Slow Digest: Scholarship

This week, Slow Digest offers three articles by scholars, or groups of scholars, who explore or reflect on the rewards of slow(ish), interdisciplinary, exploratory, and highly collaborative scholarly practices.

Patricia Hill Collins, “LOOKING BACK, MOVING AHEAD: Scholarship in Service to Social Justice”

Contributed by Jamee Nicole Pritchard

Patricia Hill Collins discusses her experience with developing scholarship in service to social justice through dialogical knowledge production, or what can be interpreted as slow scholarship. In this essay, she discusses how she had the freedom away from the pressures and confinement of higher education to slowly develop sociological theory that could actually be put into practice. I chose this essay because of its illustration of how slow productivity in academia means putting theory into practice. Slowing down sometimes means better, more effective and deliberate praxis.  

COLLINS, P. H. (2012). LOOKING BACK, MOVING AHEAD: Scholarship in Service to Social Justice. Gender and Society, 26(1), 14–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23212234  


“For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University”

Contributed by Russell Star-Lack

This article, co-written with UWM’s Anne Bonds and Jenna Lloyd, discusses strategies for slow scholarship within the neoliberal university from a feminist perspective. While this is a theory-heavy academic article, I like that it proposes and discusses realistic strategies for enacting slow scholarship including sharing practices, increasing what counts for tenure promotion, collective organizing, prioritizing care, emailing less, taking time to think, slowing down the writing process, saying no, and not holding your work to the highest standard all the time.  

Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., … Curran, W. (2015). For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies14(4), 1235–1259. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v14i4.1058


Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Practicing Trio A”

Contributed by Katie Waddell

In this article, art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson writes about her experience learning, embodying, and performing a work of contemporary dance by Yvonne Rainer, a choreographer she’d studied, and written about, prior to enlisting in Rainer’s class. A critique of the notion of critical distance unfolds over the course of the article as Bryan-Wilson recounts how her understanding of the dance shifted as she learned to perceive the dance’s movements via proprioception, rather than as a spectator. A clumsy person by her own admission, Bryan-Wilson’s very first dance class was Rainer’s. In re-learning an artwork specific to her area of expertise as a beginner, Bryan-Wilson conducts slow scholarship by experiencing the object of her study intimately, subjectively, and in real time: “as a non-dancer, I found learning Trio A akin to learning a language so foreign that you not only don’t understand the words or the alphabet, but you can’t even distinguish between consonants and vowels” (67).

In writing in a semi-autobiographical style, Bryan-Wilson also performs the kind of scholarship for which she ultimately argues in the article: scholarship that owns up to and accounts for the subjectivity and historical specificity of the author, and also treats scholarship as a collaborative project rather than a competitive achievement.

Julia Bryan-Wilson; Practicing Trio AOctober 2012; (140): 54–74. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00089

Julia Bryan-Wilson; Practicing Trio AOctober 2012; (140): 54–74. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00089

Contributed by Katie Waddell

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