Like Cream: Valuing the Invaluable

Abstract

Julien McHardy draws on his work with the alternative publishing collective Mattering Press to explore the importance of opening up and maintaining “bewildering spaces within” the increasingly normative and clear-cut regimes of evaluation. Drawing on a range of examples from alternative publishing, the artwork “The Right to be Lazy” and concepts of care, love, qualculation and laziness, McHardy argues that opening up space for otherness within are crucial to good academic work. At the same time, he also warns us that caring for difference is a struggle that includes making radical cuts and disconnections, and in practice often may build on precarious and invisible work. This leads him to asks what academic institutions would look like that could value and cultivate that which they cannot evaluate.