Reflections

5/21/18

Project Roll out

Last week, I introduced my capstone project to the world!

I developed a marketing plan that included emails to personal network, media contacts, and contributors, and a public Facebook post. I also created a few promotional pull quotes, based on Bunny's recommendation (see below). After sending out the last wave of communications, I was totally done on Saturday. It feels so good to be finished! Now that it's out there, I do feel a great sense of pride and accomplishment for all the work I and my contributors have done in the past year. Several folks have responded to my emails and posts with positive feedback and praise, and I'm just trying to take it in slowly (still holding a secret fear of condemnation and critique). I hope to be able to coast on these light feelings for a while, to make up for all the heavy and strained feelings leading up to this moment.

I actually spent til the very last moment obsessing over the last details, including creating a separate screen reader accessible PDF (which should not have been a last minute task, I learned). I learned the basics about how to create accessible PDFs through Word and general best practices. Next time, I'll challenge myself to create an accessible PDF through Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, so that there can be 1 PDF only. Luckily, UW was hosting its Global Accessibility Awareness Week last week, so I went to a few sessions and re-committed myself to making my work more accessible. Inclusion includes disability and access!

OK that's about it. I feel so done, which includes not writing/talking anymore about my capstone project, except for the MACS Conference on May 31, which feels quite far away.

4/29/18

Compiling the Capstone

I am nearly complete with the PDF of my capstone!! It is a whopping 68 pages. There are 68 artboards in Sketch, and it has gotten really unruly trying to design and zero in on minuscule details on my 13" laptop screen. Thank goddess I have a mouse so that I don't cramp up my hand trying to do this on a trackpad. I understand why design is its own job, and I never want to solo visually design my own projects again. Check out my workspace:

The last pages I am designing are the Contents page, front cover, and back cover. The table of contents (which I'm just calling "Contents") was tricky for me to create. Deciding what pieces go with what pieces, who is in conversation with each other, and whose work to showcase first (even though it's not a linear hierarchy, it is because people are impacted by first impressions), was a doozy. I did the best that I could without any outside feedback, since I alone know the pieces the most intimately at this point. I decided to break up the reader into 2 parts: TUMULT/ACHE and SUSTAIN/RETURN. It was a small way for me to insert poetic creativity, and loosely divide the pieces into the current challenges/hurts and (re)turning towards healthier relationships and empowering truths about ourselves. Of course, the pieces weren't either/or, and again, I did my best to arrange them in a somewhat narrative arc without stressing too much.

After that, I downloaded each of the PDF pages and numbered them in a folder on my laptop so I can dump them into a PDF combiner when it's ready to go. (Manually combining PDF's on a Mac via Preview is ridiculously and impossibly tedious- that's where I'm happy to rely on technology and simple scripts). You can bet that I'm regularly backing up my laptop on my external hard drive.

I scheduled a "meeting" with Em at the WACC on Tuesday, and asked her to do a final proofread. I hope I can let in feelings of accomplishment and finality after that. Em has been an amazing support for me in grad school, and in helping me with the writing portion of my capstone. Even though I had other people create most the content in the reader, it's been a huge undertaking figuring out what changes/edit to make, ordering the pieces, and making dozens of design decisions about how to display everyone's work together that honors all of them... knowing that I'll make mistakes/omissions and that is OK. It's way too much power for one person, IMO.

I've been working nonstop on this capstone and thinking about it for so much of every day of these final 5 weeks. In last week's 512 class, I facilitated the first portion with Maisha and Beck. The reading we chose to revisit as a cohort was the introduction to Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, which I thought would be a balm during this frenetic time where people are feeling demoralized and anxious about not finishing their capstone projects. With Bunny and Jules' help, I came up with an art project that involved creating trading cards of encouragement for each other. When it came time to trade, Em gave me her card (below). At this point of being whipped into hyper-productivity, I definitely have fallen into the trap of associating my worth with my productivity. It's going to be hard disassociating the two things after I am done with grad school and enter the workforce, which will presumably be far less demanding. More work to do on my self, always!

4/16/18

Interpersonal Conflict Microcosm

For the past 2 months, I have embroiled in an anguished, drawn out conflict with someone in community I used to call a close friend. It has cursed me with so many sleepless nights, where I am alternating in between rage and guilt, has distracted me from my studies, and has taken up way too many of my precious therapy sessions meant for reducing school/job/work stress. One of my latest realizations of my responsibility in this conflict (since no one is ever 100% right or 100% wrong) is how this person unknowingly triggered in me painful deep-body feelings of a past unhealthy relationship. I kept overreacting when they triggered me with their not great (but not toxic) actions. Even as I was aware of what was happening, I could do nothing in the moment to change my venom. It was like I was trapped in my own history of ache, betrayal, and defenses.

Of course I could not stop working on my capstone project, and parts of it helped me process this experience. The submission by Dean Spade really stuck out to me during this time. An excerpt:

"It can be easy when we are hurt or disappointed to decide that the other person or people caused our feelings. Certainly, others’ actions and inactions stimulate feelings in us, but what feelings get stimulated, and how strong they are, has a lot to do with us and our histories. Often, when something really riles us up, it is because it is touching an old wound or raw spot."

So when I got upset with this person, it was ~30% about them, and 70% about the person in my past they reminded me of that I have not forgiven. I know it will take me more than a little while to heal from this past pain, and in the meantime, I just wanted to get away from my ex-friend so that we can reduce harm. At the risk of reverting back to my emo days, I've been using cathartic music and movement to help me keep moving along. Lyrics from David Bazan's new split EP, the song "Severely Dear":

"This isn't what you need

It isn't what I need either

Sometimes you're left with no other way

And it's better to take a breather"

This entire situation has added another dimension to the way I am framing my capstone essay, which asks readers to set aside damage-centered narratives of themselves and choose to respond to bullshit/harm from a place of wholeheartedness, and not trauma. After witnessing how fucking difficult of a time I'm having softening/turning towards a person who has poor communication skills around conflict and is triggering me left and right, I don't know how reasonable it is for me to make the same ask to people whose trauma has been passed down through generations via bodies and DNA. I can barely practice compassion and generosity in this relatively minor interpersonal conflict (no abuse or major violence involved) that will hopefully blow over by next year. So how can I expect people enraged/deadened by the -isms the even greater task? I'm having lots of doubts about my particular piece now. I will continue to sit with this.

4/12/18

Portfolio Framing Essay V3

Last night, I spent the entire evening rewriting my portfolio framing essay. The one that had been up on this site was the one I created in PUBSCH 594: Scholarship as Public Practice during Fall 2017 quarter (2nd version). At the request of my current core class BCULST 512: Cultural Studies And Its Publics, I re-read the essay and felt like it was kinda grossly fake humble and bloated. Now that I've had 2 quarters to let it rest, I realized that the driving concepts and terms I used were largely from the PUBSCH course, and that I don't feel that much connection to the phrases "public scholarship" or "community-engaged scholarship". Usually when I revamp a piece, I try to be efficient and use pieces from the former piece to scaffold the new version, but this time, I felt like I needed to start fresh.

I've chosen to ignore the MACS Portfolio Guidelines ("Too many artifacts will make it difficult to tell a focused and contextualized story about the portfolio and its intents") and write about the 5 objectives and 3 affective modes that I've employed during my Cultural Studies education. Although I've been advised by the administration that I can have several framing essays, and this doesn't need to be The One, I find that omitting work in less prominent areas results in a less rich and complex story of my attempts, failures and achievements. During peer review, while I've encouraged my colleagues to add theory as guide posts to their portfolio essays, I have chosen not to do so. myself My artifacts and capstone project contain plenty of theory and citations, but I do not feel compelled to construct a strong theoretical argument for how I have arranged my portfolio. I am telling a story about why I am here, what Cultural Studies helped me do, and how I am building a foundation for what's coming next.

