UNDISCIPLINED: Untangling the Coloniality of Holistic Regard

The professoriate project requires discipline even as it disciplines. On any given day, quotidian and mundane, exaggerated, and barely perceptible micro- and macro-aggressions call into question the relevance, legibility, and capacities of nonwhite (and, more explicitly, Black) ways of being, knowing, and moving in the world. For this reason, we must become undisciplined. The call to undiscipline is a call to answerability for educators and researchers; it is a responsibility to revise research, teaching, and service in ways that might set the conditions for otherwise being. To consider undiscipline, this chapter turns to Black Studies and its invocation to Black worlds, or the belief that Blackness inclines toward capaciousness and self-definition. This chapter centers Blackness to interrogate the professoriate as a disciplining apparatus and illuminates otherwise ways of being therein.