How do you know what you know?
I think I felt stupid because I wasn’t sure if the question was valid: how was information organized otherwise, outside of the institution? Like, they’re in boxes, okay, but is organizing information radically somehow…different? And the answer, as provided by Orisanmi Burton thinking through memories with Black Radicals over phone with he at beach and I at desk, is it’s not that the information is different outside of the institution, it’s that the context that made it fit there (outside the walls), the self surveillance and the censorship and the ‘safety’ is not there, and that makes all the difference.
What a seemingly simple answer.
While institutions might sort by Important Man or the March of Time, we ourselves maybe sort by feel, importance, personal priority, colors. I think most of who I read has been found by Kismet, rather than Syllabus, and sometimes I look back at that constellation and both begrudge the stacks that took me to where I am and also am grateful that I was able to wander through them. I do not wish to be egotistical when I say I believe I have introduced a lot of people to a lot of other people’s work, because of these wanderings.
Here is a list of ways I found some of my most trodden paths:
A friend texted an invite to a talk she thought I would be interested in, though she wouldn’t be able to go herself
A free talk at the New School was on the free list of eventbrite
A reply to a tweet, many years ago
Mutuals on twitter, many years ago
A funny joke that was retweeted, many years ago
Just really the heyday of Black academic twitter, many years ago
A fellow volunteer at a museum who thought I’d be interested in a scholar I’ve never heard of
A podcast that had a small citation
A frantic google of a person to understand more, and finding someone who worked with/under him instead
She had written other books before
Duke University Press had a 50% off sale
Here is a list of ways I wish I found some of my most trodden paths:
My parents
My neighbors
My coworkers
A librarian