witching the institution: academia & feminist witchcraft with Dr Karen Schaller.

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?  

This collaboration with Dr Karen Schaller encompasses public talks, workshops, film, live performance, writing, and making, and 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 build 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 our work is 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. We are also interested in our own makings and unmakings as academic witches, in a longer genealogy. Building an altar works as an invocation whose articulation can, we believe, support the manifestation of new forms of protest, resistance, and re-imagining.