Slowness as a Mode of Attention and Resistance: Playing with Time in Documentary Cinema and Disturbing the Rhythms of the Neoliberal University

The article addresses some of the challenges and possibilities
of taking slowness as a tool to theorize and practice
a way of being an activist anthropologist in the contemporary
(neoliberal) university. The activism discussed here intervenes
in the university itself. To articulate slowing down as mode of
resistance to the unbearably fast and exclusionary rhythms of academic
life, the article puts into dialogue documentary cinema and
critiques of contemporary academia. Turning to the film Inland
Sea as an instance of a mode of attention/attending to the world
otherwise, the article concludes on the political potential of slowness
to become a collective strategy of resistance to the increased
culture of quantification, competition, and financialization in the
university, and a tactic for an engaged anthropology to come.