Unfit for Subjection: Mental Illness, Mental Health, and the University Undercommons

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Published Jan 27, 2021
DOI https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v107i.7843

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Sarah Hankins
University of California, San Diego

Abstract

This colloquy, by graduate-student-led collective Project Spectrum, attempts to map out existing discussions around inclusion and equity in music academia, with a specific focus on identifying and analyzing the structures in academia that work against minoritized and historically excluded scholars. 


Sarah Hankins shares thoughts on mental illness, arguing that it is a gap in our discourse. Hankins asks us to bear witness to experiences of those who boldly declare that they are “unfit” for the pipeline—“unfit” to survive the pipeline, to have access to the pipeline, and for the so-called promises at the end of the pipeline. Following the work of Black studies, queer of color critique, Black radicalism, Afropessimism, and especially the writings of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Hankins’s intervention in this colloquy demands pause in academia’s system of perpetual motion.

Author Biography

Sarah Hankins, University of California, San Diego

Sarah Hankins is Assistant Professor of Sound Studies at the University of California, San Diego.  Her research explores auditory and performative processes of subject formation in contexts of globalized modernity, with a focus on Israel and the African diaspora.  Trained as an ethnomusicologist, Dr. Hankins seeks to integrate ethnographic and historiographic methods with critical approaches in queer and black studies, media and technology studies, and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis.  Her book project, Black Musics, Afrodiasporic Cultures, and the Israeli Imagination, is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press, and her research has appeared in Black Music Research Journal, Women and Music, and Signs, among other refereed publications. Hankins is also a DJ and a music producer, working across electronic, noise, and other contemporary experimental genres

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 107 (2020): Current Musicology, Fall 2020
Section
Project Spectrum Colloquy: Strengthening the Pipeline
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite
Hankins, S. (2021). Unfit for Subjection: Mental Illness, Mental Health, and the University Undercommons. Current Musicology, 107, 153–157. https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v107i.7843