When we think about the academic institution, where is the witch? Equally, when we think about the witch, where is the academic institution? And why is it that although cultural representations of witches “coming into” their witching frequently imagine this initiation happening in the classroom, scholarly study of witches rarely acknowledges a relationship between the academic institution and becoming witch?

Written collaboratively, this piece takes the form of a series of spells and rituals to counteract the knowledge industrial complex and how it has positioned the witch. In service to these interventions, we’ll be building an altar, made from the following ‘objects’: feminist academics who write witch stories; feminist academics who leave academia to ‘become’ witches; feminist writers – such as Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes) and Mary Stewart (Thornyhold) – who are fascinated with witches; academics whose work on witchcraft has been discredited for being feminist; and feminist practitioners engaging witchcraft in protest against the structures and conditions of twenty-first century academia. Part of this work will be to reclaim academic witches who have been excluded from the academy’s account of itself and, sometimes, excluded in subtle ways from the academy itself. As part of this work, we are also interested in our own makings and unmakings as academic witches, in a longer genealogy. Building an altar works, here as an invocation whose articulation can, we believe, support the manifestation of new forms of protest, resistance, and re-imagining.

This session moves between a performance and a lecture, questioning the framework of a traditional lecture in order to explore the witch in academia.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Dr Ruth Charnock is a writer, storyworker, creative mentor, tarot reader, and lapsed academic. She is the author and editor of Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings [Bloomsbury, 2019] and writes about sex, music, witching, tarot, nature, bodies, motherhood, feelings and literature. Her latest piece ‘3 tarot cards for the new mother’ for the collection Blood and Cord: Writers on Early Parenthood will be out with the Emma Press in early 2023.

Dr Karen Schaller is a multi-modal and interdisciplinary feminist researcher specialising in theories of affect, feeling, emotion and embodiment. Her work tracks economies of feeling in 20th and 21st century literary and critical cultures, materialises the biopolitics of academia and distributions of vitality across domestic and institutional scenes, and performs tactics of feminist resistance.

Instagram: @ruthcharnock and @karenschaller

Website: www.ruthcharnock.com

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