I had a decidedly emotional reaction to today’s readings. Just yesterday, I visited my great uncle in his Long Island house since he is migrating to Florida on Wednesday as he does every winter (he is traveling with my aunt, this time, so she can make sure he is distancing safely). When I was a child, I would often stay at that house for days, for my parents (used to) travel for work for extended periods of time. My great aunt taught me to read (she was the first in the family to go to college—Brooklyn College, actually), and the creepy dolls in the guest bedrooms gave me extended bouts of insomnia. She would serve me scrambled eggs and Ritz crackers with peanut butter for breakfast. We would walk to Jones beach…

So now my dad and I visit my great uncle; my great aunt died last year after battling Alzheimers for almost a decade. She would not remember my name, but she would remember my dad and talk to him like she did when he was a child growing up in East New York. One Passover, we were using the secular Yiddish Haggadah I insist on in my parents’ home, and my great aunt, who could still read at the time, could still pronounce the Yiddish better than my German mother; her eyes even shone with recognition at the familiar story, retold every year of her life.

So we visit my great uncle and, as we leave the house on Long Island, my uncle, wearing his Korean war veteran cap, excited to introduce us to a Chinese Hot pot restaurant (he has always loved Chinese cuisine and used to meet my dad in Flushing for long family meals), we pass through the basement to go out through the garage since it is raining. The top floor of the house has remained miraculously clean, but this basement is piled high with nearly the entire livelihood of my Aunt Patty, my great uncle’s older daughter, who died of sudden aggressive brain cancer in 2018. Her culinary equipment and tennis rackets nestle among cardboard boxes of clothes and furnishings. As we walk by, my Aunt Sue, her sister, complains that every time she gathers things into bags and gives some away, the pile doesn’t even remotely shrink. She asks if I’d come by some time soon and gather anything I need for my Bushwick apartment.

So… not sure how or why this became me retelling an event from yesterday. I guess I was inspired by Eng, Asif, and Gordon on the topics of archives, memory, and ghosts, even if I don’t directly state those ideas here. I’ll give more analytical reactions to these texts in class today!

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.

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!

Reading Helen Sword’s Air & Light & Time & Space was a deeply reflective exercise. I’ve always felt a strong attachment to my writing process; I find it nearly ritualistic. Sword provides a near overwhelming variety of diagnoses of types of writers, ideas for writing exercises or alternatives to intuitive habits, and of course a huge range of personal experiences and advice.

I enjoyed the interviews for multiple reasons. First, it was nice to read intellectuals cited as people more than as thinkers; it is just a rare experience I have not often felt in a book. Talking about their children, their writing desks, their problems and frustrations…I think that vulnerability is important for any student to hear, and I find it more comforting than a guide of how to structure a successful essay. Also, it was interesting if not strange to see, simply, how senior academics live. This book is a sort of unwitting picaresque through the landscape of successful academic life, which feels at times like a harsh reality and other times like a fantasy, a career-of-times-past (seriously, who are these professors with cabins in the snow or apartments in Paris?). Either way, though, Sword situates the unique calls of academic labor through the rest of domestic, public, and administrative life of the human academic, and I do appreciate that.

I did, at times, find the overwhelming options for how to write in this book a bit anxiety provoking. That’s not a critique of the book in any way, but rather a window into my reflections on my own experiences with writing. There was a moment on page 14 that stuck with me through the text—Sword discusses the “aversion to scheduling” many people face, and how that on its own creates cycles of guilt and anxiety. For these people, Sword argues, prescribing daily writing can feel impossible and demotivating rather than helpful. 

I have always been an overachiever in school. In middle and high school, I would often use schoolwork as a coping mechanism for generalized anxiety, psychosomatic symptoms, and a very severe panic disorder. I will never forget that, because I got great grades, my illnesses were more positively reinforced than anything; it was not until I developed chronic GI symptoms from long-term stress and could no longer go to class that I was able to convince doctors/parents that I was struggling. Fast forward to undergrad, and I am working to mediate those issues, but continue to deal with a deeply ingrained inability to form daily habits (I sometimes need reminders just to brush my teeth) as well as a penchant for losing things (yes, I did lose my apartment key this morning). 

