatory study with university students in Manchester, UK called Sensing the Black Outdoors. I present the findings derived from radical sensory-spatial experiments, which led to: (a) visual encounters centred in not looking away and staying with the material presence of blackness and (b) the development of collective experiments with sensory media for feeling and imagining alternative experiences of space and time in the city.