Sensible Ruptures

Abstract

This paper explores queer and racialised experiences in Danish academia through - what we call - sensible ruptures: affective, embodied and sensory ways of knowing. Taking seriously these modes of knowledge, the article outlines the creation of an online, audio-visual archive. Weaving together text, audio and images to unfold our concept of sensible ruptures, we demonstrate how the audio-visual can meaningfully contribute to capturing the affective and material fabric of racialised and queer experiences with/in Danish higher education. Sensible ruptures underscore the importance of understanding the complex processes of racialisation in an institutional and national context saturated by ambiguity and exceptionalism. We contend that thinking not only against, but beyond, disembodied colonial logics offers a different mode of knowledge creation, reconfiguring the self as permeable, constituted through and with our histories and surroundings. We centre friendship as a vital part of this process, harnessing queer epistolary to perform our pursuit of, and argument for, knowledge as always and inevitably relational.

Keywords

• racialisation
• queer theory
• affect
• embodiment
• archives
• queer epistolary