The rewrite took 4 hours! I am very happy with these 4 pages. In addition to improving/updating my portfolio, I learned a valuable lesson- that sometimes a piece just needs to be thrown out and rewritten. This takes an enormous amount of energy and concentration, and I wonder how much better all my assignments and other essays would be if I just made time to rewrite them. For now, I'm satisfied and proud of my work.

3/27/18

Spring Quarter Start

This is the first week of the spring quarter and the first day of class. I've started out strong by setting up a few meetings to help me figure out my next direction. On Monday, I met up with Chandan Reddy, Associate Professor in the Gender Women, Sexuality Studies (GWSS) department at UW Seattle. I told him about my capstone project on an ethics of activism, and he seemed genuinely excited about it. He offered me some points of expansion: Instead of attempting the obvious entry point of the interpersonal, communicative, or psychological, he wondered what it would look like to examine the material infrastructures that enable call out culture and dogmatic activism. This would turn my research questions towards a more cultural geography and virtual publics bent. I'm not sure if I'm prepared to go there during the last quarter working on my capstone, but I will note it down for future exploration. He also gave me the low down on applying to the doctoral program at GWSS. Namely, that they only accept 1-2 students per year, which means that students don't get to enjoy a sustained cohort learning experience. Also, he told me that if/when I apply, to write a strong essay that clearly describes how my project is framed by specific feminist methodologies and feminist theories. I took a seat back hearing that, and I'm realizing that none of the work that I'm trying to do is driven by feminist theory, queer theory, or trans theory. Rather, I feel that I am shaping my work through performance studies, which is a totally different department. At this point, I feel that I will not be applying to GWSS to do further activist scholarship, because it doesn't feel like a match.

Today (Tuesday), I met with Jon Hiskes, the Communications Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at UW Seattle. Jon introduced himself to me at Allied Media Conference in Detroit June 2017, and then we bumped into each other again at the Imagining America conference at UC Davis October 2017. I had a brief meeting with my boss Miriam a couple of months ago about working for the university, and she recommended I meet with Jon about being a public information specialist (he now has a new title). I had read some of his posts and write-ups about public scholarship, and thought that would be a fun writing job. However, he told me that half of his job is humdrum administrative work, and only a small portion of it involves creative writing and marketing. He also talked about the complex process of trying to get the Simpson Center's 20 year old branding rebranded, and the various groups that have to come to a compromise before moving forward. None of this sounded very appealing to me. After the flexibility of working for IAS, I honestly don't think that working for a deeply bureaucratic and slow-moving institution like UW Seattle will be satisfying.

Before coming into these two meetings, I thought that I would get further along in my PhD planning process and make more connections at UW Seattle. But instead, based on the information I've received, I'm closing those doors for now.

3/23/18

Spring Break Updates

I am relishing my last spring break! Originally, I had planned on chipping away at my capstone project every day, but with the emotional meltdown I had last month, I am taking a more chill, less controlling route to finishing out MACS. I kept saying yes to extracurricular events organizing and networking, and I learned to make plans and write emails at lightning speed. Of course, this sprint couldn't be maintained and everything ground to a halt and I was left in a state of deep resentment about everyone, no matter their cause. I recovered from that humbling experience by working with my therapist to shave down my responsibilities to the true essentials, and bulked up my self-care regimen by jogging and lifting weights at the ARC four days a week. As it reminded me again, grad school is about the neglect of the body, and my (hopefully not) chronic lower spine pain isn't worth all the publications and renown.

My capstone is chugging along nicely, especially now that I've revised my expectations. My own requirement for myself is to compile a reader by the end of April. It looks like a couple of my writers might not be able to submit in time, and instead of agonizing over it and pushing back my schedule to accommodate them (but add stress to me), I will honor my original deadline to protect my sanity and well-being. I met with Sarah right before spring break, and she told me to consider this a first stab or a tease at a book (aka it doesn't have to be "perfect"), and that allowing the contributors to communicate in the way that is unique to them is fits the definition of an anthology (vs. me editing their work into total consistency, which is what I thought I had to do in the editing process). After adjusting my expectations, I feel more excitement about finishing the reader and preparing my presentation for the MACS conference in May and CESA in June.

It's a relief to put more trust in my capstone project and not have to worry about it every single moment, because I have started my job search process. I went to a social justice job panel at UWB a few weeks ago, and also visiting the grad career counselor. I left with that familiar dim feeling of "I'm never going to get a job that I like / It's too hard to sell myself" that I have felt every time I had to look for a job. I've also been setting up informational interviews and met up with my powerhouse friend Michele, and a couple of well-paying arts/equity jobs have come across my way that I feel pumped to apply for. At first, I worried it was too early to apply, as I won't be able to start until mid-June, but that's an assumption I'm making, and applying too late with the rest of the graduating students would be a far greater mistake.

Last update: I am an official co-director for 2018-19 PAGE! Ángela had asked me in person to apply in the midst of my meltdown, and I really wasn't sure if I could commit for the next 7 months. But I put in a statement of intent, along with the other cohort members vying for the 3 slots, and I was selected! It only pays $800 (more symbolic than anything), and it'll be a few hours of a work a week creating the application questions, selecting the new cohort, planning programming for the conference in Chicago in October, and attending the conference. Even though I can't envision my life after June, I feel like this is a good idea for me to stay connected with graduate students and the public scholarship network.

Ray of sunshine: It was lovingly sunny for two days earlier this week. I texted the longboard crew, grabbed my board, and we met up at Seward Park!

2/28/18

2018 Admissions Committee

This quarter I was so fortunate to serve on the 2018 admissions committee for the incoming MACS cohort. I want to use this space to generally reflect on that experience without offering any PII and violating FERPA guidelines. To prepare for reading the applications, I went back and re-read my own statement of intent and writing sample from 2016. After 5 quarters of intensive MACS training, I was less than impressed with what I had wrote. What I saw there were nascent inquiries about power, identity, and oppressed group dynamics that were could be interrogated with Cultural Studies, and the desire for multi-faceted historical contexts for understanding current ways of being (such as my parents' immigrant Christianity). I think that if I was looking at my own application as a reviewer, I would not put my application at the top of the list, but I would consider it a strong example of potential growth that could be encouraged by the program, which is precisely what has happened, so I'm so grateful the admissions committee back then took a calculated risk on me.

The meeting review happened yesterday, and I was blown away by the range in interests, backgrounds, and desires in the applicant pool. I also came in with a lot of assumptions about who would be a good fit, and who would definitely be a wrong fit, but discussing with the other committee members helped round out my notions and even changed my perspective a few times. It was honestly also pretty humbling looking at applicants with a wealth of professional experiences, honors and recognitions, and scholarly training, and considering them all my colleagues in Cultural Studies, whether they come to the program or not. It was also a new, unfavorable experience deciding on merit/need-based funding for applicants, because the need far exceeded the total amount we could offer. That felt like impossible decision making, and a move towards the slightly lesser of the evils. Master's programs are super expensive and under-funded, and it felt like such a morally precarious position to be in when even recommending people to apply to MACS.

At the end of it, I learned quite a bit about the challenges in being on an admissions committee, and I feel some FOMO about graduating in June because I would have loved to work and grow in relationship with some of the super strong candidates that may be incoming. I hope that I can at least meet them in the Spring or even in the summer and make the connection, because it's so rare for me to find people in community who are asking good Cultural Studies questions about this time and place.

2/11/18

On Empathy

This week I was interviewed by Soleil Ho for Bitch Media's Popaganda podcast. She had reached out to me a few weeks back, and wanted me to chime in with a critical lens on empathy. I asked her for some questions to prep, and this is what she sent over: How and where does the “pop” definition of empathy diverge from the real thing? How can we avoid the pitfalls of using empathy as a be-all, end-all demonstration of realness? What does it mean to “truly” understand another person’s experience—and is that even possible?

