Reject the aff in favor of care work—it’s the only way to combat structures of productivity that prioritize the white and able-bodied. Only through care for one another can we understand disability as a product of the exploitive economic structure of capitalism.

We can begin to center care work in the university. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha defines care work as rooted in “a place where disability justice and queer femme emotional labor intersect.” 21 Piepzna-Samarasinha’s notion of disability justice is informed by Sins Invalid’s (a disability justice performance project) ten principles: intersectionality, leadership of those most impacted, an anticapitalist politic, cross-movement solidarity, recognizing wholeness, sustainability, commitment to cross-disability solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation.22 Emotional labor follows Arlie Hochschild’s work, but for Piepzna-Samarasinha it acknowledges the ways in which this labor falls disproportionately on certain racialized, gendered, and queered individuals.23 I am not here arguing for the institutionalization of care work or for care work to replace service—though arguably many of us already perform care work within our service work—but, instead, for a reckoning with how care work is forced upon certain bodies: femmes, particularly femmes of color, queer and trans folk, sick and disabled folks. Once we reckon with this, we can see how care work is unevenly distributed and, yet, still important. Care work arguably functions as the work that keeps the university running, and those of us most impacted by the violence of the university use care work to keep each other within the university. What becomes a priority then is making sure our care work centers those we want to outlive the university rather than working to maintain the university. For example, here are some of the ways I have seen care work show up in the graduate student experience: editing papers for each other; sending each other highlighted readings; speaking up in class when we know others cannot that day; talking through theoretical ideas; talking through dissertation ideas; talking through micro- and macro-aggressions; 412 J. HATRICK talking about our lives outside the university; providing housing for each other; feeding each other; providing childcare or petcare for each other; de-escalating overreactions from people in positions of power; lending each other money; giving each other money; taking each other to and from the airport, doctor’s appointments, and vet appointments; starting mutual aid systems; sharing institutional history; sharing knowledge about which faculty have histories of racism or misogyny—including which have bragged about sleeping with their students; bringing each other groceries; taking each other on hikes and to beaches; banning academic talk for a few hours; providing feedback on syllabi; organizing potlucks and parties; making each other tea and coffee; and simply reminding someone you have their back in this process. Piepzna-Samarasinha advocates for recognizing these things as work, as skilled labor, and we know that this work is gendered, racialized, classed, and queered.24 Again, I am not arguing for the institutionalization of these skills but for, rather, a recognition that this work is done, an acknowledgement that it is time consuming, and an awareness that this is the work that keeps people in the academy. That, while we are working within an inherently violent structure that, in turn, exists within multiple violent systems, for many of us to survive, we must be doing care work—and we are doing care work. We must be caring for each other, and we must acknowledge the way this work is not evenly distributed. The university relies on exploiting our desire to do this work; historically underrepresented students are retained by other historically underrepresented students doing unpaid labor. Thus, we must approach care work by asking what deserves our care?25 How do we do care work to benefit our communities without benefiting the university? We must not give care to a violent system such as the academy, but to those who will ultimately destroy the academy. Maneuvering resources A further intervention we can make is maneuvering resources from the university to communities the university enacts violence upon. Faculty and students often discuss feeling powerless within academia as it currently functions, but this is not entirely true. Certainly, we have different access to power and different access to resources, but some of us do have access to the resources of the institution, including space, money, and labor. In terms of space, we often have access to physical spaces on our campus— or owned by our campus—that can be rented for free, we can offer meeting spaces to community organizations, we can form gardening projects, we can even work to return the land owned by the university to Indigenous nations. In terms of money, some of our programs, departments, or universities are extremely well funded. This money can be used to pay students and community members, provide food at events, and a myriad of other options that focus on redistributing the university’s wealth (in small and large ways) to poor and working-class individuals. In terms of labor, we can think