Imagine a scene some time in the not too distant future, the world is in a new era of spiritual consciousness. A legal theorist sits and surveys legal thinking as it has flowed through the latter part of the 20th century through the early 21st. What critiques of law do they find? Feminist, critical legal studies, Marxist critiques, critical race theory, psychoanalytical theory…. What do they do with this information? Notice the labels, the boxes, the schools. My question would be, as they sift and review this work, how do they feel about the work of legal theorists? What were legal theorists interested in during this time? During the latter part of this ‘era’ sexual, social and racial inequality, discrimination and human rights are dominant themes. The desire to change the world – a political motive yes, but is an emotional desire possible to discern? What drove these legal theorists? What emotions – pain, anger, love – or was this desire only in the mind?

What if this legal theorist was then comparing a new paradigm of knowledge in which we were now frequenting? What if there had been a revolution in thinking, maybe subtle, perhaps not? One where thinking, reading as an academic, a student, a teacher, was now more balanced with feeling? What if there were no clinical boxes anymore, no labels, no categories? Does knowledge feel different, does it have a sensation rather than purely a feeling? What would academic life look like in this different state of consciousness? Academics, students able to speak and not be cautious of speaking from the heart as well as the mind, to freely express feeling and personal experience in their work, not having to detach their feelings from their subject matters of research. How does that vision seem? Unsettling? Would academic life be unpredictable, spontaneous, messy, difficult, ecstatic, real? Would we all be running off to psychotherapists to deal with having to cope with emotions or would we be fully embracing and working with knowledge in a different way?

These questions have been presented due to a personal mystery that I have long been trying to work out – why is it that emotions are kept hidden as part of our lives within the university and working with knowledge?