Activating June Jordan’s “Life Studies”notes, conversation & workshop with Conor Tomás Reed and Talia Shalev 

Thursday, November 12, 3:30pm-5:00pm

Zoom registration link: https://bit.ly/31h4JnC  

Throughout her lifetime, writer and educator June Jordan’s creative practice bridged the labors of poetry, activism, and pedagogy, and constantly animated the question that she once asked of the university: “How do you provide for the Study of Human Life?”  Join Conor Tomás Reed and Talia Shalev––editors of Jordan’s “Life Studies,” 1966-1976 for The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative––as they share notes on her poetic and pedagogical life in New York within an array of communities. Reed and Shalev trace the tributaries of Jordan’s “life studies” across a selection of Jordan’s writings covering housing justice, youth literacy, and college access and curriculum demands. Their presentation will be followed by a conversation and workshop component in which participants will practice imagining their own “Life Studies” curricula. 

Conor Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican/Irish multi-gendered street scholar and freedom maker who teaches Africana Studies and American Studies at Brooklyn College. Conor is a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and a participant in Free CUNY and Rank and File Action (RAFA). Conor is developing a book about the rise of Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Studies and movements at the City College of New York and in New York City from 1960 to the present. This event is a part of Conor’s November-January residency, entitled “Radiating Black~Puerto Rican~Feminist Studies from CUNY to the Americas and the Caribbean,” with the Brooklyn community center Wendy’s Subway.   

Talia Shalev is a teacher, scholar, and poet. She is a co-editor (with Conor Tomás Reed) of June Jordan’s “Life Studies,” 1966-1976 and Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968-1974, both published through Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Her writing appears in The Seattle Review, The Volta,Cream City Review, and Women’s Studies: an inter-disciplinary journal. Talia teaches as a lecturer at the Stevens Institute of Technology and holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her current research project is Some Inarticulate Major Premise: Poetry, the Will of the People, and the U.S. Supreme Court.  

Facilitated by Maryam Ivette Parhizkar as part of the course ER&M 363: Ethnic Studies and the Social Imagination. Presented with support from the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program at Yale University and the Wendy’s Subway Residency Program in Brooklyn, New York. For questions about this event please contact [email protected].   

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Hi all,

Reposting the readings for my workshop here, as well as a short summary/introduction to the texts. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Hi everyone–

Looking at the other workshops that have been posted here, I fear I may have had the wrong approach to this assignment. I’m plugging in what I wrote anyways, with the caveat that if people have questions or would like more straightforward summaries of the readings, I’m happy to work on that. Apologies that I wrote so much, but hopefully the word count is offset by the readings, which are pretty short!

The Value of Silence, David EngDownload
Idols in the Archive, Manan AhmedDownload
Ghostly Matters, Avery GordonDownload

The three texts I would like to focus on during my workshop approach themes of ghostliness, memory, and silence from different disciplinary vantage points. Manan Ahmed is a historian of South Asia at Columbia University, Avery Gordon a sociologist at UCSB, and David Eng a professor of English at Brown University. Even as these scholars work within discrete fields, however, they also move outside and beyond rigid methodological divides; they marshal theories and techniques from psychoanalysis, epistemology, critical race theory, literary theory, political science, and even memoir. This range produces in each text a unique sense of density but also slipperiness, as if the authors, despite leveraging a plethora of tactics, face subject matters that evade immediate access or epistemological transparency; to quote Gordon quoting Barthes, interdisciplinary work creates “new object[s] that belong to no one” (7).

The objects of these texts “belong to no one” in that they evade the territorial claim of any single discipline; they also “belong to no one” because these studies—which approach silences, ghosts, losses, lacunae—necessarily circle the intangible, and navigate the complex territories of public inheritance and collective memory. This is perhaps most evident in Ahmed’s case, in which a source of knowledge—the archive—is presented as a public yet tightly regulated space that the individual can only enter as a nervous interloper. Ahmed may gain access to the archive, but not as a privileged historian who might excavate and interpret its offerings. Instead, a quick scan of the archive’s “topo-nomology” merely permits Ahmed to catalogue (and, under the watchful eye of his chaperone, photograph) the surfaces of that which he knows he cannot know further. 