about supporting student labor towards activism and community support through offering credit or research projects. We can also think about the flexibility of our own labor and skills—how can we focus our own labor in ways that benefit communities rather than the university? While our access to these resources hugely vary across academia, some of us have some power of maneuvering and redistributing those resources of space, money, and labor. Maneuvering resources allows us, in many ways, to care for students and the communities our universities exploit. These are just a few starting points and, while some of us may not be able to make any of them happen right now given our current access to resources, they are resources we can work to maneuver in the future. The university is ableist. One of the ways this ableism materializes is in how expectations around productivity are defined in relation to able-bodied, white masculinity. This can be seen in the gendered, racialized, and ableist difference in tenure/tenure track versus adjunct positions and tenure success rates. As noted by Laura Pulido, within the social sciences and humanities faculty at USC between 1998 and 2012, “91.9 percent of white men received tenure, but only 55.1 percent of women and minorities received tenure.” 26 At UC Berkeley, only 24 (1.5 percent) of its 1,522 full-time faculty are disabled—and the estimate that 4 percent of all faculty members across all institutions have disabilities is not much better (as this is well below the 22 percent for the general population).27 Does this mean able-bodied white men are inherently better at academia? Or are women, people of color, and disabled people held to higher standards? Chakravartty et al’s #Communicationsowhite and the nuanced responses to the 2019 NCA distinguished scholar controversy certainly suggest the latter to be true.28 Indeed, if, as Marta Russell and Ravi Malhorta argue, we understand disability to be “a socially created category derived from labour relations, a product of the exploitative economic structure of capitalist society;” 29 then, we can also see how the raced, gendered, and able-bodied structures of academic productivity also work to produce disability. Disabled people, women, and people of color often spend an inordinate amount of time trying to arrange for adequate work environments; for example, Joseph Grigely notes that he spends more time “trying to arrange for adequate sign-language interpreting” than preparing for conference presentations.30 What are we doing to stop this? What are we doing to reimagine productivity to create a university as a space for women, people of color, and disabled people?31 Our work is equally as important. Our work as academics should prioritize the lived experiences of those we share space with (and those we do not). Piepzna-Samarasinha writes of “centering sustainability, slowness, and building for the long haul.” 32 In some ways, this feels antithetical to academia, particularly the undergraduate experience, which is structured around student turnover. There are other scholars arguing for the slowing down of the institution, but rarely are these understood as arguments rooted in disability, gender, or racial justice.33 This, of course, has become intensified under the rise of COVID-19 and universities’ (inadequate) responses, with disabled folk, communities of color, and women bearing the burden of the pandemic and its consequences. The consequences of this result in a generalizing of an issue as affecting everyone equally when, in fact, ablebodied and minded people, cis men, and white people are affected the least, often even benefiting from the expectations of productivity. We must understand that the issue of unsustainable productivity not only worsens conditions for communities of color, disabled folk, and women, but is produced by white supremacy, ableism, and a structure of cisheteropatriarchy.

414 J. HATRICK Thievery A final method of deconstructing the university I want us, as academics, to think more about is thievery. Acknowledging that the university is founded on the stolen time, labor, land, and energy of femmes, people of color, Indigenous communities, the poor/working class, and other caregivers begs us to ask: what happens when we start stealing it back? Stefano Harney and Fred Moten state that, for academics wishing to subvert the violence of the academy, “the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one,” wherein one “sneak[s] into the university and steal[s] what one can.” 34 As Allegra McLeod discusses in her blog post “Toward Abolition,” Moten and Harney offer a double meaning: “they both condemn the wrong perpetrated by the university system and also exhort and celebrate a certain kind of redistributive conduct that the law condemns as criminal.” 35 This argument, as McLeod notes, is not just about redistribution, but about the goal of abolition democracy, wherein “the object of abolition” is not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.36 This begs us to begin asking: how do we take back our stolen time, labor, land, and energy to continue this process? How do we steal what has been stolen from us, not just for ourselves, but for our communities and the communities displaced by the university that we may or may not be a part of?