Love’s Work in the University: Reading, Listening and Being Read
This interactive roundtable session explores different practices of reading: the reading group, the embodied activity of listening to texts read out loud, and the tarot reading. All are generative practices that forge connections between ideas and people. The audience will be invited to participate in reading, listening and being read.
There is a Cantonese proverb that drinking water alone is filling enough for those in love, which expresses wistfulness and a rebuke of the naivety of lovers. It is time to confess the barely concealed secret that our position as scholars is seduced and nourished within a love of reading, of law and of talking to each other. Is this sufficient to sustain the loving work of thinking? If not, what else do we need from each other and from the University? Does this love leave us vulnerable to only being given the bare minimum (or less) when the body (and the work) needs more?
Practices of reading together are both essential to the work of being a community of scholars and uncounted within the neoliberal metrics of academic productivity. This panel proposes to use different senses and forms of reading as a critical launching point from which to discuss critical legal work, make connections and engage in broader reflections on the practice of scholarship in these times.
Reading Group Text: Sam See, ‘Bersani in Love’, Henry James Review 32 (3) (2011), 195-203
Panellists: Justine Poon (University of the Sunshine Coast/Australian National University), Thomas Bragdon (Leiden University/KABK), Dr Steven Howe (University of Lucerne), Dr Dario Henri Haux (University of Basel/University of Lucerne), Fabienne Graf (University of Lucerne/Humboldt University of Berlin)
Love’s Work Tarot
Shuffle through the deck below using the arrows on the side and stop at random. Click on the card to open.