We chatted last Friday, and I had spent the entire week researching, thinking, and writing on this topic. Lucky for me, for the past 2 weeks in Jade's Performance and Belonging class, we talked about the limits of empathy, especially in relation to the white gaze on the suffering black body. We read selections from Saidiya Hartman's classic text, Scenes of Subjection, where she made the argument that always portraying the Black slave as the piteous sufferer actually creates distance between the viewer and the viewed, reinscribes the Black body as an object, and results in a spectacle. In the podcast, I riffed off Eve Tuck and used the phrase "damage-centered narratives" to talk about oppression-first ways that marginalized folks present to the public, and how I think that this is ultimately flattening our/their existences. I framed empathy as a largely unquestioned theory of change (again, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's phrase to describe our beliefs about how a situation can be improved - Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change), and talked about how this theory is ingrained in many of us who grew up in a Western context. I talked about how empathy is just a feeling, and not action, and how some people can spin out their wheels feeling so much and doing things like arguing heatedly online, that they never get past this feeling stage. What we really want is some sort of action, a praxis if you will, where understanding and feeling drive one to an intervention, and maybe even a transformed life. I ended talking about compassion, which I feel like is more of a spiritual virtue, and wondering how that can be cultivated to grow anti-oppression movements, rather than a focus on empathy (which to me is quite neutral). Empathy relies on relating or understanding, but compassion does not demand for that to occur before moving towards the other person in support.

It was a rad experience doing this interview, which comes out this Thursday, February 15. I couldn't help but feel imposter syndrome. Like, the more I make public my explorations and on justice, kindness, and separating the soul from the political performance, the less I feel like I have anything to say, much less the right to have a platform to say it. It is really strange, and this self-doubt the strongest I've felt in all of my grad school experience. Maybe it's because I am on the verge of burnout and am running on the fumes of my earlier excitement and discovery of relevant theory. It is something I am keeping an eye on, and it is having an effect on my capstone work. I'm struggling to formulate an essay for the body of the reader, because the topic is controversial, and I feel like I'm such an amateur/beginner activist and spiritual person. Yet, part of me still wants to make a comment on these things that I am also working through.

2/2/18

Getting Crispy

I can't focus. I am feeling the dullness and lethargy of despair. My mind is buzzing all the time with things I need to do. I have to work out every day at the ARC to get a break from this constant agitation. I've lost any sense of urgency for getting my assignments. I am at a 75% in my Cultural Studies of Global Sports, and I think I need to drop it, even though it's this late into the quarter. I really wish I could just be left alone to work on my capstone. My GSA work is super busy getting ready for the spring quarter, with the grad events, coffee hours, recruiting. I need a break.

One bright note: We finally got approval from the undergrad-led Club Council for our G-LEAD hoodies, and they came in!! (Do not be fooled by my temporary smile, it is hiding layers of exhaustion and disengagement)

1/17/18

Cited!! Another Milestone

This week I wrote a note of appreciation via email to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. I introduced myself, and thanked them for their joint scholarship, as it has been a beautiful example of collaboration in publishing. Their work has enormously shaped my entire graduate education experience thus far. I want to do work like them!

I have been returning again and again to their introduction to the Spring 2017 issue of Critical Ethnic Studies, which names the overreliance of identity frameworks and outmoded usage of intersectionality in ethnic studies. As a writer on activist culture, I feel that these troubling observations also ring true in the discourse of leftist activism, and I am looking for other understandings and language to sustain a growing cultural engagement. I was recently tipped off to an older piece by Tuck , "Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities", and found her caution to indigenous communities against internalizing brokenness as strategy so resonant. I'm seeing a similar trend of 'storytelling of the self' in my marginalized communities of color and queer/trans communities, and I feel uneasy about the long-term spiritual effects of always presenting oneself to those in power as the other, the sufferer, the wronged.

Wayne wrote back and told me that they not only know who I am, but also admire my work (!), and cited me in their newest book (!!!). I'm totally floored. My piece in Catalyst wasn't even academic, so I just assumed scholars would find it too shallow or fluffy. I feel re-energized in the possibilities of continuing in academia and encouraged that I can carve out my own path and be supported. Professionally, I don't really know what this means. Perhaps I should just enjoy it and keep on keeping on. I did apply to present at the Critical Ethnic Studies conference in June, so I plan on being there and meet them both.

I can't wait to tell Susan and Jade and Jed and Miriam and all of the fans of "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor"!

1/17/18

Capstone Updates

My capstone project, at this point, is 75% chasing people down via email and hoping they'll send me things not too far off the deadlines we have all agreed upon. I know that I signed up to pretty much be a project manager when I dreamed up this collaborative project, and it is pretty similar to my role creating the 2017 King County Trans Resource & Referral Guide. So much of this labor is invisible (or trapped in my personal inbox), and I hope that it will show in the quality of my reader.

We had our first cohort Research Accountability Meeting last night, and Susan made the observation that my process of doing the capstone was very meta, as the content of my reader relies on the belief that building healthy connections in activist community is worthwhile and can always offer something us bigger and more integrative. Collaboration is very sexy sounding, but getting into the nitty gritty of it, dealing with interpersonal relationships, setting boundaries, being assertive, is all a labor of love. Meaning, it is labor. In my writing and in what I've asked my collaborators to do in their submissions is to persuade readers to adopt the idea that it is not beneficial to dispose of other people so easily. This is something that I have to keep reminding myself when I get frustrated or anxious that my strict timelines are not being met by others. Thankfully, I built in lots of padding! I remain anxious and vigilant about completing on time, so the extra check-ins with Sarah Dowling will help.

1/16/18

New Year, New Commitments

Last quarter was really, really rough for me. I overcommitted on conferences, public talks, cohort organizing, and even my class assignments. I believed that the more I worked and excelled, the more I would be rewarded. My health started to decline, and when it all came to a head, my partner and I flew off to a two week getaway to Thailand. I missed an egregious amount of class and coursework, but it was so necessary in helping me reset and get off the road to burnout. This quarter, I am setting a much different pace and prioritization so that I can graduate joyfully, with energy left to spare to apply for jobs and transition out of school.

Starting in January, I am going to weekly therapy sessions to help me find a healthier pace of life, as I am disappointed to notice that I have deeply internalized the productive body as the worthiest myth about myself (and about others). I am also working out 3x a week at the campus fitness center, having found a way to avoid changing in the gendered locker rooms. Lastly, I started a meeting space with friends every Sunday to commune spiritually with one another, as I feel like my spiritual side is coming alive again and needs nourishment. These activities leave me less time for coursework and capstone work, which means I must be much more directed and concentrated in those areas.

Even as I am trying to resist the urge to churn and burn, I am remembering while I am still here the way that this program stimulates my intellectual curiosities, and how valuable it is for me to struggle through ideas and questions with colleagues who also have a great stake in being here. I am already pre-nostalgic for my cohort and professors and even this little campus. 2 years is such a short time for such intense connection and growth, but I know that it is almost time for me to leave the nest and continue on in my intellectual journey.

12/14/17

2017 Survival Guide Award

Here's a photo of me (+ my partner) winning the Survival Guide Award in December 2017 for my work on the 2017 King County Trans Resource Guide and writing on activist culture. (I'm wearing my custom suit I got made in Bangkok :D) I am pleased as punch to be getting this award, and the icing on the cake was having previous award winner and my dear ex-boss/ex-professor micha cárdenas present it to me. micha spoke such sweet words about the importance of my work, and was like "it's so wonderful when a student of mine totally blows past me" (or something to that effect).

