workingandgettingworked-blog

[workingandgettingworked-blog]

#4c17 #d1

THE WORK OF BEING

Angela Haas: We identify as women academics of color, women academics with disabilities, working class women academic, women who are first generation college graduates, and queer academics. We open this roundtable with stories of inhabiting these identities while working in academia and within rhetoric and composition studies, including adjusting to new positions, negotiating ever-shifting power structures and our relations and agency therein, and adjusting to new perceptions of our bodies across space and place. And in the spirit of our decolonial, queer, feminist orientations, we’d like to give a shout out to our sisters who could not make it to the roundtable today--Casie Cobos, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, Flourice Richardson, and Aimee Suzara--whose work of being when interfaced with academic labor prevented their physical attendance today but has nonetheless informed and inspired our work of being.

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs: One of my closest friends and colleagues asks me with tenderness and compassion, when will you be happy? You have gotten many awards, it seems like things are going well at home, and you have acknowledgment, but you are not happy.

I was very moved by her question, wanting to shake me into happiness, somewhat saying to me, “This is as good as it gets in the academy honey, and you are always dissatisfied.” I could recognize the “between the lines��� narrative because I have felt the same way about another of my colleagues of color who for many years has struggled not feeling affirmed, appreciated, recognized, or even respected for the gloriousness of her work.

Both of us have had difficult family lives for several years, and tragedies that have happened onto our children, and so because she is one of my role models, I wanted her to "be happy" so that I could at some point aspire to the same privilege. In my case, my son was assaulted in his apartment and left blind to one eye, PTSD’d, depressed, and undergoing many medical treatments as a result of facial broken bones, etc. and to boot did not get along with other members of the family in our home, and because of this lived alone until recently, so balancing all this, taking care of my mother from afar, being super mom, super woman at work, because you know you cannot risk not doing so, has taken a toll on me, and makes me unable to be "happy." 

And the truth is I have NOT gotten “many awards.” In 2015 I received the inaugural Provost’s Award for Scholarship, Research and Creativity, I was named as a Commissioner for the Arts in 2014, and am the Director for the Center for the Study of Justice, the last two honors require an incredible amount of work, they are not awards. But, because my name was called in relation to these things, all of a sudden all other Chairs, awards, and any type of publicity, as usual in this case, was closed to me. According to most of my colleagues “I am overly recognized," and awarded these awards that they never will receive, because to some of them, I am a troublemaker and an affirmative action hire, not an asset but a liability.

Stephanie Mahnke: Including various approaches to knowledge expand our frameworks of seeing the world, as well as our potential for solutions and understanding. It also provides a critical intervention into what/who we miss when we centralize any one framework. To be an Othered woman in the academy is not just to feel and be placed in the liminal space, the periphery of the academy, but also to be in a key position at the boundary – a critical position and perspective to question what we consider “academic.” Since complex epistemologies emerge from cultural and subjective complexity, the potential for additional lenses naturally questions the imagined centrality of the West’s objective, patriarchal, heteronormative, geo-specific values. For instance, I’m grateful for the work behind feminist rhetoric which has already contributed new ways of approaching knowledge that have changed the scholarly landscape; it has informed new ways of listening, of including communities, and questioning our positionality. As a Filipina-American scholar, I work to create spaces for Filipinx frameworks, and even harder to legitimize these foreign frameworks as academic, as legitimate--how do I retain and cultivate cultural frameworks while also balancing the inherited ones? How do I retain a sense of authority in the periphery? This has been an additional labor of WOC scholars for a long while. Yet, to push boundaries and intervene with the field’s centering will fall on all our shoulders in one context or another—who is at “center” and in the margin is changeable-- and to engage in this deterritorializing work means working to stay open and to collectively reach across cultural, embodied, and subjective contexts. For women of color just learning how to navigate institutions, there is also always the work of making space for yourself while also making space for others, and finally, learning how to stand in that space.

