Attunement in the Cracks: Feminist Collaboration and the University as Broken Machine

This essay takes the form of a dialogue between Natalie Loveless and Carrie Smith, both professors at a large western-Canadian research-intensive university undergoing restructuring prompted by budget cuts. Together they ask how feminist collaboration can work to resculpt academic political spaces. Though both agree that large-scale action is needed, they also argue for the value of insurgent, modest, local modes of collaborative resistance that operate in the cracks of the neoliberal university.

Beginning from their experience navigating the dual threats of COVID-19 and radical budget cuts as professors in academic leadership positions, they make a claim for an anti-racist, feminist university that is responsive in its capacity to nurture generosity, care, and creativity. Together they invite readers to be attentive to the conditions necessary for any true critical collaboration to take place, listening for and attuning to what Sarah Sharma has called "brokenness" (2020)—those places where things are not working from the perspectives of patriarchal power and where those committed to feminist anti-racist/ableist/speciesist university spaces might want to linger.