ABSTRACT
The ‘outsourcing’ of reading-as-labour might be counted amongst the many faults of the care-less university, replacing the institution as a place for the work of thinking-with the accounting of this thinking that has already taken place, a priori. Amongst the elements that American political theorist Joan Tronto uses to build an ethics of ‘care as a practice rather than a disposition,’ are three concerns – ‘attentiveness,’ ‘responsibility,’ and ‘responsiveness,’ – that resonate with aspects of study. Care as a practice rather than a disposition orientates it clearly towards the impersonal: it challenges the sentimentalisation and individualisation of care. For Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, study is similarly embedded in and emergent from practices of living that are always going on, collectively: in workplaces, lunchrooms, on porches and streets. Studying in Harney and Moten’s sense of the word is ‘coming together on our terms, rather than theirs.
