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This article explores how feminist teachers can engage with affective pedagogies when teaching intersectional gender studies. In the context of global corporate universities that emphasise action plans on diversity, equality, and inclusion, and alongside a rise in anti-gender and anti-diversity politics both within society and on campuses, feminist scholars encounter challenges in navigating affective contestations and tensions when teaching intersectional gender studies. These tensions can both evoke uncomfortable atmospheres and offer hopeful glimpses of societal changes and solidarities. In addressing this, we employ the idiom of 'the elephant in the room' to exploring how affective tensions emerge in the classroom and how feminist teachers may respond to and care about them. Drawing on literature on affective pedagogies, we conceptualise affects as intensities that move within and infuse feminist classrooms and analytically unpack two experiences of elephants emerging when teaching an intersectional gender studies programme at a Danish university. Specifically, we offer two takes on affective pedagogies that we name 'swaying the elephant' and 'holding the elephant' and discuss the ways in which feminist teachers can nurture ethico-political and affirmative practices in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the critical role of time in the discursive, communicative constitution of organization under neo-liberal capitalism and its normalization of uncertainty and change. Building on a review of extant time notions in studies of organizational discourse and communicative constitution of organization, we propose a critical approach to temporality inspired by feminist time notions, namely spacetimemattering and politics of time. In doing this, we develop a multimodal and performative concept of temporality that facilitates a double attention to the multiple communication modes of time and their performative powers in organizing work life. We explore the value of this conception of temporality through an empirical illustration, showing how multiple temporalities entangle, differentiate, and compete, and how one time construct may domesticate and devalue other times without, however, eliminating those, thus enabling ongoing, precarious struggles over organizing work practices and subjectivities. The paper expands the scope of temporality studies in organizations, nurturing critical theorizing of and insights into the multimodal performativity and politics of time at work in neo-liberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this piece, we dwell on the shadow sides of the "new normal" of academic labor during the pandemic. As the greedy, neoliberal university penetrates our homes and bodies during lockdown, it infuses our (work) lives with a magnitude of mixed pressures and troublesome effects and affects. Embedded in very different home situations, we explore autoethnographically how we are affected similarly and differently, through questioning our senses of toxic productivity, toxic passivity and toxic affectivity. We recast toxicity as – not a characteristic of the university but – a fundamentally relational issue which works through and exacerbates individualization and isolation in the context of the pandemic, thus requiring relational forms of feminist resistance in response. For this purpose, we develop an approach for writing our differences together, which cares for and fleshes out our lived, multifaceted experiences including the filth and shame associated with the toxic new normal. In doing so, we are not escaping toxicity, but reconfiguring our embodiments and enactments of it by caring for ourselves and others, which re‐energizes us to push back and unsettle how we may live academia, and perhaps become happy academics, during this crisis and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the relationship between digital technology and dis/organization by theorizing and analysing digital data infrastructures as partial connections. Much literature attends to the ordering and controlling organizational powers of digital data infrastructures. We propose to expand existing discussions by also exploring their disorganizing aspects. Drawing on Marilyn Strathern, we conceptualize digital data infrastructures as partial connections that both connect and disconnect, with the implication of simultaneously ordering and disordering the social relations implicated by digital data infrastructures. With a case study of a national well-being survey used in Danish education governance, we illustrate this point, showing how connective and commensurable powers of digital infrastructures not only (re-)organize social relations through their datafication but also disorganize the infrastructural imperative of connectivity in unanticipated ways. This leads us to argue that dis/organization is integral to the powerful ordering capacities of digital data infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diversity management efforts often turn diversity issues into a business case, thereby depoliticizing these issues and shying away from more political concerns of inequality and discriminating norms of difference. In this study, we explore the performative potential of activist practices to promote the repoliticization of organizational diversity work. To do so, we draw on interviews with three explicitly norm‐critical activists, discussing how insigths from their practices can inspire diversity work in formal organizational contexts. The three activists are (1) a twerk dancer, psychologist, radio host, and co‐founder of a popular fourth‐wave feminist group; (2) a project manager and co‐founder of a non‐governmental organization for minority ethnic lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender + people; and (3) an anarchist activist, gender educator, and founder of a gender network for educators. Showing how their norm‐critical practices work through discursive tensions of personal↔public issues, safe↔unsafe spaces, and creative↔conventional methods, we discuss how these practices may perform in organizational settings, enabling the repoliticization of diversity work in and as the constant negotiation and recognition of norms of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing. Writing against. Writing for. Together, in part, with difference. Collaborative. Desire for change. Disrupting mainstream ideologies and practices. Resistance. Activism. Against neoliberalism. Feminism in its multiplicity. Fragmented. Moving forward. Rupture. Writing for social change. Writing for life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]