Tessel Janse On Collaboration

Fernand Léger (1950) Les trapézistes. Color lithograph. artnet.com

During the first plenary meeting of this academic year, Tessel Janse gave an inspiring talk about collaboration, which was also the theme of this introductory meeting. Discussing what collaboration means, not just for her, but also what it can and and should mean for (us) students, our universities and academia as a whole. You can read the text from this talk below.

Dear students of the Humanities Honours Programme, dear tutors and coordinators,

I’d like to start by thanking the committee for organising this event, and for inviting me to speak on the topic of collaboration.

About eight years ago I sat exactly where you are seated now. I was full of questions about where I would be later, what I could achieve, and how to change the world (spoiler: it’s still a work in progress). So, in a way this feels like coming home. When I did my Bachelor’s Degree in Art History at Utrecht University, I was part of the first group of students to participate in the current iteration of the Honours programme. From how many people are here today I can see that the programme has grown, and that many have found their way to this inspiring space. The programme opened many doors for me, and was a first step on the path that I am walking now.

I often imagine my academic life as a hike. Frequently, it takes me through rough terrain, climbing high mountains, but luckily also sometimes a sunny stroll downhill. There are days that I walk through tunnels, eager for the light at the end. But at times, the hike has offered me spectacular views and moments of sudden clarity. These mostly came when friends or mentors joined me along the way. Today, my path loops back to where it started a few years ago, here at Utrecht University. Now I’m doing a PhD, and I’m a teacher – though learning still, myself. In many aspects I feel unchanged, still that same Honours student keen to learn and to explore. I have to remind myself that now I return with more baggage and experience, more training and better knowledge of myself. When I was invited to speak on the topic of collaboration and to share my experience with you, I realised that (though perhaps a cliché) the only way to approach this was like writing a letter, or perhaps a lonely planet travel guide, to my younger self.

I’ll share with you some memories and observations. But I also want to open up the notion of collaboration, to think about some unexpected ways in which we collaborate during our time at university. These different kinds of collaboration have been equally important to my development and to how at least I approach life within and outside of academia.

So, collaboration. Though it is the foundation of learning, teaching, and research, collaboration is generally a rare good in academic education. As you go from a Bachelor’s Degree to a Master’s to, perhaps, a PhD, learning becomes more and more individualised and competitive. Collaboration is something you will have to actively seek out, on your own initiative. It is for this reason that the Honours programme is so important, asking us to work with students and colleagues from other disciplines, across generations. To venture outside the lecture halls and into ‘the real world’. During my time as an Honours student, I learned to do teamwork, to think together and get creative. As a group, we witnessed the projects that unfolded when we joined forces and put competitiveness on hold. I remember starting out with a symposium on World Art. We attempted to answer the question of whether Art History can be effectively rewritten from a global perspective, and if attempting to do so would even be a desirable project. It brought me many new skills to be working towards an event, something other than a paper or a presentation, to which we could invite practitioners, curators, and – not to be underestimated – our own friends and family members.

Later, in the aftermath of the 2015 Maagdenhuis occupation and the New University movement that resisted the ongoing marketization of academia, with a group called ‘The New Utopians’ we embarked on a documentary about re-imagining the university. All under enthusiastic encouragement from our Honours teachers, who were as eager to collaborate with students, as we were to pick their brain about anything we could. Most important of all, in these projects I made friends who I am still close with today. Even though now, very much to our own surprise, almost all of us are doing PhD’s in different countries. I am very aware that doing a PhD is not the only valuable option after finishing your university education, and for many it is not a dream at all. But together as The New Utopians we dreamed and supported each other, and continue to do so. Of course, this was often in the pub, in the park, or on a random road trip, and many film screenings and reading groups — with lots of red wine – followed. Remember to make time to enjoy yourself, and to look after each other. Because care, too, is collaboration.

This Programme made me into more than a student of Art History. Instead, I became a Humanities student, and interdisciplinarity became ingrained in my thinking – this is how I ended up researching the idiosyncratic combination of Post- and Decolonial Studies, contemporary art and Critical Animal Studies. The Honours Programme is the place to learn to start following your creative instinct and start engaging with others outside of your own discipline or comfort zone. Take this opportunity, explore your talents, develop yourself beyond academic writing, and: invite as many people as you can into these learning spaces, because there is so much to learn from these people in return. Use your status as Honours student to get in touch with people that inspire you, and you will get much further than you think. For me, the mentors I reached out to during the Honours Programme later helped me to make my choices about my future path.