What ethical obligations arise out of knowledge production around bodies and histories that are always moving out of our line of sight, out of our range of hearing? What should we do when we, as knowing subjects, nevertheless feel intimate, personal, and political connections to these bodies and histories that do not belong strictly to us? Ahmed, who is of Kashmiri heritage, describes the archive as marked by Partition- and colonial-era histories of interreligious persecution. He notes a possible collection between the archive, its neighborhood, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ in the text), a Sunni supremacist organization; he understandably begins to feel wary when archive officials ask him why he’s “looking for Hindus in Uch” (10). There runs a throughline between the archive’s function as a Pakistani State repository for errant, “sinful” objects, and Kashmir’s historical oppression as a community that refuses “the triumphalism of the Muslim League” (16). In pairing these larger questions of state power and nationalist violence with an earlier portrait of family life, Ahmed suggests that he is drawn to such fraught and contested spaces for more than purely academic reasons. Yet a personal connection does not always equate to a sense of ownership or access: even the stories of Ahmed’s own grandmother’s constitute “a dark archive” that he cannot share (10). As he writes, “they were not my secrets” (10). 

There are multiple modes of silencing at work in Ahmed’s telling: the silence imposed by the State, which controls and withdraws the conditions and objects of knowledge; and the self-silencing of the scholar, who feels an obligation to turn away from “half-private, half-public conjurations” that rest on an “unstable” onto-epistemological limit (11). Ahmed’s invocation of “conjuration” aptly registers the spectral quality of knowledge production around traumas that are publicly situated but also privately processed. The “unstable limit” that his scholarship traverses makes it difficult to discern who is speaking, through which socio-political mechanisms such speech is mediated, and even what, ultimately, these disembodied voices are expressing. The children who play around the archive say they hear “all kinds” of noises, and Ahmed’s account hints that not all of these are intelligible (16).

As with Ahmed, multiple forms of silence are at work in David Eng’s study of national discourse and processes of mourning after 9/11. Eng describes the organic silence that follows a shock of trauma as a potentially generative “moment before … loss is expropriated into its symbolic meaning” (86). But there is another silencing mechanism, resonant with Ahmed’s sketch, in which American society’s legitimation of certain strains of public discourse suppress “alternative narratives of community and belonging,” as well as the absence/presence of “certain deprivileged losses” (90). Eng shows us how silence can sound a lot like patriotic noise, just as, in Gordon, the invisible or marginalized are paradoxically made even less discernible in a culture governed by hypervisibility.

For the purposes of discussion, I would like to flag a few strategies that are set forth by these writers as possible responses to the erasures that racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and capitalism enact within people’s lives. Eng suggests we return neglected or marginalized losses “to the sphere of the social and to social activism,” in a move that combines “mourning and militancy” (89). By refusing to let go of that which has been erased, while also directing the attachment to that loss outwards, we can help “another story, another history” emerge in opposition to sanctioned narratives (94). Meanwhile, Gordon suggests that scholarship begins with “the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish,” even as these “inarticulate experiences” necessarily call forth a position of scholarly humility and vulnerability (24). The ghost as a “social figure” forces us to acknowledge that systems like capitalism or State terror—systems that need to be apprehended analytically for their internal power relations to be understood—are nevertheless also experienced in “partial, coded, symptomatic, contradictory, [and] ambiguous” ways, many of which remain difficult to understand (24). Haunting is mediation, but a vexed mediation that demonstrates how individuals, due to the complexity of social life, can never be easily relayed back to or collapsed with the larger institutions and structures that enfold them.

Lastly, I want to point to the affective dimension of much of this work. If it’s true that, as Gordon maintains, scholarly encounters with ghosts transform the scholar too, it is perhaps pertinent to ask whether studies of the subject matter under discussion potentially reproduce feelings of despair, pessimism, remorse, or even (perhaps most pertinently) guilt. What are we to make of the emotional or affective costs that such work imposes on scholars, and how can we avoid the risk of allowing histories of haunting to congeal into their own rigid narratives?  It is perhaps significant that Ahmed, unlike the other two scholars in these readings, ends his account on a more ambivalent note. Rather than declaring a dedication to a subversive epistemological project or a triumphalist pursuit of occluded histories, Ahmed chooses to foreground a smaller, more enigmatic moment with his chaperone: “We returned to the chai, which had cooled down considerably, and started slurping it again” (16).