2017 has been absolutely surreal in how much attention I have been getting for my work! I am ever so grateful. It is undeniably wonderful feeling so connected to my work, my community members, and our larger goals. Countless things to celebrate have happened to me this year, all pointing to the fact that I am exactly where I need to be right now, doing what I need to be doing. This is a new feeling of belonging for me, and I will do all I can to hold on to it.

11/17/17

Alicia Garza is in!

One of the most exciting milestones of my capstone project is when I invited Alicia Garza to contribute to my collaborative capstone reader, and her team responded and accepted the invite!! I pinched myself out in disbelief for a week. I feel like a total rockstar, and it makes me feel more confident that I can take my capstone and grow it into a bigger project after MACS. Email thread below:

---------- My Call ----------

From: Frances Lee

Date: Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:46 PM

Subject: Call for Essays: A Reader on Activist Culture

To:

Dear Alicia,

My name is Frances Lee. I'm a writer, trans activist, and graduate student at the University of Washington Bothell. I wrote a piece in July in Catalyst Wedding Co called "Excommunicate Me From the Church of Social Justice" about dogmatic activist culture as it relates to call outs, instructive texts, and the quest for purity. In October I published a follow up piece in YES! Magazine, "Why I've Started to Fear My Fellow Social Justice Activists", reflecting on developing an ethics of activism.

I am a huge admirer of your work. As referenced in my original essay, I had the pleasure of hearing you speak at the Allied Media Conference 2017 in June. I was so inspired by your powerful presence and of your strategic embrace of new activists who make mistakes. In reading your piece in Mic, "Our cynicism will not build a movement. Collaboration will", I have come to see that the hardest and most necessary relational work that I am not doing well as an activist is reaching out to people who disagree with me. Like you said, building movements require a mass of people committed to one another across difference.

I am in the process of putting together a reader to further explore these tensions/challenges/openings within activist communities in the US and beyond. I believe that there is much more that is needed to said on this topic by other people in the movement who are considering the following questions in their own work:

How do we cultivate graciousness and a spirit of generosity towards others we are building with?

How do we let justice movements breathe and be flexible as the conditions of our struggles change?

I am writing to invite you to to contribute a written piece for this reader. I would be honored to showcase your work alongside other visionaries in this collaborative resource. This reader will be freely available online. This project is my master's thesis project, which is grounded in community-engaged scholarship and activist design. My longer term dream is to expand this reader into a full-fledged book. Thus, if you choose to submit, you would retain the copyright of your submission. As the editor, I would retain first publication rights.

Submissions (prose, essay, or poetry) should not exceed 1000 words. A 100-word proposal is due before December 31, 2017. If you are interested, please let me know at your earliest convenience.

Thank you so much for the work that you do!

Frances Lee

11/16/17

Robin Kelley coffee hour

I was invited to a small graduate student coffee hour the day after Robin Kelley gave his racial capitalism talk at Kane Hall. It was me and five other graduate students (all of which are in MACS or are an alum!). We all got to tell him about our research interests and capstone projects during the course of an hour.

When it came to my turn, I told him about my project proposal to curate a community reader on activist culture in an attempt to disrupt the dogmatism and meanness that is so prevalent in the left. He agreed that this was an issue and shared his frustrations over this, and recommended that I check out the little known book, Lessons from the Damned: Class Struggle in the Black Community by Nancy Stoller and Patricia Hayden. It's a book edited by Black feminists in the 1960's living in Mount Vernon and a beautiful example of a written collaboration with community (from the young to the old, and mostly working class folks). Because I mentioned the Comabahee River Collective as a theoretical foundation for my work, Robin stated that Black feminism is often invoked as a finished and complete thing, but rather, it is incomplete, and the Comabahee River Collective was full of deep fissures and interpersonal conflicts. Thus, the reader would not be revealing any new information about movement building, but would be addressing longstanding tensions.

More interestingly, Robin moved to a condemnation of "public scholarship" and "public intellectualism" as fetishized commodities. He told us that the divide we see as so problematic between academic and activist knowledge is an artificial one that was created more recently when academic labor was made precarious. And that back in the 60's and 70's, then went hand in hand, and that is how Race and Ethnic Studies departments were formed in response to strikes by student activists. He cited the Boggs Center as a prominent example of how the most high level theoretical work must be done at the community level. New knowledge is produced through shared struggle between academics and the organic intellectuals in communities.

This was an unexpected critical view of public scholarship, which at first felt pretty troubling given that I am enrolled in a program that is based in public scholarship. However, the more I think about it the more I believe that all academics have a responsibility to their other communities, and the burden off figuring out how to do public scholarship should not rest solely on the shoulders of those who identify as such.

10/15/17

Reflections from Imagining America

Last night, I returned from a 4-day stint at UC Davis for the Imagining America conference on public scholarship. I'll admit that I spent most of my time longboarding on the flat, dry trails weaving throughout Davis and socializing with my PAGE cohortmates, at the expense of sitting through back to back panels and networking wit professionals. Because of this division of activity, I had a pretty good time there and I'm glad I committed to it.

There's something so special about traveling to a new environment with its own predetermined structure and having a small cohort to go through it all with. It is pretty much the only way I want to do conferences going forward. After a disastrous first night getting no sleep due to my sickly roommate, I moved to the co-director's Airbnb north of downtown Davis. The mornings I spent talking with my new roommates, walking to the co-op, and cleaning the house together were just as valuable as the time I spent consuming other people's talks at the formal conference. The more I do this, the more I am understanding that relationships and sustained support structures is what will allow me to continue in academia (if I choose to).

What I learned from this conference was less of what was scheduled (though I did encounter some good questions, like, How can I stop privileging the urban over the rural? As a scholar, how can I be part of solution-making, rather than just meticulously crafting damning social autopsies?), and more through the one-on-one, unscripted interactions between my colleagues. As we were having fun playing games and drinking and explaining our community engagement work with each other, a theme emerged: that essentially the stress of being in a PhD program was slowly degrading their health- mental (anxiety, panic, and depression), emotional (strain on relationships), and physical (chronic pain). I was invited to join a private Facebook group for women and non-binary grad students of color and am seeing the same things there. The picture I have assembled is that the process of getting a PhD, especially if you are from multiply marginalized social groups, is irrevocably bad for you. So being someone without a clear project/reason for doing a PhD, I am feeling less excited about applying for one.

A question I raised in a panel about diversity and arts in the academy was about the deeply problematic foundations of the American university, and how to "be in but not of" it. It felt partly lazy on my part to take on the role of the critic, because it is easy to critique but hard to build, but also I really wanted to know how people made it work for them. I suppose because the academy is a newer professional setting for me, I am still very much an outsider and easily upset when exposed to its many injustices. I suppose that every field has its problems, and maybe the problem is in me not knowing which one/not wanting to commit to one, and accept its imperfections as part of the package.

I think grad school can be all those things, esp. if one chooses a department that does not consider student's needs. However, not all grad programs are bad for one's health. But you are right to thing long about it and choose wisely. There are upsides as well! MHP

10/5/17

A Target on Modernist Design

A few things have been keeping me on track thinking through my proposal capstone project, "Decolonial Design". As I've been preparing for my panel at the fast approaching Radical Networks conference on October 20, I've been sitting in on video calls with my collaborators, who operate within the other fields of black geography and wifi networking. It's been a great exercise having to explain to them my research topic, my questions, and the directions I want to go. These conversations have made me realize that I need to get way more narrow with my capstone topic.

In our first BCULST 510 Engaging Cultural Studies class with Ben Gardner this week, he had us choose a "factoid" about an artifact related to capstone and share it with our classmates using common sense language. The artifact I chose was the Modernist typeface Helvetica. Helvetica is one of the most popular and highly regarded in the world. It is well-loved and used by designers because it is a precise, readable, and inconspicuous typeface. Per this searing Medium article by j.w., Helvetica "supports the belief of Modernism’s ability to communicate the breadth of human experiences through its “neutral” and “universal” visual language".