It is only my current therapist that ever suggested to me that I may have undiagnosed ADHD, and hearing that has been life-changing for me. It was a diagnosis I almost certainly will never get formally, for most tests are performed with children who underperform in school or lose focus. I, on the other hand, tend to hyper-focus (as I am right now, can you tell from how long this is?). I find it to be one of my strengths in many ways—my academic work, for example, focuses heavily on non-linearity, which is very intuitive to how I think. It is also helpful for building bibliographies, since I’m usually mulling multiple ideas at once. However, to finally circle back to the Sword, it causes some huge problems for me with disciplined schedules. The idea of writing at the same time every day feels absolutely unachievable. I can barely take my medication every day! And I can’t find an exercise routine that’ll stick!

Again, this post is largely in agreement with Sword in her approach to the topic in such a non-hierarchical fashion. This is just a place in the text where I felt both validated and yet, somehow, still unsure of how to fill my own plate from the banquet of advice before me.

Finally, I’ll write out some of my personal writing habits in hopes that we can continue to share some of ours like the academics in this book did! When I have to write something small like a discussion post, I usually crank it out in one go. However, when I write research papers, I am big on the whole outlining thing; in fact, I’ll often make a quote page, an outline, and a “skeleton” with bullet points and quotes inside the outline. The hardest moment for me is usually the one where I transition from the skeleton to the paragraph format. When it comes to writing style, once I find my rhythm, I am pretty confident in my voice, but often go back to edit wording (I can be circuitous). The thing I struggle with most is the editing process, both personally and socially. When I first write, I’m often embarrassed to show it to anyone but the grader. I’m looking to build more peer reviewing skills in this program.

Ah, and here is my BASE! No surprise here. Everyone who posted so far has been different haha!

This workshop aims to take the question of “study” outside the university in tandem with the reality of online mass participation in social media. The underlying assumption of this workshop is that humanities-style work—critical reading, interpretation, argumentation, textual analysis—has been flourishing and evolving online into sophisticated and self-referential discourses. The “readings” for this week are both case studies of the entrenchment of such discourses and are meant to help us think beyond the boundaries of traditional academic work.

This week’s “readings” are composed of videos alongside an optional secondary text. WE can take these videos in three different ways: 

1) work with the contents of their arguments, all of which are both intimately connected to their medium/context and valuable to us in our critical questions in our studies; 

2) my primary focus, to work with these essays as examples of public scholarship that use the video-format as one particular medium to impact a larger high-level ongoing discussion in online communities; and 

3) as instructive to us, as both students and teachers, at understanding how our own scholarship can situate itself in more complex entanglements along multiple planes (scholarly, content, social). 

Every question we ask with regards to these texts should be thought in relation to scholarship in the academy; rather than seeing academic work as a default, we can use these instances of somewhat different discursive worlds to reflect on the uses and limitations of familiar formats such as the article, journal, book, and conference.

See the full description and required readings HERE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12SCc575DQhDjvruxHV0iQr_BsmEJyU2e6-FtamfP_7Q/edit?usp=sharing

It is hard to describe my reaction to reading Putting the Humanities PhD to Work. I hesitate to say that I enjoyed it, given all the dread and confirmation I found within it of the prospects of current practices in higher academics. But perhaps I would say I was validated by it, and found myself at moments emotional while reading it. I also felt thankful for its persevering optimism even if I struggle to share such perspective.

I was particularly struck by Chapter One’s outline of the current practices within higher academe in terms of how faculty work is structured, what is considered valuable, who is made to teach which classes, and more. I found myself drawn to the lines about reliance on adjuncts as well as relatively inexperienced non-tenure faculty or grad students to teach Intro courses. “These introductory courses are among the most challenging to teach from a pedagogical perspective….Moreover, many of these students are also encountering college for the first time….All of this requires more intensive time and attention from faculty members” (26). Rogers quotes Moten/Harney about how university cultures seem to see teaching as a low-grade mode of academic work that, when one reaches true success, one can bypass. Rogers connects this thought process to a broader gesture by higher academia generally to reject its own work as “labor” and rather seeing itself as a “pure” form of knowledge-seeking constituted through “passion.” “Until we talk about faculty work in the language of labor and employment,” Roger writes, “it will remain shrouded in mystique that makes it difficult for graduate students to consider it as one option among many ” (13). These are, indeed, ideas I have seen touted, and I am thankful to this book for giving me a frame to dissect them. They are perhaps where I found the book most helpful.