Some questions to consider:

Eng titles his essay “The Value of Silence”—what do you feel is the value of silence in relation to research, study, and history?

How does interdisciplinarity (or other negotiations with/within the structures of academe) conjure new objects of inquiry into view?

What ethical obligations do we have in work that approaches ghostliness, spectrality, and silence?

This week’s readings have me once again thinking about Project Runway. Well, for one, because watching that show was a big part of self-care in undergrad (Season 15 was instrumental in getting me through the work week with a nice Friday reward of a new episode). But also because of the analogy Professor Hintz provided for us with regards to writing.

Perhaps grad school is also kind of like Project Runway. First off, it’s a sham world, and we all know it is—yes, we are all here because we love fashion, but we’re here on set for much less glamorous reasons. If we get to the end, or even close, we’ll have gotten the connections and exposure to make it worth it. The reality show is also a competition: we know that not all of us will make it out, and sometimes that’ll mean direct comparisons between one another. And yet, two surprising things happen. For one, people here really, actually cut and sew beautiful fashion that expresses extreme talent and creative ideas. That’s not fake. And secondly, despite the fact that we’re told that the network will get its best ratings if we start drama, most of the time, contestants will help one another and applaud as our pieces walk down the runway.

It’s a silly analogy, but I do mean it. I see graduate students support one another despite the structures that may naturally push people to act otherwise. Competitive toxicity and toxic competitivity were rampant at Columbia, and, so far, I haven’t felt that at CUNY, so I appreciate that (although I have felt to some extent people flexing academic clout and how much they read, and I appreciate that less). 

To some of the points on the blog thus far: I’ve also heard critique of the term “self-care” as revolving too much around one person and their isolated acts of care, placing the onus on individual actions and almost being another task one can fail to fulfill. Recently, I’ve been seeing “community care” thrown out more, especially in activist circles. I believe it comes from Black and Indigenous women and femmes expressing frustration with the idea of self-care that pressures the individual actor, especially in the face of systemic injustice and precarity/death. Community care emphasizes the interdependence and mutuality required in maintaining mental and physical health. It might not be self care to venmo my friend $20, but maybe I’ll be in need next week and it will be care for them to be there for me. 

Some nice resources on community care: https://alp.org/breaking-isolation-self-care-and-community-care-tools-our-people 

https://www.abpsi.org/pdf/FamilyCommunitySelfCareToolKit.pdf

https://www.self.com/story/white-people-self-care

http://www.forharriet.com/2018/03/self-care-is-community-care.html

This discussion makes me wonder what it would look like to perform trauma-informed pedagogy as a teacher during all the ongoing crises. At the last Friday Forum, this was discussed in depth, but was not presented in an instructive manner, so I’m not sure how much I learned as someone not yet teaching.

Two more scattered notes:

I really relate to Alessandra about sleep and disability. As I have mentioned in a past post, I developed a chronic illness in my senior year of high school that had a dramatic and traumatic impact on my life. During the worst of it, I was so fatigued that I could not be out of bed for more than a couple hours a day. Ever since then, sleep has been one of those hard limits for me. In undergrad, the latest I stayed up was 3am probably, and it’s only gotten harder! By now my lower limit of sleep is probably seven hours, and I’m at my best if I can get ten. The irony here is, unfortunately, I feel most productive in the evenings, and prefer to do my research and writing late (or at least I did in undergrad, but maybe now with the pandemic and just getting older that might change…)

When looking at the statistics on the Covid-19 study, I was struck that the single highest subgroup percentage for anxiety disorders was…nonbinary people. It’s a category I rarely actually see in a statistical survey, so I felt simultaneously validated and frustrated. My first thought was “of course,” since trans people are hyper-pathologized and require therapy in order to physically transition, so surely that causes more diagnoses to be distributed. On the other hand, I wonder if the statistics for Black/Latino students are actually lower than accurate because of phenomena of medical racism, criminalization rather than pathologization, and lack of access to healthcare. But yeah, my trans/enby community is riddled with anxiety. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve found the graduate trans community at all here at CUNY—I just know of other trans people and I’m like “hey,” but haven’t really discussed what it’s been like being trans right now.

