PhD Diaries #1: A Transgressive Academy

Subverting the logic through feeling, collectivizing, and liberating

A few weeks ago, I participated in my first doctoral event, the Spring Academy. Organized by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies, the conference facilitated encounters with professors from diverse backgrounds across the Global South, as well as with researchers focusing on extensively distinct themes, from decolonial higher education to poetry as resistance against contemporary oppressions.

Among the discussions, the panels regarding knowledge and the limitations of the university engendered a spectrum of incredible divergences that, ultimately, converged upon recognizing the complexity of the subject matter. How to combat anti-science discourses and comprehend that the university was — and, in numerous instances, remains — a space for the maintenance of colonial, sexist, and hegemonic power hierarchies? How to expand the voices present within the academic environment? How to rupture with Eurocentrism without relinquishing scientific methodology and rigor? These constituted some of the inquiries posited during the expositions of the professors and researchers.

The resolutions to these inquiries cannot derive from binary perspectives. In his lecture, Professor Adolfo Alban Achinte, from UniCauca, reminded us that the division between reason and emotion, between academia and life beyond it, is a fallacy. We think because we feel, and we feel because we think. Our experiences, communities, and origins are intrinsic to the manner in which we comprehend the world and formulate our projects, lectures, papers, inquiries, and research endeavors. Life cannot be compartmentalized utilizing a Cartesian model. It overflows.

Foucault once asserted that thinking is not merely an intellectual exercise, but a “beautiful and transformative practice.” Nonetheless, this only manifests when our thoughts function as instruments for global change, enabling the adoption of a genuinely liberating praxis. In this regard, bell hooks argues in Teaching to Transgress that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”

But first, why do we occupy classrooms?

The Desire to Learn

During my master’s degree, I contemplated abandoning my academic career. With the advancement of neoliberalism into university enclaves, the production of knowledge degenerated into a market-driven practice, characterized by objectives to be fulfilled, inhumane deadlines, and scarcely collective logics. Furthermore, I became disillusioned upon observing the estrangement between theory and practice within certain contexts. Decoloniality and feminism were articulated, yet the universalized woman in the majority of debates was white and middle-class. I did not have a single Black professor during my master’s degree, while we constituted merely four racialized women in the laboratory. The deficit of representation compelled me to question whether that environment was indeed my place.

At a certain juncture, I managed to forget the reason I had entered that space: I loved to learn, just as I also adored to teach. I recall the joy I experienced as a child when discovering something novel, the enthusiasm of arriving home and recounting everything the teachers had enunciated. When I attained literacy, I spent months reading all the street signs and Monica’s Gang comic books, increasingly fulfilled with each new lexical acquisition. Learning has always constituted my paramount passion. Reading, subsequently, became a profound companion, especially since I was a rather solitary child at school. It permitted me to encounter new worlds and dream beyond geographical and temporal limitations.

Years later, feminist theory emerged from the tribulations of the context surrounding me. What could be the origin of those power hierarchies that positioned women in situations of jeopardy and disadvantage across so many spheres? Why is our autonomy so circumscribed? These and other inquiries exerted pressure upon me to pursue resolutions.

Many individuals possess analogous histories of convergence with feminist theory. Bell hooks recounts:

“I came to theory because I was hurting — the pain within me was so intense that I could not continue to live. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend — to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.”

For many women, an academic career was not a market-driven choice, but a cry for succor amidst a patriarchal context. We conceptualize from what we feel: anger, pain, unrest, a thirst for transformation. These emotions constitute the engines of our research endeavors. Nonetheless, there are attempts to convince us that they are incompatible with scientific endeavor, neglecting that they are foundational to our social analyses.

Occasionally, we ourselves forget.

Transforming the World

Throughout the preceding centuries, the scientific enterprise was utilized to justify violence against oppressed classes within diverse contexts. The exclusion of women and Black individuals from Enlightenment equality, the tortures within the medical field during the development of gynecology, and the racist eugenics dispersed across so many territories constitute merely a few examples.

In recent years, the archetype of the traditional scientist has been undergoing certain alterations. Universalizing visions are being challenged, while new countenances, bodies, and voices enter and contest academic arenas. In Brazil, the development of women’s history and the Quota Law represent prominent examples of the ongoing mutations. Thus, from within the structure, we subvert its logic without relinquishing scientific rigor, thereby expanding it.

However, we cannot perceive our inclusion within this space as an opportunity to reproduce the logic of capital that individualizes contexts, perpetuates positivism within the human sciences, and distances us from reality. Theory is only valid when accompanied by a praxis of liberation and transformation. Upon entering, we did not arrive isolated, but we brought our sentiments, communities, and numerous other women who — in the past or present — lacked the opportunity to occupy that space.

I conclude with the wisdom of bell hooks once more:

“When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes evident is the bond between the two — that process, ultimately reciprocal, where one enables the other.”

Who writes

Manoela Veras holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations, a Master’s degree in Global History, and is currently pursuing a doctorate at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She investigates discourses surrounding race and class within reproductive policies across the Global South, with an emphasis on Brazil, utilizing a feminist perspective. On Substack, she writes regarding reproductive policies, research, daily life, women's history, and education.