Now, this all sounds very sweet and, indeed, utopian – as an academic year opening should be. But I know many of you will be quietly wondering: how will I even make time for this programme in combination with my side jobs and succeeding in my major? Or: she’s going on about a PhD, but what if I don’t want to stay in academia at all? And how do I even navigate a place that often feels so hierarchical, when I’m not even sure if I belong here? Especially this last question still haunts me daily. Where I am now at Goldsmiths university, one of the most innovative and inspiring places I know is being violently restructured by a management team out for financial profit. Here I am experiencing myself that collaboration can be hard. Through union activism, strike organising, and as a student representative, I am seeing that collaboration is under pressure when power dynamics, different interests, and challenges to what education itself even is, start doing their erosive work. In many ways, academia can be a hostile place, marked by long histories of exclusion and entanglement with power, and we all have to carve out a space in it. Especially young academics, first-generation university students, women, differently abled, and racialised people.

That is why I want to open up the concept of collaboration, beyond group work or interdisciplinarity alone. I wouldn’t be a postcolonial studies student, a Goldsmiths graduate, or an Honours student, for that matter – if in some ways I wouldn’t be thinking about what my generation can do to reshape academia and contribute to its future. How do we make a space that is so pivotal to society – because I like to think of humanities as the location of the social conscience – in turn answer to the voices that demand change and more diversity? What can we do to decolonise the university? How can we transform the university into a space for collaboration with activists, and with those perspectives that were historically silenced by the connection between knowledge production and imperialism?

Of course, this is an ever unfinished project and there are many people more suitable to speak about this than I am. There are also many ways of approaching these questions. I encourage you to find your own, but I will share with you some ways in which I have applied this to my own daily research practices. As a gesture of collaboration in my speech design, I will bring in the advice of those who have inspired my own approach.

For me, collaboration exists in many ways. In academia, paradoxically, it is often a one-sided affair. This can be productive, though, forcing one to consider research ethics. For me, this has inspired me to think about my citation politics: who do I cite and reference, who do I think with? As feminist race studies scholar Sara Ahmed, and many others have argued, non-white authors are cited less than their white colleagues across a variety of fields (Bolles, 2013; Chakravartty et al., 2018; Ray, 2018). This means that the centrality of white scholars, mostly men (Ahmed, 2014), in the canon is reproduced through repetitive citation patterns. All the while, non-White scholars are excluded both from circulation and from the merits of being cited, as citation is seen as an indication of research quality and determines career development. And not only that: repetitive citation patterns mean that some questions are not asked at all, or that answers are always sought in the same vein.

I know that it is inspiring, empowering, and in many fields necessary, to attach ourselves and our research to the celebrity names of Western thought. But at the same time I want to invite you to reflect critically on who we want to include, who deserves a bigger platform, and which so-called ‘outside’ voices and fields bring the most challenging but productive questions. My own citational practice therefore centralises emerging scholars, women, Indigenous scholars, and non-white thinkers. As sociologist Nirmal Puwar, author of the seminal book Space Invaders, argues, the goal here should not be to ‘strip out everything under the label of “pale, male and stale” but we can widen platforms whilst interrogating the alliances, affinities and intimacies in the contact zones of knowledge exchange’ (2020, p. 10).

Here, she asks us to think about the politics behind knowledge production: who is speaking, from where, for whom, and with what interest? Who are they being accountable to, or collaborative with? And how can we learn from their research ethics to invent our own?

From this listening to traditionally excluded voices stems a second practice that inspires me. This is the challenge to ‘unthink mastery’, as decolonial scholar Julietta Singh names it. Central to interdisciplinary collaboration, or interdiscursivity, or transdisciplinarity, whatever you call it, is the necessity to let go of mastery and lean into curiosity. Disciplinary thinking is what enables us to posit ourselves as experts, which can foreclose engagement with other thinkers we see as ‘outside our field.’ Interdiscursivity also means a commitment to looking beyond scholarly discourses and towards activist, cultural and curatorial practices.

Inspired by Singh’s Unthinking Mastery, my own practice can be thought of as partly ‘undisciplinary’ (Gómez-Barris, 2017; Singh, 2018). For me, this is an unthinking of disciplinary boundaries – though not a denial of their realities and their impact on my thinking – and a way of moving through uncharted territory. Undisciplinarity not only means unthinking disciplinary comforts and being critical of the politics of discipline-production. It is also an exercise of unthinking the boundaries (between science and theory, nature and culture, or scientific and traditional knowledge) that colonialism imposed. Singh advances ‘vulnerable reading’ as an open, continuous practice of remaining susceptible to new world configurations that reading texts – both written, artistic, philosophical, and political texts – can begin to produce. Vulnerable reading, or listening, resists disciplinary enclosure, refusing to restrict in advance how and which tracks one might wander.