Stephanie Mahnke: The work of being begins early on as a grad student woman of color who also must navigate the frameworks we inherit. As a graduate student, I sit at the juncture between the formalism of my earlier academic training and entering the academic conversation with my own scholarly voice. My movement at this stage is hesitant, cautious, and sometimes regressive. Many times I feel I only vacillate between two instinctual moves: a green light to this approach, a red light to this other. Much of this has to do with the inevitable politics of a field, of a department, of a classroom. However, I struggle to undo the inherited frameworks—especially at this stage that’s fraught with mistakes—and expand my notions of text and of models outside the institution, as ways to confront a research question. I work to expand connections between various stimuli—knowing I’m limited by this body and my world of contact—while also not fixing privilege to any one approach.

Angela Haas: As the only American Indian faculty member at a Predominantly White Institution, I am tasked with mentoring all the indigenous students at Illinois State University, no matter their major--despite me not being the director of American Indian studies. As first generation college and one of only six faculty of color, three international faculty, and three queer faculty (and two faculty members inhabit two of these identities in the second largest department on our campus, I am also asked by the majority of graduate students from underrepresented communities to serve as their mentor, no matter their areas of specialization. I cannot account for how often these students have shared with me that when they have asked other faculty to serve as mentors several straight, white faculty have told them that they “don’t do race” or “don’t do gender”--as though they aren’t performing race and gender on the daily. Certainly, my life has been enriched by working with these students, but I am currently serving on more doctoral committees than anyone other faculty in the college. 

As Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs and her co-editors of and contributors (2012) to Presumed Incompetent--and so many other women of color in the academy--make clear, minority faculty by nature of our being in the world and the academy are oftentimes expected to do the lionshare of the mentoring work with minority students. Further, Audrey Williams June (2015) explains how this labor is both invisible and critical to the institution’s success. As she writes, in the Chronicle, “The hands-on attention that many minority professors willingly provide is an unheralded linchpin in institutional efforts to create an inclusive learning environment and to keep students enrolled. That invisible labor reflects what has been described as cultural taxation: the pressure faculty members of color feel to serve as role models, mentors, even surrogate parents to minority students, and to meet every institutional need for ethnic representation.”

Jennifer Sano-Franchini: To work as an Asian American woman faculty member at a predominantly white institution has meant that I have had to labor to make my place of work a hospitable place to be. This has meant keeping up with a number of areas of scholarship to make my teaching and research more inclusive and yes, more rigorous. It has meant thinking reflexively about how this new set of students respond to my body and thus my teaching. It has meant working to understand what it means to be the authority figure after having spent most of my life questioning and challenging authority as a social construct. It has meant responding to voices of doubt, and finding the language and appropriate affect with which to respond to microaggressive behavior. It has meant laboring to build community, reaching out to folks, taking the time to start a caucus for Asian/Asian American faculty at my institution, participating on committees relevant to inclusion (in addition to search committees, review committees and programmatic committees), participating in various kinds of organized dissent on campus. And not only has this work been necessary for me to even be at my institution, I also see my work as an important and valuable contribution to the institution itself. I wonder if the folks reviewing my tenure dossier will see this too.

To work as an Asian American woman in academia has for me also meant spending several thousands of dollars to endure 18-hour travel days with a four year old if I want to see my family. Many universities say that they support "work-life balance, they are willing to arrange for discounted rates for faculty to go to the gym," but too often balancing work and home life rests on the shoulders of employees. This is a labor problem and it is a systemic problem specific to academia, where current hiring practices often require faculty to give up control over where they live.

GETTING WORKED

Far from being a meritocratic space where good ideas and hard work are recognized, academia does its work upon bodies and minds in many ways, with unquestioned behaviors and practices echoing the logics of White supremacy, neoliberalism, settler colonialism, sexism, transphobia, ableism and classism--among other social and political forces. Microaggressions abound--but not just microaggressions--large structural forces that discipline bodyminds, that create catch-22 situations from which there seems to be no end or escape.