What's interesting to me about Helvetica?

I wonder that Helvetica could possibly be a starting point to opening up the field of decolonial design. It is a ubiquitous typeface. Helvetica is used in NYC subway MTA signage, it has been Apple's system font since 2007, it is used on all US Federal Income Tax forms, the US TV rating system, and the Canadian government's website, and by many corporations in their logotypes (logos). People who see it everywhere do not recognize the typeface. For that reason, my colleague Em jokingly coined the term "helvetegemony" to talk about it. Helvetica is held up by professional designers as a standard of clarity, neutrality, and simplicity in the canon of Western typefaces. It also embodies the epitome of minimal and clean design I've been striving to emulate as a designer for the past decade.

What's the larger context?

Helvetica was produced within the Modernist aesthetic movement in Europe and America during the early to mid 20th century. It was a response to the new realities of rapid industrialization and the rejection of traditional religious belief.

What questions does it raise for me?

• How has Helvetica been used to flatten the human visual experience?
• Who was Helvetica really designed for?
• What meanings are hard-coded into its design?
• What affect does reading Helvetica evoke? What is this doing to us as readers?
• If Helvetica might represent whiteness/Eurocentricness/heterosexuality, what typeface could represent non-whiteness/Otherness?
• In response to the above question, what does it mean that I (and my group) cannot come up with opposites or alternatives to Helvetica?

Great QUEstions! MHP

10/2/17

Modes of Doing Cultural Studies

Right now, I am thinking heavily about ambivalence and amateurism. These two modes of being have become hallmarks of both my gender identity and public scholarship (probably in that order, amateurism only related to being a scholar). Of course, they showed up with me in the beginning of my time in MACS, and since then I've been trying to decide if I want them around, what to do with their presence, and how to respond to the common sense reactions they tend to raise in spaces that revolve around professionalism or oppositional group identity.

What's been remarkable are the wealth of opportunities for publicly-engaged scholarship that have emerged while I've been developing a relationship with these two modes. As you can see from the below reflection entries, I've been building quite a CV over the summer! I mention this not to put up a front of false modesty (yuck), but to propose that ambivalence, amateurism, failure, not knowing, and weak theory paired with a heap of curiousity is the way that I am approaching my Cultural Studies educational experience, for better or for worse.

TQT shared an article this week called How to Live Less Anxiously As An Academe. Even though I am not a professional academic (technically I am paid to do recruiting and student advising), I was pleased to find that I have already wholeheartedly adopted some of these tips as a grad student. I have little aspirations of becoming a professor, of teaching at a distinguished institution, or of climbing the academic ladder. I am not a particularly good or well-trained researcher (see entry below). I try to publish pieces that speak to broad audiences who aren't familiar with academic jargon and Cultural Studies theories. I am an unabashed amateur- meaning that I openly acknowledge to audiences that I am no expert in what I'm working in, and yet I deserve to have my voice and budding ideas heard. My life and well-being depends on my Cultural Studies-framed investigations and collaborations, I don't do it for the good marks or scholarly recognition.

9/30/17

I Don't Know How to Conduct Research

My Fulbright application is due in 2 days. My research proposal is to do an ethnography of a trans activist organization in Taiwan, while participating as a member of their organization. I am curious to discover the relationship between trans legal rights and trans cultural acceptance there, and compare it to the climate in the US. My intent is to create a mini documentary about their experiences as well. Last weekend, I had my internal UW interview, and it didn't go as well as I had hoped. One of the reviewers was an older white male anthropologist. He basically wrote off my application as being weak, vague, and all over the place. Of course, I felt very prickled by this, and mostly chalked it up to him not ever having heard of trans studies, and also not understanding what I thought was a plain connection between activism and legal rights. Even the way I relayed this experience to my friends made it sound like he was in the wrong, or simply a misguided privileged academic.

However, the part of his feedback I took to heart was that the official IES reviewers would likely exhibit the same unfamiliarity with trans and activist topics. To improve my final draft, I solicited feedback from my cohort colleague Danny, who majored in anthropology for undergrad. It wasn't until after getting their comments that I realized how little I actually know about what an ethnography is, and how to even write a solid research proposal. I had started the proposal so late in the application game that I did not have critical details locked in:

• What trans organization in Taipei will I be working with?
• Why ethnography and not another method?
• Is there a major event going on during the time that I will be there for filming?

I don't have answers to any of these questions right now. I simply do not know. For the 1st and 3rd questions, that is my failure of not doing enough preliminary research. For the 2nd one, I honestly thought that I would get more of an education on research methods, Cultural Studies or otherwise. This is not an excuse blame my program (although I think it could be improved on this point), but to expose how I am pretty untrained as an academic. Due to these factors, I feel that my application is 99.5% going to be rejected by IES in the first round of reviews.

I feel disappointed by my lack of preparation, but this was an overall useful experience for me to go through, because how else could I have seen my areas of lack? I don't feel ashamed for not knowing, and 2 days is not enough time for me to find out, but this is a larger issue that I have being in academia. This is a concern I want to bring up with my program advisors, as I see this as being a big roadblock for applying to PhD programs in the future.

9/29/17

Start of Year 2

Today was my first day of classes!

It was a mixed bag. I started off going to DESIGN 210 Form and Composition, the undergraduate design class at UW Seattle I am auditing. I found out that the class actually meets MWF, rather than only Fridays, so I have to flex my GSA schedule at Bothell, which is M-Th. This felt unnerving to me and for a few moments I entertained the thought that this was a clear sign I should just ditch my decolonial design capstone project and take a different elective. But I really do want to learn more design foundations and theory, even though parallel I feel like such an amateur with incomplete knowledge and technical skills. I think I have also been considering that "Design Activism" is a nice feel-good catchphrase that doesn't (or can't?) exist as a possible practice, a claim that S. Surface made at their recent GRAY talk. I still don't really understand how this capstone project fits into my larger academic/activist/career goals, but I've gotten lots of encouraging feedback from other folks about the importance of doing the project, so I think I will go forward boldly!

The 2nd class of the day was PUBSCH 594, Scholarship as Public Practice. It is the introductory class for the Certificate in Public Scholarship, which I'm not getting, but I wanted to be in the class to have a space to learn more about ways to do public scholarship and network with other graduate students on the UW Seattle campus. Part of the course requirement is to create a Google Sites portfolio, and I'm just going to be using my existing MACS portfolio for this purpose (Hello Bruce! Hello Michelle!). The first in-class exercise was to define public scholarship, and below is what I came up with. I think what is telling about my non-definition is that 1) I don't know what public scholarship concretely is, and 2) My student experience is being driven by an oppositional relationship to the university. I want to be careful to not go too far in that direction out of sheer excitement of rebellious spirit, and be very intentional and precise with the ways I want to be oppositional to the university as an institution. My QTPOC community acquaintance Fabian Romero, a GWSS PhD student, is also in our small class, and I look forward to sharing space with them and finding ways to support each other in graduate school.

9/14/17

Love, Communication, Relationship, & Standing My Ground

Today, I published an exploratory follow-up essay to "Excommunicate Me," entitled "Kin Aesthetics // Love, Communication, and Relationship as Responses to the Church of Social Justice".

I already got a negative comment + some pettiness on FB about it (on the editor's page) and it's got me riled up! I decided to write point by point responses to the critiques. They won't get to read this, and it's mostly for me to practice responding and having a conversation.

CLAIM: White/cis/male/privileged people love the essay / are using it to get off the hook

This was an unintended, unexpected outcome, especially for a piece I thought only a few folks would read, having received no public response to my previous essays. I thought I made it clear my political identities and that I was talking to my communities who shared those lived experiences of marginality. I am not talking to multiply privileged white people trying and failing to be allies. All the other social justice 101 articles on how to do better are for them and I do not see the need to repeat them.