As I was doing the readings I was trying to pay attention to my immediate feelings and emotional responses to the texts, and I noticed that I felt particularly stressed out while I was reading the chapter from How to Build a Life on academic guilt. I don’t think this is the fault of the author, who approached the topic with generosity, thoughtfulness and an admirable commitment to honesty. Rather, I sense that there’s a point, under late-capitalism or neoliberal austerity, in which conversations about mental health inevitably begin to feel exhausting because a necessary and foundational solution to many of those problems—structural change—is so difficult to achieve. For that reason, both mental health issues and discourse around mental health issues often make me feel tired and stuck in a repetitive loop; sometimes, I even get sick of strategies for addressing mental health, though I know that they’re well-intentioned and often very helpful. This might be because burnout can sometimes be so total that even a proposed solution (gentle as it may be) feels like a chore, like one more thing to add to the list of behavioral habits/changes that one must adopt in order to keep functioning within this very dysfunctional system.

I think that’s why reading about the pervasiveness of academic guilt within the academy made me feel despair—in particular, Iacono Lobo’s admission that she kept working while she was in labor freaked me out and honestly made me feel a little panicked about the prospect of spending the next five to seven years around academics. I am at heart a rather lazy person, but I also enjoy reading and learning new things, which means that my pace of work and my attitudes about work will vary greatly depending on which environment I’m in. In other words, if I’m around a lot of people who feel academic guilt, it’s easy for me to get sucked into that ambient sentiment and start feeling it as well. And while I think Lobo is really good about countering the ideology of academic guilt, I couldn’t help but feel that the solution to this problem shouldn’t be a mindset shift: it should just be less work. And I don’t even mean work as in the paid labor of teaching (though I believe in strong boundaries and protections for the labor a university asks its workers to perform)—I mean academic coursework. I know it’s maybe taboo or absurd to suggest this, but what if faculty just assigned….less coursework for those completing PhD programs? Why do we normalize 1000-2000 pages of reading a week? This is mostly a rhetorical question because I know what the answers will be (rigor, training, pursuit of knowledge, etc), and part of me agrees with the answers. But another part of me feels like it doesn’t have to be this way. We can do less work while still doing meaningful work; we have our whole lives to read and write!

Something else that struck me from the readings was the discussion in “Self-Care as Professionalization” about faculty modeling healthy self-care and work habits. In some ways I felt a knee-jerk skepticism to this point—mostly because I feel it would be hard for me to see a faculty member’s lifestyle and habits as replicable for my own personal context, since a faculty member occupies such a different relationship to job and professional security (assuming we’re talking about tenured faculty). But I do think it’s ultimately a very useful suggestion, and that one thing faculty members can better model for us is a refusal to romanticize the academy and academic work. We know that sometimes academic work gets framed by academics as an automatic virtue or even a moral good, and that can obfuscate the fact that academic work is also a profession. I think this slippage is easy because many of us do feel that reading and writing are noble pursuits and fulfilling ways to spend time. It’s very difficult to not have a moralizing strain of discourse present in even the most forgiving and anti-work discourses about academia. For example, even if we don’t valorize work or perfectionism, we might still valorize qualities like “enthusiasm,” “passion,” and “inquisitiveness” within the academy. These are all personal traits that we assign to good scholars, and that PhD admissions teams will look for even if they’re not paying attention to more traditional “metrics” of skill, like GPA.

But what if, sometimes, we don’t feel enthusiastic or passionate about the work we’re doing? What if we view academia as a job, not a pursuit or an interest? I don’t think this kind of thing is ever cut and dry; I think people fluctuate and move in and out of feeling passionate about their work and their research. But it’s true that particularly now, during a time of pandemic, we might be finding it hard to feel stimulated by things. I know I right now occasionally struggle to sustain interest in anything, and would much rather pursue a simple pleasure like eating or watching TV (the kind of “lateral agency” pleasures that Lauren Berlant describes in “Slow Death,” her amazing chapter on eating and food in Cruel Optimism) rather than an intellectual interest, even though I know the latter has the potential to be more fulfilling in the long run. It’s often this impulse, rather than a perception of my own competence or skill, that occasionally makes me feel like an imposter within academia, where everyone is assumed to be bright and curious (other times, I do feel extremely enthusiastic about the work I’m doing; and then there are times outside of that when I don’t feel enthusiastic but I do feel grateful, if that makes sense). I’m going to stop here because now I’m rambling, but I’d be curious to see if anyone has thoughts on this or has ever felt similarly.

