Performing White Scholarship

Haliehana Stepetin and I facilitated a workshop at Seditious Acts: Graduate Students of Color Interrogating the Neoliberal University at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. CFP

Saturday, April 22

2:45pm-3:30pm

Participatory Workshop 1: Passing: Performing White Scholarship

Agenda

• “ I want to acknowledge today that we are UNinvited guests on Dakota Territory.”
• Personal introductions:
  • Who we are
  • Why we came up with this workshop idea
  • What are our affective experiences of performing the role of the graduate student in the university and being conditioned (prominently, the history of Native disciplining) to perform a specific kind of white scholarship?
  • We’re opening up topics that won’t be resolved in this workshop [3 minutes]
• Scholarly context and framing
  • What is white scholarship? [2 minutes]
    • How does this play out in the classroom, whether teaching, TA-ing, being a student, or presenting our work?
    • A way of speaking? A way of writing? Methods of analysis?
    • The privileging of text over movement and other forms of knowing?
  • What is performance? Why? [2 minutes]
    • What we do/act tells us something about our desire for access, what does it do in our body/how does it mark and change us? Performance as a system for storing and transmitting knowledge that challenges traditional western epistemologies (Diana Taylor)
    • What would it look like to bring our inherited languages, dialects, and rituals into the university setting through discourse and writing?
• Icebreaker: Turn to someone next to you. Introduce yourselves:
  • Where are you allowed to be yourselves in the academy?
  • What is lost when you conform to the academy’s standards and notions of common sense? [5 minutes]
• Workshop:
  • 1st poster board: Write down values of the academy [2 minutes]
  • 2nd poster board: Write “cultural, family, community, friends, personal values and practices” [2 minutes]
  • 3rd poster board: “Strategies of Resilience” [15 minutes]
    • What can we do to unsettle whiteness in the academy? Small-scale intervention
    • What resources can we share with each other?
  • Summarize takeaways
    • How do we tell this to people who don’t know/care? Aka white people
    • We already know all this, but it’s a validating space for our research (and an embodied affirmation)
    • Responsibility shift - do the work white professors/students!
    • Making links between universities and then the comumnities
    • Optional: Offer to curate resources, send around people to write down their emails (optional), give us feedback [2 minutes]

Extra questions

• What are our affective experiences of performing the role of the graduate student in the university and being conditioned (prominently, the history of Native disciplining) to perform a specific kind of white scholarship?
• How have we shifted the ways we speak, write, and think since entering the university?
• What is this performance’s interplay with the rest of our partnerships and familial, friendships, community, and political relationships?
• How is this issue handled by the institution? Or is it? Is it being absorbed into the confines of “imposter syndrome”?
• What would it look like to bring our inherited languages, dialects, and rituals into the university setting through discourse and writing (Performance Studies and value given to the repertoire?)?
• How is/would the university respond to our refusal to comply with their models of white scholarship?

References

• The Undercommons - Moten and Harney
• Towards the Tangible Unknown: Decolonization in the Indigenous Future - Sium, Desai, and Ritskes (2012)
• Native boarding schools and the Assimilation movement from US Government
• Performance - Diana Taylor
• Add a brief history of US university/education

Handout