However, I will not be held responsible for white-ified interpretations. White people, and frankly anyone with power, will use anything to justify keeping their positions of power. To blame me for enabling existing white bullshit is, well, bullshit. White people are responsible for their own behaviors, actions, and hearts. It is not my job to “fix” privileged lefty white/cis/male people or communicate in a way that is legible to them.

I have also not received feedback from white people thanking me for letting them off the hook for their oppressiveness. Rather, the ones who chose to write feel more encouraged to do the hard work of anti-racism and claim they will continue to do so. To me, that is an ideal response from a privileged group and a beautiful way to engage across the hierarchy of identities.

CLAIM: Identity politics / centering affected voices / anger is necessary

I never said they weren’t important or necessary. If anything, these ideas and frameworks have become a ubiquitous hum in leftist movements over the past few years, even bleeding over into the mainstream discourse (where they get blasted, but they are present nonetheless). When ideas and narratives become dominant in spaces, it is a tip for me to start questioning their usages and roles in that new environment. Change is constant, and ideas need to change too or they get stale. I wanted to open up more space for a plurality of frameworks/ideologies/driving emotions, because I believe *that* is an integral part of centuries-long liberation movements. To me, anger is a useful tool for identifying oppression around me and towards others. It is an entry point into deciding how to respond. It is, however, not the core emotion of the activists I admire who are grounded, loving, present, and content. They experience anger, of course, like any human, but that is not what drives their well-being.

CLAIM: It is anti-call-out culture / It needs to look at call-out culture in a framework of power

I am not anti-callout culture. Again, quit it with the binaries! “If it doesn’t seem like I’m for something, then I’m 100% against it” is not the way I operate in the world, and it's sad if others try to box me in like that. I could explain more about call outs, and how I’ve learned so much and gotten better in my activism when being called out by people with whom I am in relationship with. The public shaming and gleefully vindictive call outs are ones that make me wince, and that is what I would like to see much less of. Instead of calling someone out, can you go talk to them directly? Can the wrong be righted quickly and privately? Are ego and pride driving the call out? Is calling someone out going to resolve the issue? If you’re going to call someone out, what’s the most effective way of doing it that benefits all involved? Are you also going to catch someone who you call out? I am not an expert on call out culture and there are many articles that dissect the power dynamics behind it and how to do it better. Mine is not one of them.

CLAIM: Oppression and hurt needs to be met with militancy, not softness or laying down

Yes! Sometimes! This is a point that many hallowed religious figures have a lot to say about. But in these essay, I am not talking about relationships with my political enemies or towards people who hate and want to destroy me. We have to make a distinction, otherwise our movements will just keep getting more insular.

Again, movements thrive and success on a plurality of tactics, and to some extent, of ideologies. Doing and thinking the exact same thing as everyone scares me! I don’t claim to know when hardness is needed and softness is not useful. That discernment is a lifetime work in progress. I have been hard for so long, it is time for me to try softness.

CLAIM: You can’t speak for me and my xyz identity/identitites

I certainly don’t speak for you, nor can I. I don't even know you, modern reader. The beauty of a personal essay is that it’s personal, it’s about what I’m working through. It is lovely when other people connect to those workings, but it is not prescriptive, and honestly, I might be thinking in a totally different manner in a year. Writing and sharing my writing publicly is an offering to my leftist activist communities, a peek inside the process of someone who wants to keep doing better. Take what you like, and leave the rest. I am allowing you to consume my thoughts, but you cannot consume or control me. I am human and fallible and multifaceted, just like you.

-- And then

I write for me. Getting blasted with public response is undesirable to me, because it threatens my sacred practice. I protect my practices and speak my truth, as my understandings of myself, the world and others shift over time.

I will only consider responding to people in my life, not strangers who don’t exhibit the same amount of vulnerability and openness as me. I am less on FB now and am loathe to post personal writing on there because healthy dialogue rarely occurs there. I’m no longer into having my mood/day completely ruined because of a mean and critical comment by someone who doesn’t know or care about me. If that means I have to stop writing publicly, then so be it.

9/14/17

Academics Against The Privilege of Academia

Even though it is summer, I never stopped writing critically and employing the ideas I picked up last year. My PAGE fellowship experience is ramping up, and a few weeks ago, I participated in a video conference call with the entire group of fellows. It was inspiring to be around all scholars of color, many women, and some other trans folks. They were all PhD students save for myself, and I tried to not feel inadequate, because I know I belong there and am eager to network. We were all tasked with writing blog posts about public scholarship, and here is mine.

9/2/17

Love Affair with Longboarding

At the end of spring quarter, Christian Andersen offered me the observation that I was "carving out an intellectual path by biking/walking." This summer, I've been taking that feedback to the next level by picking up a new sport where you can physically carve: longboarding.

Longboard is dangerous, relatively inefficient, has a steep learning curve, and can only be done on dry roads. Unlike skateboarding, where you ride a shorter board that is designed for performing tricks in an urban environment, longboarding is mainly for cruising across distances, dancing, and bombing down steep hills (all very different styles) on a longer board.

When I first stepped on my board, it immediately felt wrong. I was no longer in comfortable control of where my body went in relation to the ground. In my neighborhood, I made the beginner's mistake of trying to roll over the sidewalks, which were narrow and laden with crumbling driveways every 10 feet. But then I reached out to a few queer of color grad students (MACS cohort & GWSS) who had been skating for years, and we did a couple of skates at UW Seattle and Seward Park. I started going on solo skates on wide, smoother roads wherever my day's tasks took me. Since then, I have learned about all the parts of my longboard (board, trucks, bearings, bushings, wheels) and upgraded them to my riding style (probably not financially wise). I also recently organized an all genderqueer/tenderqueer ride down Lake Washington Boulevard where we skated, talked about our feelings, and took in the gorgeous lakeside scenery.

For me, longboarding has turned into a kind of spiritual practice. It is terrifying to get on the board, knowing that I am trading the solid earth for something perpetually shifting and unpredictable. When I push off, I know I could fall ungracefully at any time and be met with a bloom of pain. And I usually don't know where I'm going, but it just feels good to go. But there is a light freedom that comes with flying across the land and slicing through the air, even in the face of definite danger and uncertainty. But so far, I've wanted to keep on doing it, and keep on moving. Once I embraced the terms of this experience, longboarding became thrilling, and a source of easy joy. In a culture obsessed with mastery, knowing in my body just how much of an amateur I am and what my many limits are keep me humble. During this learning time, I rotate in my consciousness the zen Buddhist phrase: "In the Beginner's Mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few."

As I cherish the final few weeks of dry sunny summer, I feel preemptively unready to let go of longboarding. When the rains and mists come, it is no longer safe to ride due to decreased traction and visibility. This too is a lesson- to fully enjoy pleasures and experiences while they are present, and simply let go when they are no longer available to me. Happily, I will be traveling to UC Davis in October for the Imagining America conference; the campus is flat so I will pack my board. After that, until summer 2018 then!

9/2/17

Post Internet Fame

I am still processing the thing that happened to me and my writing back in July. A good friend sent me this article by Lan Samantha Chan (!) that reminded me to hold on to why I ever write in the first place:

"Hold onto that part of you that first compelled you to start writing. Hold onto that self through the vicissitudes of “career.” A writing life and a writing career are two separate things, and it’s crucial to keep the first. The single essential survival skill for anybody interested in creating art is to learn to defend this inner life from the world. Cherish yourself and wall off an interior room where you’re allowed to forget your published life as a writer."

I write for myself, and on occasion, for my loved ones. I have rarely had an audience or anything who could speak back to me about what I've put out, and now that I have one, I can't let it change my longstanding practice.

