Reimagining Academic Practice

This collaborative project inaugurates a new phase of inquiry into the future of knowledge production within and beyond academia. Building on previous Tokyo College initiatives—such as The Future of the Humanities project, the Future of Higher Education event series, and the recent workshop Who Cares? Care and Knowledge Production in the University—this endeavor seeks to cultivate a reflective and imaginative space for scholars, practitioners, and non-academic stakeholders to reconsider the purposes and practices of academic work.

Engaging with scholarship across the sociology of knowledge, higher education studies, disability studies, decolonial theories, and related fields, the project aligns with emerging conversations that advocate for more inclusive, expansive, and experimental methodologies. Works such as Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (2023) and Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities (forthcoming 2025) exemplify this turn toward reimagining academic methods as creative, ethical, and care-oriented practices. The working group will explore how innovative and hybrid methodologies—integrating academic, artistic, and community-based modes of inquiry—can contribute to more accessible and transformative forms of knowledge production. Central to this ethos is a commitment to creativity, care, and community praxis, and to centering marginalized methodologies, knowledges, and experiences. Through this initiative, the group aims to develop dynamic formats for producing and sharing knowledge.