Vulnerable reading, thus, requires an openness as well as a humility towards what is articulated by perspectives other than our own. Closely related, Indigenous scholar Zoe Todd translates Dwayne Donald’s ethical relationality (Donald, 2012) into a scholarly habit that has reciprocity as its starting point and end:

‘Reciprocity of thinking requires us to pay attention to who else is speaking alongside us. It also positions us, first and foremost, as citizens embedded in dynamic […] systems of relations that require us to work constantly and thoughtfully across the myriad systems of thinking, acting, and governance within which we find ourselves enmeshed (Todd, 2016, p. 19).’

For me, reciprocity translates to research in conversation with other voices, inclusive reference practices with regards to who and how I read, and awareness of the impact and dynamics that my writing can produce and the spaces I have access to. Even though the papers that you write or presentations that you give might feel like a hesitant first attempt at something new, the arguments, sources and case studies that you bring might inspire someone, somewhere in your audience. They can bring about a small amount of change, make something suddenly clear like a signpost along the road to our collective future.

Reciprocity, therefore, also means paying attention to the conditions of possibility of us being here, in Utrecht, in this very room, talking about collaboration. How could we speak, here, today, without the cleaners going in – often late at night or early in the morning for very low pay – to keep these spaces clean, as postcolonial feminist Françoise Vergès reminds us (Vergès, 2019; 2021). How can we think of security staff, librarians, receptionists and all non-academic staff, the coffee bar around the corner, as constitutive of what knowledge we produce? And how can this often overlooked form of collaboration become more reciprocal – by acknowledging their work, inviting them to participate in our events, and caring about their working conditions when we strive to better our own?

My advice, coming back to this place, is to seek out those who inspire you, to learn from your teachers and those older generations who have gone before you. From the texts you immerse yourself in and the libraries that keep you, late at night working towards a deadline. But also think about the future and what sort of university we want to build towards together. Learn from the spaces where you might feel excluded yourself, and think: in my future, who will be included, in body, in thought, in research and in writing?

The last but definitely not least type of unseen collaboration that you will encounter, exists with the people who support you outside of these walls. Your friends, your housemates, your family members who have delivered you to the doorstep of Utrecht University. Your fellow students. Those who will catch you in moments when the hill seems too steep to climb or when the paths to choose seem too many or, at times, not enough.

This is the last thing that I wanted to share with you. It is one of my most recent realisations, when preparing this talk forced me to reflect on what I did well and what I would have done differently: celebrate your achievements, because they are not yours alone! I, myself, was always running towards the next exciting mountain: I forgot to sign up for my graduation ceremony, I did not bother with organising a celebration because I was writing applications for my Masters programme, and I reluctantly dragged myself to my graduation in London because I felt that I had to. But your success in University is not only your own, it is the result of the many people around you who carry you, clear the way, walk with you and are there to inspire new adventures. Involve them, celebrate them, share your inspiration, your dreams, and your success.

If there is one central takeaway from the Humanities Honours Programme for me, it is: don’t be afraid to be called unrealistic, to be an Utopian, because we need to be able to imagine Utopia in order to even get us halfway.

References:

Ahmed, S. (2014) White Men, Feminist Killjoys. Available at: https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/11/04/white-men/

Bolles, L. (2013) ‘Telling the Story Straight: Black Feminist Intellectual Thought in Anthropology’, Transforming Anthropology, 21(1), pp. 57–71. doi:10.1111/traa.12000.

Chakravartty, P. et al. (2018) ‘#CommunicationSoWhite’, Journal of Communication, 68(2), pp. 254–266. doi:10.1093/joc/jqy003.

Donald, D. (2012) ‘Indigenous Métissage: a decolonizing research sensibility’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(5), pp. 533–555.

Gómez-Barris, M. (2017) The extractive zone: social ecologies and decolonial perspectives. Durham London: Duke University Press (Dissident acts).

Puwar, N. (2004) Space invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place. Oxford : New York: Berg.

Puwar, N. (2020) ‘Puzzlement of a déjà vu: Illuminaries of the global South’, The Sociological Review, 68(3), pp. 540–556. doi:10.1177/0038026119890254.

Ray, V. (2018) ‘The Racial Politics of Citation’, Inside Higher Education, 27 April. Available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2018/04/27/racial-exclusions-scholarly-citations-opinion.

Singh, J. (2018) Unthinking mastery: dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Durham: Duke University Press.

Todd, Z. (2016) ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word For Colonialism: An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1), pp. 4–22. doi:10.1111/johs.12124.

Vergès, F. (2019) Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender, e-flux. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/100/269165/capitalocene-waste-race-and-gender/ (Accessed: 10 January 2022).

Vergès, F. (2021) A Decolonial Feminism. Place of publication not identified: PLUTO Press.