I am thinking right now about a very critical, hurtful comment about my article made by a community acquaintance as a public Facebook post this past week. The hundreds of heartfelt positive responses I've received diminished to a droplet when this one came through. Honestly, it cast a pall over an otherwise spectacular summer day full of friends and play. I wholeheartedly disagreed with the comment (and the meanness/smallness in which it was made), but I couldn't stop thinking about it and was annoyed at myself for being so easily toppled. Finally, a friend suggested that I check out Brené Brown's Daring Greatly, in which she writes about vulnerability (the concept and of her own). After rising to writer stardom and getting a wave of feedback from anonymous strangers, Brown made the commitment to herself to only read/engage with critical comments where the author was exhibiting the same amount of vulnerability as she had put out. Wow. I found that immensely helpful and will attempt to use that framework going forward (while keeping aware of my biases and privileges that allow me to do so). I am wondering if I could apply this to academia, where people's worth is attached to their publishing status.

For now, I'm happy to move on to other projects and writing about topics I care about. I suppose I am afraid of being a one-trick pony, but I've got too much other stuff going on for that to be the case. I will not let internet fame be a negative stage in my process!

8/11/17

The Graduate Student on Break

In observing myself now vs. I'm a lot more interesting (and stressed) when I'm in school. Rather than create theories from my own incubation, I am more able to create- no, to synthesize a mishmash of something new (?) from other scholars' theories. Does this make me a proper candidate to be a professional scholar? How can I be a deep and critical thinker without being caught in the tentacles of neoliberal academia?

8/8/17

Summer's Blowing By

In other exciting news, the interview videos I produced for the Poetics Operations Collaborative will be screened in LA this September! They were offered up by micha to be part of the contemptorary fundraiser at Human Resources. This is the second time I've had my filmwork be screened. There's something really special about that, knowing that strangers will be consuming something I made, looking for tidbits to take away.

I am very proud of those videos, even though they are getting way less attention on social media than my essay. They are each a mere 3 minutes long, even though it took me more than a quarter to create and finish them. The meetings with each person (queer/trans, and disabled folks in the community) only took about an hour each, and I used my iPhone to record them speaking and then later asked them to perform some fitness activities for me to shoot with the same iPhone. It is very low-tech production. I have a nicer Micro 4/3 camera, and I have access to an entire library of fancy equipment via UW/UWB, but I hate fiddling with feature-ful equipment and learning something so quickly on the spot when I only have one take. I think that a story needs to be strong enough to stand on its own, and dialing down the production quality is a good way to see if that's the case.

The editing part is what took the longest! The interviewees and I were basically having meandering conversations, and many times I offered up information about myself so that I could relate to what they were saying. All my utterances had to be edited out. I went the extra mile and snipped all the "ums" and stutters and pauses- there were many. It was sweet to talk to Dorian, who I had not met before. Only a month or so afterwards, they survived a brutal attack on Capitol Hill for defending their friend from a sexual assault. I am talking with them now about helping them write an account of what happened. ET, another person I interviewed, is a personal friend and illustrator I highly admire. It was fascinating treating them as a subject and an expert, and using my skills to amplify their story and struggles as a person with a disability. I think that it strengthened our friendship, and I am happy that we can do professional work together.

--

What else? The internet furor over my "Excommunicate" essay has died down, at last. That extreme focus of attention on me was not good for my health. I had anxiety and wasn't fully present throughout my ensuing extended phoneless weekend to Mount Rainier. Only a 7 hour hike temporarily distracted me! I simultaneously soaked up and lamented all my mentions. I finally emailed Miriam and Kate about it, and they wrote up a UWB news item. It probably was a terrible and risky experience for my ego. And now I feel a great deal of pressure to write something as a follow up that is just as compelling and chord-striking. Except I can't, because that essay is something that's been in development for the last several years (coming out of so many conversations, journalings, and my 500 course final paper). I am, however, in the process of drafting up a follow-up piece for NBC Think, I'll be performing an abridged spoken version for CBC next week, and supposed to submit a piece in September to YES! Magazine.

A month later, my article is being referenced by Kai Cheng Thom and Current Affairs. The response to this essay is giving me pause on my capstone project- should I ditch the exploratory decolonial design thing and shift to writing about activist culture? Or, how can those two topics be related? I need to give this a good hard think, and check-in with Sarah when the school year starts up again. A few weeks ago, I found out I got accepted into Radical Networks with my collaborators Jen Kagan and Ronald Morrison. It occurs in mid-October and is about techy networking activism. I am a bit surprised that our proposal got in, because my contribution is not about wifi or data networks, but is about decolonial design, and a bit about The Boundaries Project.

--

Yesterday I wrapped up a week of training with Meshell Sturgis for my upcoming GSA (Graduate Staff Assistant) appointment. Switching from student mode to administrator/internal assistant role is shocking! My role is in recruiting, so my new goals are to increase enrollment in the IAS grad programs by doing class visits, tabling, and doing one-on-one student advising. It's a good thing I really like MACS for the most part (and by that, I really mean I like my cohort). Honestly, I am not sure I would strongly advise anyone to get a humanities masters degree, unless it was either paid for or a terminal degree. Funding is key! Our generations are being pulled down by decades of paying student loans! I hope to be real with any prospective students with ask for that kind of advice.

A big plus of learning the ins and out of the institution and what it has to offer is that I've already learned about relevant resources that I am putting to use now! Like getting the fine print on conference funding: there's IAS, GSFEI, GFIS, and then GO-MAP (for students of color). And that student clubs get something like $1500/quarter (or year?) for events, swag, conferences, etc. And finding out that we get free advising for study abroad opportunities --->

Yesterday, I met with Natalia of Global Initiatives to talk about applying for a 2018 Fulbright. I have exactly less than a month to submit an application to UW and go through a mock interview. It's something that UW wants on their name, I guess! I want to go to Taiwan, because I want to reconnect with my "roots" (but not really, because only my Dad was born there, and my grandparents fled there during the Cultural Revolution, so we are not indigenous by any means) by being around Taiwanese people, eating food, and speaking Mandarin Chinese every day. Apparently that is not good enough reason to apply for a Fulbright. Can I make a case for this? I am currently thinking about drafting a research proposal to do cultural work in the LGBTQ communities in Taiwan, perhaps coming up with a localized resource guide like the King County Trans Guide. Or, it would be swell to do a mini comic zine on my experiences and relationship building there... but that's probably not academic enough. And yet academia is only the vehicle for the program- it's true intent is to build bridges between cultures and have Fulbright scholars act as diplomatic ambassadors representing the great US. Hm! I don't know if this is the perfect fit for me, but it would give me a chance to travel after finishing up MACS, do a self-directed 10 month project, and provide for my living expenses (+ dependent expenses!).

--

So those are some things that have been occupying my time for the past few weeks. The summer has not been particularly relaxing or free. I was foolish in accepting four part-time jobs, and the addition my internet virality has added more freelance writing to my plate. It's all very good! It's all so much and moving so fast. Trying to take as much care and put as much thoughtfulness in each of my outputs as I can manage. But really, I would be so grateful for a "real summer", hopefully in early September when my jobs start to wind down.

7/11/17

Going Viral?!

Catalyst Wedding Co published my below essay on Monday. Today is Wednesday. In those two days, I've gotten more Facebook likes, comments, and reposts than I can track. People are requesting my Facebook friendship and sending me fan messages (and I'm dumbly accepting and having lackluster convos because I'm distracted at work). My friends are being sent the article by their friends, who I don't personally know. My coworker across the country brought it up in a work email. I went to a relationship skills class hosted by the Northwest Network tonight, and at the end I found out the presenter used my essay to shape the class.

