On Basketweaving, the Critical Humanities, and Public Finance

This paper takes up Doug Ford’s remarks on the uselessness of “basket weaving courses” and the disciplines that support them. Implicit in such claims about the luxuriousness of women and gender studies, indigenous studies, black studies and other fields is the idea that these fields, and the political movements they’re often tied to, are trying to lay claim to state power, curtail the freedom of private individuals and families, and appropriate the wealth of the nation for their own unearned leisure and enjoyment. I want to consider these fields as sites of theoretical labour and formations of counter-knowledge which bear implicit demands regarding public finance and the institutional conditions necessary for the production of knowledge.