Slow Scholarship Looped in Dark Ecology: A Mortonian Perspective on the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
Slow Scholarship Looped in Dark Ecology: A Mortonian Perspective on the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

Summary/Abstract: The impact of work intensification on scholarship has emerged as a poignant issue for higher education. The neoliberal university’s obsession with outcomes, efficiency and socio-economic ends produces a culture of haste at odds with the adequate performance of scholarship. This obsession evinces indignation, with calls to restore the centrality and value of slow scholarship as a core feature of higher education. The tension tends to be analysed as a deep dispute between neoliberalism and slow scholarship, each seeking to prevail. This paper presents an alternative way to think of this issue. The discordance between the two can be analysed in terms of Timothy Morton’s ecological view that everything exists within a fluxed state of coexistence. According to this view, everything exists within loop structures in a mesh reality. Within loop structures, everything is constituted by permeable boundaries and is continually in a paradoxical state of being both itself and not itself. Given this, nothing is absolute or fixed. Concepts such as neoliberalism and slow scholarship are themselves interconnected within permeable and paradoxical relations. Dark ecology captures this combination of both connection and difference between all things. One important implication is how ecologically embedded concepts and ideals can challenge traditional ideas about epistemology. This has further implications for our normative thinking about the relationship between slow scholarship and the neoliberal university. An ecological reading of normativity reveals insights from focusing on the inescapable boundedness of slow scholarship in difference relations.

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