Stephanie Kerschbaum: In my current project, I am listening carefully to the stories that disabled faculty members tell about their experiences disclosing (or not disclosing) disability.* Across many of these stories, a seeming paradox is emerging, one that resonates with my own experiences: openly raising disability means confronting negative consequences of external judgment, misunderstandings and misconceptions (alongside other gendered, classed, and raced readings of one’s own bodymind**). But not openly raising disability means doing the work of self-accommodation and managing disabling conditions and situations and trying to maintain equality or the appearance of equality with colleagues. Asking for accommodation means getting “special treatment” and being perceived as not working as hard, while not getting accommodation means not being able to keep up or do the job.

In one interview, Priya, an Asian-American female faculty member in the health sciences noted that her disabling condition—a chronic, incurable, sometimes-manageable and sometimes-debilitating but not life-threatening condition—led her to always work well ahead. She would have every lecture planned before the semester began, every assignment lined up and put together, and all of her grant proposals, manuscripts, and other work would be done as early as possible simply because she couldn’t always anticipate when her condition might make it impossible for her to work, and she knew that on a regular basis she would need to be able to focus on taking care of herself. But, while this strategy led to success early in her career, she could not maintain this level of production over the long arc of an academic career. She noted that she’d regularly been mentored not to disclose her disability or talk about her condition, as mentors would simply say that her record spoke for itself. 

But when the academic records we create paper over the hidden iceberg of effort, emotional labor, and self-accommodation that it took to create that record in the first place, those records don’t speak for themselves. Instead, they erase disability, they act as if disability does not matter, when in fact disability does matter, intensely so. And in stories like Priya’s, disability intersects with—joins tributaries and becomes a rushing river—other –isms that matter to how women’s work, and Othered women’s work is read, responded to, acknowledged, taken seriously, cited, and celebrated.

*Some of these stories were collaboratively collected with Margaret Price as part of a qualitative interview study focused on disabled faculty members and their experiences with disability disclosure in professional/academic spaces. **on the term “bodymind” see Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain”, Hypatia, 2015.

Dora Ramirez: It seems that we forget: 

How different forms of discrimination interact. Ideas are born from our thoughts, our worldviews, the way we perceive reality; yet we spend time constructing identity through terms that are considered “problems” rather than addressing the social and economic inequalities that are found within our department homes. We forget.

I realize that my salary is on the low end for associate professors in the department. I blame it on the discipline, I blame it on the conservative, rural state I live in, I blame it on myself. I have medical bills for a chronic illness, and have to pay for my kid’s food with a credit card. This is the material reality of an immigrant’s child without a safety net who is now one of two women of color in a department of 59 full-time faculty. So, I spend a lot of time in my office with the door closed. Not because I don’t like my colleagues, but because I get tired and need to decompress from having to read people’s cues both in and outside the department. I have to figure out how much to trust and negotiate what different forms of inequalities are interacting in each specific encounter. That is how race and gender works in a neoliberal environment. It’s innate. 

Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her insightful 1989 essay, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” She reminds women that they are not just female. They are many things that intersect and create lived oppressions. So, I tell my colleagues,

You are not just white.

I remind them that intersections of material realities affect us all. If social divisions, if struggle, if oppressions need to be visible for a society to believe they exist in their community, then perhaps, I will leave my office door open and speak up when others do not want to hear or listen to me. And then maybe they will understand that,

I am not just brown.

Franny Howes: I teach a four-four-four load on the quarter system, picking up two more classes during the summer term at first because I needed the money and now because no one else will teach them, and I advise a load of seven communication majors, and I am the departmental scheduling coordinator and I am the webmaster and I started the Facebook page and I advise a buttload of other people's students because I'm the only one who has the schedule memorized and I buy my own supply of tissues so people can cry in my office and I do disability trainings and diversity trainings and creativity trainings and somehow I'm on the "ethical reasoning" committee and I developed our communication and technology sequence and I am trying to start a new Professional Writing major (...that's not just me) (most of this is not just me, we're all on 4/4/4 but some of us 4/4/4 harder than others) and I fail to publish and I fail to get my grades done on time and because I'm short and cute and perceived as young, I "don't really know what anxiety is like" and I would slow down except if I slow down I'm going to pass out. Oops, I did pass out. Those grades will just have to get done tomorrow Or the day after. This isn’t a humblebrag or a work of self-flagellation. This is just to say that I’m afraid of being perceived as both too much and not enough. An excess of queerness or a lack of professionalism; an excess of feeling and a lack of collegiality.