Thank you Katie for providing a workshop on these really important issues of how we treat ourselves and each other in this space of the academy. I’m also really excited about the activity re: academic interests that Katie mentioned in her description!

Something I was thinking during our last class is that “academic” isn’t really part of my personal identity, and so I don’t really feel fraught, at all, re: conversations about the role of the academy in society, or about “academic” language vs. “non-academic” language, etc. This assertion is not to disavow my positionality and my access and the privilege of that; I “identify” as a teacher, so I do have fraught feelings about that, and as someone who wants to centralize writing about and talking to people about art and philosophy etc. in my life. I have no interest in destroying my spirit for the sake of this institution. Sometimes I think to myself, “Stefanie, at your age and with your experience, do you have the capacity to be abused by a faculty mentor in the academy?” And well, I think the answer is YES, I am definitely more abuse-able than I pretend to be, but I also know some red flags and a strong sense of what I want vs. what I don’t want, which I didn’t have before, and I know I wouldn’t want to talk with someone who made me feel guilty about not destroying myself for this. After my first run with graduate school and the trauma that came with that, I worked a really long time to ground myself in my values and decide that I did not need to be praised by someone whose values (esp. surrounding the way they treat others, ESPECIALLY people they have power over) I do not respect, and that’s kind of my advice to other graduate students.

I remember feeling a little guilty last semester in class when we were reading something (don’t remember what) where the writer, an academic, talked about her own imposter syndrome. And the professor and others in the class were casually referencing their own imposter syndrome. I wanted to say – but I didn’t, because I felt guilty! – that I’m sorry, I don’t have imposter syndrome. That doesn’t mean I think I’m the shit, because I don’t – I am wrong a lot, and I get embarrassed, ashamed, etc., a lot. But if my job is to interpret, share ideas, and research, if I am being truthful, I am not an imposter. I called this post “ethics and imposter syndrome” because how I’ve come to think of academic imposter syndrome is almost as a poisonous technology of reproducing academic culture. Academics who have “made it” feel like they have to grasp onto this myth of merit, and impose that onto others in the form of nurturing a perpetual imposter syndrome that values status over truth. I remember once, shortly after I dropped out of graduate school, I found myself having dinner with a group of people, one of whom was an academic who had recently gotten her Ph.D. and some sort of job. When I mentioned I had recently dropped out because I had to acknowledge I was miserable, she said in this very specific tone: “Well…of course. The misery is part of its rigor.” I understand now that despite her need to imply that my “not being able to handle it” was evidence of something bad about me, someone who says something like that is not a happy person, and someone who says something like that is suffering from and reproducing this “imposter syndrome.”

In Harris’ chapter on “Academic Guilt,” she mentions sharing an office with other graduate students and the way people would compare themselves to each other in really competitive ways, including feeling satisfied if one was torturing oneself more than one’s colleagues and having various bad feelings if one was torturing oneself less than one’s colleagues. It’s infuriating. It’s so much more fun to be generous and supportive, and the ideas are way more truthful. I feel happy to have not really seen this dynamic and mentality at GC as strongly as it exists in other places, but I’m curious if others feel the same?

And just to be clear, I am above defining “imposter syndrome,” when I call it “reproductive,” as a phenomenon very specific to academic spaces and distinct from the feeling that the system is oppressive, hurtful, and only built for some people to thrive.

One random thing I wish was noted in the reading was that when they talked about self-care and how women seemed to want to talk about it more is that men, especially cis white men, don’t need “self-care” as much because women are taking care of them. We’ve all seen the articles about how during the pandemic, academics who are men have produced more while academics who are women produced less? I’m also curious how people feel about the term “self-care” in general. I also was surprised to read how common clinical depression is in grad school!!! I haven’t heard it talked about so much; I am happy to share strategies for how I deal with clinical depression with anyone who asks, but I hesitate to put them here just because “advice” re: depression can be taxing for some people.

