2016 | 3 | Published: Rethinking Life @ The Margins

Michele Lancione‘s (aka l’editore più generoso e simpatico––non da dire intelligentissimo––nel mondo, o almeno quelle parte che so io del mondo!) first book/edited volume, Rethinking Life at the Margins, is out today! Like all hardcover academic books, it’s euphemistic to call it ‪#‎notcheap‬, but you can get your libraries to order it! And/or use the discount code -50% with ‘ASHGATE230’

I’m beyond proud to have written the final chapter of the book, “Between the Fool and the World” and to have it sit among such excellent and varied contributions to the book! For my part, I get biographical on Deleuze+Guattari and question what it means to “claim a margin” in the university, a questioning journey that began years ago and that is inspired by and grounded in so much of the radical work that has learned and taught me well in FES, especially Ace Yorku Equity Seminars. Of course, it’s all framed by doing tarot…critical-spiritual survival practice for marginal life/living, which, as usual, cuts right to the core.

#SpoilerAlert (from the conclusion to my chapter):

Agencement [assemblage] seeks to enable the elaboration of difference en route to contextual understandings of the institutionalizations of power and the potential for unmasking and unsettling the oppression of marginal bodies, groups, and practices. It has been my argument that, if  agencement [assemblage] is to be a critical, even liberating, concept-practice, then we must skeptically attend to the particularities of the very institutions that profess commitments to diversity and difference, including through the elaboration of ideas of assemblage and through the gesture of assembling life at the margins. As Sara Ahmed (2012 [On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life]) reveals, although many universities are increasingly managing to ‘make room’ for ‘diverse’ bodies through commitments to inclusion, such principled policies often, and necessarily, fail precisely on their own terms.