Patti Poblete: I spend every day worrying that the actions I take will be interpreted as failure. That my choices will be tied inextricably to my race, my gender, my disability, my immigrant status. That, as one of the very, very few women of Asian descent in leadership roles on my campus, and in my field, my struggles will become barriers for others in the future. That my advocacy will continue to be interpreted as an inappropriate divergence from my work. I am afraid that my determination to pursue social justice as a scholarly necessity will eventually rob me of the health insurance I need to survive. I am angry that in writing centers, in composition assessment, in academia, folks still act as though “quality” isn’t equivalent to a false meritocracy. I am weary of White, well-educated women asking me to educate them in diversity and intersectionality, because they’re just trying so hard to understand the origin of my discontent.

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs: Academia is for the competitive, and for the very strong, but how do you measure strength? It is often measured as privilege. Is it also immeasurable, and not only measured in resources, is it possessed by the people who are able to compartmentalize and continue to work, no matter how sick their mother is, how disabled their children are, how sick they are, how little money they make, compared to what they need to lead a decent life, how many microaggressions they suffer per week, or even on a daily basis.

My life in academia would have been monumentally different had I not had to struggle to pay for every conference, trip, had I been able to attend all the writers conferences, that are simply unavailable to me, (not because I could not apply for them, but because that would mean that I would leave the welfare of my children and husband in a limb, I have attended NONE). We are not encouraged to bring the children to the Disneyland of academia, only those who can afford it, may, those for whom the academic job is a hobby. On the contrary, children are wished invisible in academia and to academic parents, especially for professors of color. When I first was hired in my tenure track job, I was the first tenure track woman with children hired, and that first year, my all male senior faculty colleagues spent their meeting time writing memorandums about what equipment my children could not use when they visited the university. 

As I see now, how my children have processed through their bodies the burdens of enduring the tales of woe, of attempting to be from a social location that has not yet accepted us. I wonder how it might have been for them if instead of doing extra work during the summer so I could publish three times more than expected, I would have sent them to educational camps, which I could not afford. Would they be happily in college now, if the "college" memories they saw of their mother had appeared to strengthen her and make her content? But, my children resist the institutions, in large part because they see that they are the flesh witnesses of the toils their mother endured, coming from the lower class, into a department of only men academics, in a discipline impacted by women, with many stereotypes about US Latinos, particularly Chicanos. We are oftentimes seen as the Latinos on the lower strata of the Latino spectrum, which the trumpian voices have materialized, to prove that we had not imagined all the biases that engulfed our spirits for more than one hundred and fifty years. All the “firsts” I have endured have given me a turtle shell that merits mentioning, that compels me to speak out. I was the first Chicana tenured at this university, and the first woman tenured in my department, in one hundred and twenty years of the existence of the university.

Jennifer Sano-Franchini: Workplace microaggressions are a labor issue that comes with physical and material consequences for workers and that effects the potential and possibility of supporting more diverse and inclusive workplaces. How do academic institutional structures consciously or not and intentionally or not enact or support the enactment of workplace microaggressions? This happens through biased assessment procedures, including skewed metrics and processes and the persistent use of assessment tools that are particularly vulnerable to bias, including over-emphasis of quantitative scores on student evaluations, whether in academic hiring or tenure and promotion reviews. This happens when minoritized faculty are put in positions where they must pay the “diversity tax,” engaging in particular kinds of service that benefits the institution but that tends to go uncompensated, and often not recognized by tenure and promotion committees just to persist within particular institutions, especially those that are not already well-equipped to support minoritized faculty. Further, recent trends calling for “globalizing” and “diversifying” universities can, when used as a marketing ploy more than a genuine call for cultural inclusion or justice, lead to tokenism of minoritized faculty. Workplace microaggressions are all the more exacerbated when minoritized workers are recruited, isolated from their culture and support network, and brought to a place where institutional structures do not account for these changing conditions, whether in terms of establishing an effective mentorship system, or support that enables access to the cultural resources needed.