Hello all! Outlining my workshop for next Monday. The summaries and readings can be found here. If you could respond with a blog post, that would be great. A brief overview below: 

Required Readings: 

• Two short chapters from How to Build a Life in the Humanities, “Imposter Phenomenon” and “Academic Guilt”
• “Self-Care as Professionalization: A Case for Ethical Doctoral Education in Composition Studies”
• “Undergraduate and Graduate Students’ Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic” 

Supplementary readings (pick and choose as your time allows): 

• “Time Management and Timelessness” in The Slow Professor 
• “Time Out” from the Supervalent Thought blog by Lauren Berlant 
• “Blissful Blundering: Embracing Deficiency and Surviving Graduate School” 
• CUNY Mental Health Resources

Here are some questions I’m thinking about:

1. Given the pressures of graduate school, academia, and the structure of the academy, not to mention today’s precarious political and economic climate, how do we maintain healthy lives as graduate students?
2. How do we address the negative tendencies or harmful thought patterns we see in ourselves? How do we establish good boundaries and cultivate healthy practices?
3. How do we work to support one another, mindful that some are at greater risk of developing mental health disorders than others? 
4. How has COVID impacted mental health and mental health resources in the CUNY community? 
5. How do we take this conscientiousness into the classroom as current or future teachers?

Mental health touches us all personally and differently, and I want to make sure people have space to share as much or as little as they like on this topic. Please feel free to share and reflect on your own experiences on the blog or in class, or not. Any questions/concerns, please let me know. My email is [email protected]. 

Thank you all! Looking forward to discussing.

Sandra, thanks for putting together such a thoughtful and interesting workshop. It’s funny; I’m so “traditional” in so many ways. I kind of love the craft of conventional academic writing partially, I think, because it didn’t come naturally for. me and the process of training myself to do it was really formative for me. I also really love working with conventional texts! And so I’ve always kind of run from the phrase “digital humanities” but, it turns out, engaging with this material was really useful for thinking about some things I had been thinking about. Also just to be clear I’m a novice to this stuff in a lot of ways; I basically only use Youtube to watch music and makeup tutorials!

In addition to reading the chapter, I watched the video re: JK Rowling and the video re: video game one. I chose the former because I’m often thinking about the relationships between authors and their texts, and the latter because I had just read Against the Fascist Creep by Alexander Reed Ross, which discussed Gamergate a bit, which I had of course heard of, but had no real understanding of because I’m not very online and I don’t know anything about video games. I also watched a few of the tiktoks. I have two questions that might be simpler for you to answer, Sandra: 1) I’m interested in how, in your instructions, you didn’t seem super invested in us sitting down and watching the videos (instead saying we should cook, etc.) I’m just interested, then, in how you see the difference between youtube “culture” and say, podcast culture (that could be an ignorant question – I don’t listen to podcasts either!). 2) Is it a pattern for popular youtubers who are men to have less expensive lighting setups than popular youtubers who are women? I really liked Big Joel, but kept thinking about his lighting in contrast to Ellis’ lighting!

Despite not being invested in Harry Potter or video games, I appreciated the content and more or less agreed with the two videos – though the video game one kind of horrified me because, re: the misogynists, it always truly terrifies me to see for myself what I know theoretically, which is that evil people are also generally truly mediocre people! For me something that was interesting is that the unit of analysis of the two videos I watched seemed to be internet debates about texts as opposed to the texts themselves. And in that sense, both really did feel like a more succinct and clear version of what academics do – and for their succinct quality and clarity, more effective than what many academics do. Something I had been invested in in the community college classroom is making sure students see interpretive work as embodied and relevant, and as something they are ENTITLED to do (as opposed to just “demonstrating skill” in an essay). Something I also always say to students is that writing is merely a form of communication that is more difficult for many, because one doesn’t have gestures, tone of voice, etc. – I think incorporating videos like these into the classroom could generate understanding and conversation about both of these points. I didn’t take the best notes while reading, but something that struck me from the Smyth article was when he said that people really CRAVE hermeneutics. I think that’s true; something I always feel about English majors is we can be so self-conscious about the fact that what we mainly do is interpret texts – but interpreting texts is so important!!! I really am committed to the value of hermeneutics, and I loved the way Smyth talked about this.

