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Universities have often claimed institutional and value neutrality to assert their autonomy, protect themselves from political or religious pressures, and preserve academic freedom, thus maintaining an image of impartiality. However, a closer anthropological look reveals an affective university—a complex socio-political space shaped by politics, emotion, and conflict. The increase in far-right attacks—from Argentina to Switzerland, the USA to France, and Brazil to Denmark, and beyond—has increasingly used the rhetoric of neutrality. This discourse targets universities, accusing them of exhibiting political bias and incorporating politicized content into classrooms. Such claims suggest that this undermines the supposed “objectivity of knowledge” and fosters perceptions of academic activism, which far-right groups argue has no place within universities. Against this backdrop, student organizing around various causes, such as feminist and anti-racist movements, anti-colonial, and environmental activism, has, again and again, reclaimed university spaces as vital sites of socio-political engagement and life.
This course will adopt an anthropological perspective to examine how neutrality is conceived, designed, enacted, and experienced within universities—institutionally, affectively, spatially, and epistemically—in everyday life, as well as the practices that try to challenge it. By examining various contemporary and historical institutional contexts, we will draw on feminist, queer, and critical design theories, as well as decolonial and affect theories, to gain insights into the multifaceted politics of everyday life in universities. In this course, alongside theoretical discussions, students will collaborate in groups to create multimodal projects (using e.g. photography, sound, film, poetry, and design) that enhance our understanding of universities as affective spaces, central to contemporary sociopolitical life. |
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