Ersula Ore: They say not to judge your new home by the standards of your graduate institution, so I didn’t. Instead I accepted that the dysfunction that was my tenure-track appointment would be one that I would come to navigate under sacrifices I could accept. I initially survived my transition by listening for dissonances between my department and the college, identifying alliances among faculty, and recognizing where along the spectrum of value my colleagues placed me. I did what I could to protect myself from exploitation, specifically the ways my double minority status in rhet/comp made me the target for a number of “special requests” including additional faculty service, independent studies, and invitations to write or be a Co-investigator on grants, mentor, or sponsor graduate and student organizations. However, within two years various forms of blackmail among inappropriate asks and persistent sexual harassment had driven me to the point of quitting. Within that time I came to understand how the university’s push to “diversify” followed a cultural logic of exploitation that permitted departments to scapegoat faculty women of color by failing to implement structures of support and protection. For me, then, getting worked entailed constantly confronting workplace microaggressions, sexual harassment, and assaults on the value of my work while at the same time being praised for it and demanded to do more. This form of getting worked was violent, but not as violent as I knew it could be nor as violent as I could have ever really imagined.

THE WORK OF PERSISTING, THE WORK OF HEALING, THE WORK OF CHANGE

All of this--the working and getting worked--is not without hope, and not without change. We are all here, telling our stories, sharing others’, commiserating. What does it mean to persist in the academy under these conditions, at this political moment? How do we heal? How do we connect and sustain one another’s bodyminds? How do we thrive and cultivate one another’s persistence?

Franny Howes: I agreed to co-develop an interdisciplinary project-based entrepreneurship class because I was afraid of missing out, afraid that if I couldn't sell my teaching and professional work in terms that my university could recognize I wouldn't be seen as doing anything, wouldn't be seen at all. But this is a very hard historical moment to be teaching a business class for the first time. Can intersectional feminism sneak into entrepreneurship? Do we have to in order to survive?

Dora Ramirez: Our bodies, our minds, each of us, present differential understandings of and intersections between discourse, embodiment, and material realities. Thus, when we think about defining collegiality within departments that bring together various identities, various differences, then we need to move our discussions to listening and speaking about our oppressions outside of identity and think about the social and economic boundaries found in our own departments, lest, we forget each other.

Kate Firestone: As a simultaneously intellectual, physical, and emotional enterprise, labor is an embodied practice. Labor in academia is often recognized and rewarded based on the production of specific objects like books, articles, syllabi, and more. Of course, this isn’t to say such productions aren’t valuable. Rather, it is to pose the question: how might a more intersectional understanding of labor expand our capacities to recognize and reward labor that, within neoliberal, colonial systems, are often invisibilized and dismissed as illegible? 

To answer this question, I reflect often on my own intersecting identities as an able-bodied; Asian American; transnational, transracial, Korean adoptee; a cisgendered woman raised by white parents in central Pennsylvania, now attending graduate school at a predominantly white institution in the midwest. Indeed, there is much I do as a graduate student within my department by serving on a variety of committees. 

Yet, there are some dimensions of my identity that are not and cannot be nourished in these contexts. So, I have had to seek and build support elsewhere, moving beyond traditionally defined borders--both physical and epistemic--to establish new campus organizations like the Asian Pacific American Graduate Student Association with Stephanie, as well as mentor and support the undergraduate APA group at MSU. Though frightening to do on my own, I leave home when time and money permit to do the labor of engaging with Korean adoptees, working to kindle and sustain critical relationships with lost brothers and sisters spread out across the country. This work, in addition to all that’s expected of a successful student, is not easy. It requires precious resources like time, money, and physical and mental energy--all of which we know are in short supply and high demand in academia, especially for graduate students.

