Parse Journal (Aug 2023)
Undisciplining Who We Bring to the Academic Table
Abstract
From formatting and style manuals we may first learn from in secondary school to the submission instructions that academic journals put in place, students and seasoned scholars alike learn to navigate standard rules for academic writing. Since the turn towards reflexive citation practices and refusals of institutionalised order, we have a wealth of directions and interventions to write and think otherwise. Through this essay, I look at the loyalties to our respective disciplines that stubbornly remain intact, despite our creative efforts and theoretical interventions to reconstruct citational practices. I argue that the danger of disciplinarity—even its siblings cross-, multi-, and transdisciplinarity—is that it disciplines us into the scholarly order and production of knowledge that such alternative citation practices aim to challenge. I begin this essay with a look into anti-disciplinarity by way of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons and the proposals for movements otherwise that Black critical thought, queer theory and performance studies offer us. Importantly, this essay is projected towards Axelle Karera’s provocation that “to be black and critical is necessarily to engage in disorderly conduct, to become ‘undisciplined’.” Following the introduction, the central part of this paper consists of visual documentation of an embodied practice that considers themes of disorderly conduct and becoming undisciplined. I revisit the ways in which I undiscipline the traditional literature review, methodology and contribution to knowledge. The visual documentation is composed of conceptual frameworks and materials, and a formal enquiry that draws from critical creative research and critical autoethnography. Through a combination of writing and abstract form-making, I explore how I make with the literature and scholars I cite.