It is the question of “what is to be done” where I am less inspired or, perhaps better once again, “validated.” Yes, the proposals outlined by Rogers are great: broadening the possibilities for various vocational preparation; reforming the admissions process; improving working conditions and pay for adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty; increased childcare, healthcare, and support structures; and reorienting programs to give care to pedagogy and various measures of success. Yes, that is all great, and I am glad that I read it. But I guess it was strange to begin this course with The Undercommons, which, compared to this text, I would consider abolitionist in spirit. For Moten and Harney, the university as it has been built seems to be a sort of beastly king in a towering castle, and those in the undercommons are chatting servants stealing scraps in the subterranean kitchen (weird analogy, but an honest one from my head). In Rogers’ book, the university is a space worth saving insofar as it continues to exist and humans continue to pass through and desire to survive in the world. Perhaps this is the difference between a utopianism/fantasy in M/H and the “practical” in Rogers. I guess my question is then…where does the more cunning, more free and dangerous “play” of M/H enter into the “work” of Humanities-PhD-being-put-to? 

On a different note, I was also validated to see Rogers critique diversity initiatives as they currently work, and provide the analysis that, even if these initiatives increase numerical diversity, as long as universities continue to measure success along conservative and racially biased frames, they will not precipitate long-term change and may in fact harm people of color, particularly Black, Indigenous and low-income people. A friend of a friend recently published the article “A Farewell Letter to DEI Work” in Inside Higher Ed, an article I thought of often while reading Rogers. I’d recommend reading it for a bit of insight into the potential harm of Diversity/Equity/Inclusion initiatives that stand without broader structural changes to a university or larger accountability mechanisms.

Reading Austerity Blues was an anxious experience. I often found myself imagining how Fabricant and Brier are probably pulling out their hair seeing how their analyses and predictions have come home to roost in the wake of the accelerating conservative/far-right movements across the USA as well as, of course, the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crash. If this book gestures towards unsustainable choices (“austerity”) in their potential to escalate social and economic “tensions”—then, well, we’re living it.

There are a few structural elements and arguments I appreciated about Austerity Blues. One is that Fabricant and Brier connect the discussion of CUNY and public higher education to the politics and economics of education in general, illustrating how K-12 public (or not) education both mirrors through policy higher education and invariably impacts the structure of higher education. I think about that in the context of the current crisis of public schools in New York City and the impending possibility of a teachers’ strike. Just the rhetoric surrounding the transition to remote learning, the delays of school opening, the unequal resource distribution along lines of racial/class inequality, and the incessant blaming of teachers all reflect in Austerity. 

And that’s not to mention the national attack on public education as “propaganda”—something Fabricant and Brier were not even ready to predict. Sure, public higher education is directly intertwined with the rise of student movements (as F&B explain in Chapter 3) and therefore become fuel for right-wing reactionary politics (weird to find out that’s how Reagan got his start) that decry the brainwashing of liberal institutions. That’s a calling card for the entire Republican party and the far-right and dovetails with a general rejection of science alongside what is seen as intellectualization of identity ie. identity politics, intersectionality, critical race theory, gender studies. But…public school education? Howard Zinn? Sorry, that rhetorical attack just hit different today…I think, for me, it represents a significant shift in public rhetoric since this book’s publication in 2015 that continues to alarm and renegotiate public thought.

There is more to say about Austerity Blues, but I’d like to turn and address the podcast episode with Inside Higher Ed about the impact of coronavirus on CUNY. To be honest, when listening to this discussion, I felt ambivalent at best and cynically frustrated at worst. While the individual speakers all brought up some useful points and shared valuable stories of their experiences last semester, I can’t help but rear skepticism toward attempts to reflect, rationalize, or even intellectualize the ongoing trauma of the covid crisis. There is a moment in the podcast episode when the host asks the students, “Was there some good that came out of it?” and I found that question alarming, especially directly in toe with a conversation about toxic optimism. However, it is not the specific focus on the good that threw me; rather, it is the attempt to glean morals, lessons—perhaps in the words of Moten/Harney “policy”—out of the current crisis (emphasis on current, we are right in its clutches). I assuredly find it impossible to ask such questions right now, and am not sure if they are worth asking until after the bigger battles ahead have passed. I would argue the feeling of crisis, of dislocation, and of trauma, is currently unavoidable and therefore not worth rationalizing away, but rather…well, I don’t know what to do with it.