Without this extra labor, though, I starve parts of myself that make teaching and researching impossible tasks. Without this extra labor, I am fragmented and jagged-edged, hurting more than helping, when helping is what I’m here to do. Yet, it is impossible to help others if you cannot first help yourself; and as such, I try to make the labor I do outside of academia my work within it, because the only way I know how to move forward is if this labor is simultaneously self-care. In moments like these I think about Kendall Leon’s response to Perryman-Clark and Craig in the WPA Journal blog, and how she proposes that we approach the work of institutional change intersectionally and decolonially, by looking at how actors in community-based organizations effect institutional change. Leon argues that these actors and their histories are relevant models from which we in the university can learn about “how to be, do and act in institutions--particularly from a position of disempowerment.” Being in communion with you all here today, I share this with you now as a way to practice doing this. Thank you for listening.

Patti Poblete: As an administrator, mentor, and instructor, I want to create spaces where these issues can be addressed, not only honestly, but infrastructurally and procedurally. 

Administration:

Are the demographics of my program staff reflective of the demographics of the university as a whole? 

Are the student participants in the program reflective of the demographics of the university as a whole?

Who is being left out, and who isn’t being seen? Who are we inviting, and who are we overlooking?

Are our procedures for hiring based on a (false, flawed) system of meritocracy? Are applicants being judged according to the particulars of the job ad, or are we relying upon a (biased, unacknowledged) sense of intuition?

Mentoring:

Are we creating a barrier for our mentees if we don’t make explicit the struggles inherent in academia?

Are we encouraging them to pursue a balance between work and life?

Are we modeling behaviors that discourage our mentees from healthy living and innovative work?

Teaching:

How are we assessing what “good” work in a course means?

How are we defining “civility” in the classroom?

Are we addressing our students as full human beings, who have concerns and responsibilities that aren’t visible to us?

Are we accounting for a full spectrum of identities that impacts the knowledge we recognize, the conversations we generate, the understandings that we share?

Ersula Ore: They say persistence pays and it’s true, but what no one speaks to are the sacrifices made to reach that payoff.

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs: I have been thinking long and deep about what support we give “the diverse, the queer, the people of color, the professors who come from the working class.” In journals about women in academia, we have barely scratched the surface of the support not given to mothers in academia, but these other populations of people who do not receive support are worth mentioning, and even underlining. I have felt compelled to host baby and bridal showers and organize get well cards or gifts, throughout the years. And, realize now, that I was doing this, because oftentimes, if I did not do it, nobody would. I was taking time from writing poems, cleaning my house, organizing my files, for the common good, which to me, is obvious: you keep your colleagues satisfied, feeling affirmed in their personal lives and appreciated also as human beings that contribute to the well being of our institution, and they will thrive. Needless to say, I saw this as a common healthy practice I implement. 

I pour my heart into this venue only to say, please take care of those around you, who provide “intangible qualities, incapable of objective measurement, but which make for greatness.” I attempted to do this as first editor of Presumed Incompetent, birthing a volume that took 8 years of my life, but think we still need to underline some of the issues I mention in this piece. We are not worthy of hosting mothers, queer and gay parents, and all “othered” individuals in our communities if we do not respect them as much as they deserve, and as I tell my students, I believe "you can never respect anyone too much." Let's be kind with words, bodies and spirits, and allow as well as support people whose families do not come from privilege and academic hidden agendas, through the jungle of unrecognized and unrecognizable treasures. You as an individual professor in any type of institution can make a difference in making sure others’ experiences of the academic world are rich and empowering, robust and positive. Their experience of wholeness is in your hands, my dear adjunct professor, associate and assistant professors, lecturers, administrative assistants, students, administrators, professors.

Jennifer Sano-Franchini: We invite all of you to participate, make, and engage with us for the rest of the session. It is our hope that through these interactions we might together build knowledge that considers the dimensions of women’s labor in the profession and that cultivates community around and through intersectional women’s identities inside and outside of the discipline. We have collectively prepared a set of objects and texts with which you can interact, including a zine called “Stories from Liminal State University,” bibliography, [other artifacts: video, stickers, cards]. There are materials for you to make your own zine page, to tell your own stories, and we will scan and add your page to the zine. And, we will be circulating the room, so please feel free to ask questions, or tell us your own stories and experiences of labor in the profession.