Canon, Legacy or Imprint: A Feminist Reframing of Intellectual Contribution

Four years ago, eleven women collaborated on a paper advocating a collective, feminist engagement with the pressures and consequences of the neoliberal academy. Inspired by that work and now as mid-career scholars, the authors of this chapter are increasingly thinking about how to create lasting imprints for a better future inside and outside the academy. They ask what difference a shiFt in thinking towards “imprints” and away from “canons” and “legacies” can make? They imagine future retirements from the academy not in terms of that rarified inclusion in the canon and its individualistic and patrimonial inferences, but in terms of imprint, and the idea of leaving a lasting impression on other scholars and scholarly communities through being-in-relation with others and a diverse set of scholarship.