But…..not everything is a text! And so where the internet (broadly) scares me, is when it comes to context and history. I used to be of the opinion that the internet created opportunities for community that lots of people might not otherwise have access to. I also used to be of the opinion that the internet made knowledge production more democratic. I don’t think I was wrong, and I still think them in SOME ways…but I think I was always a little bit wrong in some ways, and I also think things have changed. Smyth talked about how the internet is similar to lots of academia but without the same citational practices, and it reminded me of how recently I described Twitter as “the worst traits of academia on meth and without citations.” Like….people tweeting flat-out incorrect things with authority, and then those things going viral. Or…so one really alarming trend I’ve seen lately is people talking about revolutionary leaders or leftist thinkers or…fascists…in a tone that is one that cannot be described as anything other than the same tone as people talk in when they are engaging in fandoms. And leftism should absolutely not be filling the same role in someone’s life as a fandom would. While most of the tiktoks were super cool, there was one that did this “socialists and libertarians are closer than most would like to think” and it was so irresponsible because yes, what we now think of as “libertarians” did appropriate that term from truly left movements, it is what it is now, and i would hope that libertarians and socialists have NOTHING in common! I hesitate to call it “irresponsible” because the person in the video looked so young. But definitely part of a worrisome trend in my opinion, where people start “knowing” things without history or context.

And so quite honestly, when the work is hermeneutics…I do think we English people have something to learn from the Youtubers, as our texts are often boring because they shove a bunch of unnecessary citations in the midst of interpretations that could be exciting otherwise. But history is different. And when various internet platforms worry me lately is when it’s very obvious that the only context for people’s interpretations is the internet. But here again, this is in some ways similar to academia, because lots of academics problems is that the academy is the sole or intensely primary context for analysis.

Hi everyone. I’m here to formalize some of the words of introduction to this workshop that I gave during class on Wednesday.

First off, my workshop summary and required readings are listed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12SCc575DQhDjvruxHV0iQr_BsmEJyU2e6-FtamfP_7Q/edit

Important notes:

1. As stated on the google doc, you are not required to watch all the videos listed. I would really encourage watching at least two sections (that means for AGNB, watching both videos counts as one; for the TikToks, looking over various accounts counts as one), but just one is okay too.
2. The chapter “Infrastructure and the Humanities” is also optional. If you do read it, consider it to count as the same as watching a video.
3. As stated in class, you are not required to write a discussion post leading up to Monday’s class. However, you are still encouraged to do so, and it would make me really happy if you did, just because I’m interested to know which videos you all watched and how you felt about them. You’re also welcome to just comment on this post with a couple informal thoughts or topics you’d like to discuss.

If you have any other questions, feel free to comment here or email me at:

[email protected]. Thanks, and looking forward to a great discussion on Monday!

I appreciate reading Helen Sword’s book, Air & Light & Time & Space. For starters, the title is extremely inviting and promotes itself as a safe space to dive into writing practices. It was refreshing to read a book that didn’t solely focus on the negative realities of academia and pedagogy. The book is not curated as a “how to” manual, rather it is a guide for reflection and customizable planning. However, thinking of writing, discussing writing, reading about writing and writing overall gives me so much anxiety! As positive as the reading is, I was enormously triggered. As a procrastinator, writing is an excruciating task for me. I have mostly negative associations when it comes to writing. I am also extremely critical of myself in academic and creative spaces so having to reflect on my writing practices and/or habits is hard for me. One of my biggest insecurities is how I articulate my ideas on paper.  My interest in pedagogy and language diversity comes from being urged to code switch in various settings. I’ve decided not to code switch under any condition. However, the idea of language assimilation is always in the back of my mind. There are many woes contributing to the lack of confidence in my writing practices. I am usually satisfied with the end results of my writing. It is the path in between the start to finish that gets my anxiety pumping. Overall, reading about writing experiences, worries and practices of other scholars, specifically advanced scholars, sparked a few questions I had trouble articulating this semester. What is a junior scholar? Is it more important to have a writing ritual as it is to just get the work done? Should writing conversations be tailored to the path of relief after a finished product or gearing up to put pen to paper?  (It seems obvious that even the best writers experience highs and lows. If the best writer has trouble with writing then I must be doomed!) 

