Research-Creation for the Community: Pedagogy, Feminist Maker Cultures, and the Critical Work of Making Face Masks in the Time of Covid-19

Research-Creation for the Community:Pedagogy, Feminist Maker Cultures, and the Critical Work of Making Face Masks in the Time of Covid-19 Lai-Tze Fan (bio) This essay considers pedagogy during times of crisis. It was written at the start of the autumn 2020 school semester. Some questions: with lowered enrolment numbers and an inevitable drop in research funding, what will research look like in the next few years? What do these changes mean for the future of the humanities? I note the celebration of stem research during the covid-19 pandemic for contributing directly through advances in healthcare and technological interventions. While cuts are being made in most disciplines, more money is going into medical- and science-based research than ever. In Canada, at least half a dozen new covid-19-based funding initiatives have been introduced since spring, in what is ultimately a political and capitalist race for a solution—or better yet, a vaccine. We could compare the stem surge with the distressing numbers of this year's job postings so far in literature, history, philosophy, and other humanities disciplines. The rhetoric around stem contrasts that of research based on critical and cultural theory, as if the former is the only means through which identifiable contributions may occur and as if the latter has no role to play during times of crisis. [End Page 39] My doctoral student, Kem-Laurin Lubin, reminded me of a quotation I had long forgotten in Stuart Hall's "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies," published in the context of aids in the 1992. While the politics surrounding aids and covid-19 are different, it was also a global crisis that led Hall to question the point of the humanities and, more specifically, of cultural studies and critical theory: Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies? What is the point of the study of representations, if there is no response to the question of what you say to someone who wants to know if they should take a drug and if that means they'll die two days later or a few months earlier? At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. (285–86) Oh, we are used to being asked to defend theory, to "prove" the point of theoretical thinking in our grant proposals, performance reviews, and over family meals. But recent global events have created a scenario in which we may ask ourselves the same questions as Hall, revisiting the application of critical theory to the moving target of real-time sociocultural problems that are not limited to covid-19 but that also include the continuing Black Lives Matter movement, climate crisis, global political tensions, and more. The limits of theory are the solid walls erected only by imagining that theory is something that happens in a classroom, a seminar, a conference, or a book. That some of us could be let "off the hook" is perhaps the byproduct of abstracting and separating theory, including through critical language, discourse, and practice, from the cultural phenomena to which theory first responds. Put another way: the point of theory in times of crisis is to be found within crises themselves—in action in street protests, hospital wings, and legal institutions around the world, and through and for those for whom the classroom, seminar, conference, or book are not accessible for a variety of reasons. In this context, let's start with one angle: in times of crisis, what is the point of theory in the classroom? [End Page 40] march 2020 was a terrible time for university students. As campuses were closed around the world, I, like other educators, tried to accommodate "the new normal": students' added time constraints and new responsibilities, the possibility of and anxieties around...