Required Reading:

Boggs, Abigail, and Nick Mitchell. ‘Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus’. Feminist Studies 44, no. 2 (2018): 432–63. https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.44.2.0432.

Chen, Mel Y, and Tim K Choy. ‘Corresponding in Time’. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 4 (1 November 2020): 795–808. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa182.

This week we launch the first Ends of Knowledge reading group by orientating conversations around two fundamental questions. What are the medical humanities for? And why are they like the way they are? To get at these questions, we ask that you read two journal articles in preparation, each of which correspond to recent formations of interpretive humanities study of the contemporary university. The first is Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell’s ‘Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus’ which offers a compelling reassessment of research into higher education and its relationship to crisis and repair. This article also acts as a superb overview of the field of Critical University Studies and will be very helpful for our conversations in the future. The second is Mel Y. Chen and Tim K. Choy’s ‘Corresponding in Time’ (2020), a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and a corresponding reflection on the exigencies of research and writing. In this article, the crisis of illness and injustice are both present and endlessly deferred – and questions about the rearrangement of disciplinary knowledge-production is again at its heart. We hope that these two articles will allow us to think together, think through, and think within what it is that happens in health-related research across the university sector.

To attend, please email James Rákóczi or Harriet Cooper at endsofknowledge@gmail.com for the Zoom link. If you have any difficulty accessing any of the materials (we are more than aware how the system currently locks things behind paywalls), then do not hesitate to get in touch.

The featured image is of a Russia-Germany gas pipeline, covered under Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication.

Suggested Further Reading:

Boggs, Abigail, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein. ‘Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation’. Abolition Journal (blog), 28 August 2019. https://abolitionjournal.org/abolitionist-university-studies-an-invitation/.

Chen, Mel Y. ‘Unpacking Intoxication, Racialising Disability’. Medical Humanities 41, no. 1 (1 June 2015): 25. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2014-010648.

Viney, William, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods. ‘Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks’. Medical Humanities 41, no. 1 (1 June 2015): 2–7. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2015-010692.