Mediality and Gestures of Thinking at the University

This chapter describes the main gestures enacted in the study practices of lecturing and academic writing in view of establishing their media configurations. To describe the media configurations, I use the concept of sensorium as an analytic tool and I look at how senses are called for or downplayed in gestures of study. After having described how students use their sight, hearing and touch while taking part in the lecture, I move on to academic writing which gives rise to more abstract gestures of disassembling, assembling and interlacing. This chapter also gives an answer to the media question through the concept of mediatic displacement. Mediatic displacement is a media configuration which manages to cancel the effect of one medium by using another one against it, and, in a series of transcoding movements, to enact an educational suspension of the world.