The university's missing and the work of mourning

Keywords: critical university studies, mourning, psychoanalysis, Gaza, academic labor
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

That the university is a site of significant loss as been horrifying clear in the last decade. As the university, and many disciplines, struggle to reproduce itself, many of those working – or wanting to work – in the university have been discarded, ejected, or found it impossible to continue working in the university under the conditions they have been forced to endure. Many working and studying in the university have been lost during the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic – whether dying of COVID, or navigating ongoing illness caused by COVID and/or Long Covid. And in the last year, as we have witnessed Israel destroying every university in Gaza, administrations of western universities have steadfastly refused to recognize such overwhelming loss – let alone begun to act in ways that might stop ongoing scholasticide in occupied Palestine. Writings on mourning might, I wager, help us reimagine the topography of the university today in the face of such overwhelming loss: Freud’s 1917 essay on mourning and melancholia struggled over how enormously difficult mourning is, as well as continued to situate mourning as fundamental to the vicissitudes of the human subject. In this paper, I move between psychoanalytic accounts of mourning and Abdeljawad Omar’s ‘Can the Palestinian mourn?’. In so doing, I hope to offer some thoughts on what some of our current frameworks within and beyond geography and critical university studies might be missing about how ongoing political-economic and psychosocial transformations are remaking what university constitutes today.