ABSTRACT
In recent years, a growing body of scholarly work has been pushing for “slowness” in academia, be it science, scholarship or pedagogy. While slow scholarship is gaining increasing popularity and its practices are multiplying and diversifying, in this chapter, the author expresses worries about the lack of active engagement of matter (i.e. organic matter) in articulating and practising slowness in Higher Education. The worry, specifically, is that the neoliberal forces will be quick to co-opt this new movement, transforming it in mere and apolitical techniques of “self-care,” largely individual and merely procedural “fixes” to better oil the machine of late capitalism. Working with the contribution of feminist new materialism scholarship, this paper makes the argument that it is possible to prevent this from happening if caring work with matter (i.e. organic matter) is enticed. Using the contribution of two feminist new materialist authors, particularly Karen Barad and Elizabeth A. Wilson, this chapter claims the importance of inheriting well our pasts and the traces they leave, for example, on body, that is, organic matters; and for the value of mobilizing a caring and empathic approach to matter’s liveness to work with matter in making more liveable worlds matter (as material-discursive entanglements). The chapter concludes with some concrete proposals as to what a feminist new materialist slow pedagogy could look like.
