Dr. Gitanjaly Chhabra and Dr. Kathleen (Kaye) Hare

What Remains Unsaid: Apophatic Erasure in Academic Life and Luminous Edge of Absence

This project features a series of erasure poems created by two academic colleagues/friends currently working in a Canadian university serving international student population. In Canada, shifting immigration policies, international student caps, visa restrictions, and enrolment declines are reshaping universities, producing financial instability, program cuts, labour precarity, and uncertainty for students, faculty, and staff. In this context, this project asks: What academic lives and experiences become absent through shifting immigration and international student policies? Whose experiences are erased or invisible?

The project combines an apophatic approach and posthuman philosophy to explore absence through erasure-based poetry inquiry. Erasure serves as an apophatic method of subtraction, silence, incompleteness to attend to what cannot be fully said. Posthuman philosophy extends this inquiry by situating academic experience within the entangled forces shaping it, including policies, institutions, economies, migration systems, media discourses, and lived realities. We view absence as a productive presence: what is being lost, displaced, or made difficult to hold in Canadian higher education.

Poetry source texts include news articles, policy announcements, institutional communications, public commentaries addressing university closures, employee layoffs, crackdowns on student “fraud” and debates about privatization. Through iterative reading, erasing, and re-composing, the poems are created by attending to what remains during and after removal and loss: illuminating grief and guilt; and new forms of absence and relational becoming in a rapidly changing higher education landscape.

The installation inhabits the space between presence and disappearance, voice and silence, visibility and erasure. The work invites viewers to lived realities of navigating academic survival while reflecting on visibility, voice, uncertainty, precarity, and belonging. Absence also extends to viewers, inviting reflection on their own situatedness in a global context where academic and intellectual life is being meaningfully reconfigured. What results is a record of academic lives working urgently to resist erasure.