I enjoyed the chapter “Writing With Others.” I do consider myself a “typical” humanities scholar. I prefer solitude and silence as I read and write. I find it hard to write if someone is in the same room, even if there is silence among us. However, I love collaborative discourse. My favorite part of graduate school, and education in general, is engaging in critical discourse about readings. Again, as a procrastinator not only is it difficult to maintain healthy writing habits, I also find it difficult to properly edit my own work. I have two or three writers who I turn to for editing purposes. They’re also academic writers so we have a mutual editing relationship that’s beneficial for all of us. In the chapter, Sword’s includes testimony on how scholars engage with collaborative writing, one scholar explains, “the collaborative process is essential for good writing; it brings together different perspectives and allows identification of holes that should be filled before submission. The outcome is a better product than if I wrote in a vacuum. (Kurt Albertine, Pediatrics, University of Utah)” (129). I don’t have much experience with co-authorship writing- but, I do believe collaboration is important. Collaboration in the form of peer editing has helped my writing improve. Peer editing allows others to fill in gaps and holes I may have missed while writing. Being an English scholar often triggers negative emotions of exclusion and solitude. On a personal level, most of my family members don’t truly understand what it means to be an academic. Community building in academia allows for positive reinforcement- it makes me feel as though I am actually doing something.

These results are very on brand!

I felt quite refreshed reading Helen Sword’s Air and Light and Time. Chapter 3, Rhythms and Rituals, particularly spoke to me. I appreciate that Sword begins her chapter doing away with “should” and instead focusing on “may” in reference to finding our own writing rhythms and rituals. “Should” is heavy; solid; connotative with guilt. “May” is a possibility, permission, the month of spring! I particularly liked her quotation expressing this sentiment on page 53: 

“Like marching and dancing, routines and rituals share some common features. Both are intentional activities rather than passive states; both can be either communal or solitary; both involve not just repetition but change. (Marching takes you to new places; dancing transforms the places where you are.) The point of this chapter is not that “anything goes” but that, within the spacious parameters of a successful writing practice, nearly anything is possible: marching, dancing, swaying, skipping, or even standing still to feel the wind blow past. Whether you prefer polar oppositions or sliding scales, rules or ambiguity, both/and and/or either/or, there is no “right” way of writing. The best way to write is any way that works for you.” (53)

We may find our own writing rhythms and rituals, and there is freedom, individuality, promise and potential in that. Refreshing to hear since it often seems like authors attempt to prescribe a one size-fits-all solution, which can then engender feelings of guilt or confusion when it doesn’t work…we are all so varied as writers, it makes sense that rhythms and rituals will naturally and substantially differ from one person to another.

I also liked this passage, because it made me think about writing in terms of movement and performance. I am a dancer but I’ve never thought about the connections between how I write and how I dance before. I usually approach choreography with a detailed plan, much like I like to have a “map” before I start writing. I am also a “fiddle as I go” writer, much like I’m a “stop and let’s change it now before we forget” choreographer. But my rehearsals, much like my writing routines and rituals, are spaces of repetition and invention. Practicing a particular piece is also creating the piece, much like writing is a process of discovery. And honestly the best rehearsals are the ones where I release some of my control to let in creativity and ambiguity, much like writing as well. On this note, I really liked Alessandra’s comment in her blog on how she approaches writing, given her work as a playwright and actor. I’m curious to learn how other people’s work and interests inflect, compare, or contrast from the way they write? 

Thinking about “rituals” also made me reflect on the discussion of spatialized rituals in Chapter Two. Sword quotes the cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg, who explains that spatialized rituals “‘can amplify performance by inducing ‘intense concentration or a favorable motivational or emotional state,’ triggering ‘retrieval of ideas, facts, plans, and other relevant knowledge associated with the place, time, or frame of mind selected by the writer for work’” (34). I really related to this.  A particular seat in the library (or my one chair at home now…), a piece of music, a cup of coffee, sunlight — all work to get me in my writing flow much quicker. Sometimes it can take me hours to just get going, but these markers usually give me a push in the right direction. Or they allow me to more easily “fake it until I make it”– feign that I’m in the zone, until I actually am. 

Thinking about these routines and rituals encouraged me to take the BASE quiz. I tried it manually at first, but the digital version Joseph recommended definitely gave more in-depth results…

I know I tend to write in isolation, and usually share my work with only a few people, and the quiz reflected this. I think part of that comes down to who is actually interested in reading it or has the time to do so, but the other part comes down to my need to “perfect” until the last moment. I know I need to relinquish the flawed idea of a finished/perfect draft. Sending something I’m not completely happy with is ok (definitely admired this mindset in your post, Stefanie.) The quiz suggested I widen my social horizons to establish a more productive daily routine and I think having someone to regularly read my work and keep me accountable, would definitely encourage me to write and share more. How have others approached or developed the social/communal nature of their writing? 

Looking forward to discussing today.