Transverse Disciplines: Queer-Feminist, Anti-racist, and Decolonial Approaches to the University, edited by Simone Pfleger and Carrie Smith

Queer-Feminist, Anti-racist, and Decolonial Approaches to the University, reflects on the ways that academic disciplines can be reimagined through transformative collaborations and commitments to decolonial and anti-racist work.The collected essays focus specifically on the future that can be imagined for German studies.This volume asks difficult questions about how the discipline, and academia, might navigate changes necessitated by neoliberal policies, institutional mandates, financial urgencies, and other sociopolitical realities, and push back against other converging crises in our society.The authors answer these questions by focusing on our conceptions of disciplinary boundaries, through the reflection and contemplation of "transverse" orientations that cut across contexts, disrupt linear thinking, and destabilize normative systems embedded within our institutions (14).The selected chapters do this thoughtfully, by demonstrating how transverse thinking has long been nurtured by Black, queer, neurodivergent, and other minoritized scholars and activists.Altogether, this volume provides ways of re-orienting and re-imagining disciplinary fields and their relationships to other disciplines by discussing ways to foreground marginalized voices and center anti-racist, decolonial, queer, and anti-capitalist frameworks in practice (7).While a discourse of crisis frames the volume, these essays are grounded in strategies of care, cooperation, and collaboration, and the shared implicative responsibility to reshape the future of academic work and institutional structures alongside these theoretical and activist frameworks.