The website Autostraddle contacted Catalyst and asked them to let them republish it on their site- it is going live tomorrow morning. I've received several private messages from strangers via the contact form on my other portfolio. I asked my editor to send me their page view stats and this is what she reported back: "As of right now, your article has an unprecedented 17k page views. We typically get about 20k page views a month across our whole site and your article is nearly that after only 3 days!"

A small sample of the hundreds of comments I've gotten:

• "I am a QPOC who is living this reality at this moment and was feeling very isolated and alone. Thank you for speaking up, letting me know that I what I am experiencing is valid. I have a bit more resolve to keep moving forward for another day."
• "This old black lesbian hears you, has lived through these moments if political purity and purges before, and is grateful for the ways you speak my heart and mind."
• "This is fantastic. I've had most of these feelings. In fact, I felt like I should write an article, but didn't think that it would make a difference! I'm glad that you did. This makes a difference. Thank you."
• "This needs to be required reading"
• "The amazing Frances Lee wrote a really beautiful, loving piece which feels like an invitation to something beautiful."
• "Hi, we don't know each other. But I wanted to say: Brilliant. Important. Piece"
• "I'm writing today to see if it would be possible to republish Frances Lee's BRILLIANT piece, "Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice" on our website? We were absolutely floored after reading it — it's exactly how we've felt about the subject for so long, and Frances has teased them apart and examined them so perfectly here."
• And so forth.

This has utterly overwhelming. There was maybe one dissenting comment, and everything else has been full-force positive, which I feel is unheard of online. I know I should feel excited and grateful for the attention, but I feel disoriented and imposter syndrome has come over me. I don't know anything! I am borrowing ideas from other people, from other religions, from those far wiser than me. I honestly thought only a few friends would read the article, that it would be a tiny seashell in the churning ocean of thinkpieces. I would have edited it a few more times at least! Some people have expressed that it's strange to find the essay in a wedding magazine. Sure, I get that. But I like placing and finding things in unexpected places. I like disrupting the usual sources of "radical" activist ideas. And my editor and contact Liz has been nothing but totally supportive of my writing, and lets me publish anything I write. Anyways, what a wild week! I do not have plans to become a professional writer, and I want to focus on my design research and getting through grad school. But maybe this is an opportunity worth digging into.

2 more exciting pieces of news prior to this week!

• I was nominated to represent UWB graduate students in the 2017-2018 Chancellor’s Advisory Committee for Students (CACS)! Considering that I've pretty much only been investing in my MACS cohort, it will be cool to meet other grad students on campus and advocate for their needs. Here's the UWB news writeup.
• I was selected to be a 2017-2018 PAGE Fellow! I will be part of a national cohort of 9 other grad students and collaborate on public scholarship projects. The conference will be at in UC Davis in October, and Bunny started to plan that we both get our PhDs there (hers in Interpersonal Communication)

The following school year is going to be busy! I took so many extra credits last quarter that I think I can get away with only taking a 2-hour elective on "Scholarship as Public Practice" (still relevant).

6/28/17

Excommunicate Me From the Church of Social Justice

My first year of my Cultural Studies program is wrapped! The workload was heavy, and I also willingly took on a great deal of additional projects and emotional labor to get more out of my experience and build a academic community. Throughout that time, I lessened my community activism and was able to take distance and reflect on my experience there. I wrote the below piece about my frustrations with activist culture in Seattle and my desire to be involved in more nuanced and fluid ways. I fully admit that I am not nor will I ever be a community organizer, so I have some anxiety about the legitimacy of my outsider feelings. However, these issues have been brought up by other people before, but I wanted to use Cultural Studies and my experiences of religion as another entry point, and write to a non-academic audience. I submitted it to my editor at Catalyst and am waiting to have it published.

---

There is a particularly aggressive strand of social justice activism weaving in and out of my Seattle community that has troubled me, silenced my loved ones, and turned away potential allies. I believe in justice. I believe in liberation. I believe it is our duty to obliterate white supremacy, anti-blackness, cisheteropatriarchy, and imperialism. And I also believe there should be flexibility and openness around the activist tactics we use and pathways we take. Beliefs and actions are too often conflated with each other, yet questioning the latter does not renege the former. As a Cultural Studies scholar, I am interested in the ways that culture does the work of power. What then, is the culture of activism, and in what ways are activists restrained by it? To be clear, I’m only one person who doesn’t know everything, and I’m open to revisions and learning. But as someone who has spent the last decade recovering from a forced conversion to evangelical Christianity, I’m seeing a disturbing parallel between religion and activism in the presence of dogma:

1. Seeking purity

There is an underlying current of fear in my activist communities, and it separate from the daily fear of police brutality, eviction, discrimination, and street harassment. It is the fear of appearing impure. Social death comes when being labeled a “bad” activist or simply “problematic”. I’ve had countless hushed conversations with friends about this anxiety, and how it has led us to refrain from participation in activist events, conversations, and spaces because we feel inadequately radical. I don’t prefer to call myself an activist, because I doesn’t fit the traditional mold of the public figure marching in the streets and interrupting business as usual. When I was a Christian, all I could think about was being good, and proving to my parents and my spiritual leaders that I was on the right path to God. All the while, I believed I would never be good enough, so I had to strain for the rest of my life towards an impossible destination of perfection.

I feel compelled to do the same things as an activist a decade later. I self-police what I say in activist spaces. I stopped commenting on social media with questions or pushback on leftist opinions for fear of being called out. I am always ready to apologize and repent for anything I do that a community member deems wrong, oppressive, or inappropriate- no questions asked. The amount of energy I spend demonstrating purity in order to stay in the good graces of fast-moving activist community is enormous. Activists are some of the judgiest people I’ve ever met, myself included. At times, I have found myself performing activism more than doing activism. I’m exhausted, and I’m not even doing the real work I am committed to do. The quest for political purity is a treacherous distraction for well-intentioned activists.

2. Reproducing colonialist logics

Postcolonialist black Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon in his 1961 book Wretched of the Earth writes about the volatile relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and the conditions of decolonization. In it, he sharply warns the colonized against reproducing and maintaining the oppressive systems of colonization by following a revolution with replacing those at top by those previously at the bottom.

As a QTPOC (queer trans person of color), I have experienced discrimination and rejection due to who I am. I have sought out QTPOC-only spaces to heal, find others like me, and celebrate our differences. Those spaces and relationships have saved me from despair time and time again. And yet, I and reject QTPOC supremacy, the idea that QTPOCs or any other marginalized groups deserve to dominate society. The experiences of oppression does not grant supremacy, in the same way that being a powerful colonizer does not. Justice will never look like supremacy. I wish for a new societal order that does not revolve around relations of power and domination.

3. Preaching/Punishments

Telling people what to do and how to live out their lives is endemic to religious and to dogmatic activism. It’s not that my comrades are the bosses of me, but that dogmatic activism creates an environment that encourages people to tell other people what to do. This is especially prominent on Facebook. Scrolling through my news feed sometimes feels Iike sliding into a pew to be blasted by a fragmented, frenzied sermon. I know that much of the media posted there means to discipline me to be a better activist and community member. But when dictates aren’t followed, a common procedure of punishment ensues. Punishments for saying/doing/believing the wrong thing include shaming, scolding, calling out, isolating, or eviscerating someone’s social standing. Discipline and punishment has been used for all of history to control and destroy people. Why is it being used in movements meant to liberate all of us? We all have made serious mistakes and hurt other people, intentionally or not. We have the opportunity to learn from them when those around us respond with kindness and patience. Where is our humility when examining the mistakes of others? Why do we position ourselves as morally superior to the lowly un-woke? Who of us came into the world fully awake?

4. Sacred texts

There are also some online publications of dogmatic activism that could be considered sacred texts. For example, the intersectional site Everyday Feminism receives millions of views a month. It features more than 40 talented writers who pen essays on a wide range of anti-oppression topics, zeroing in on ones that haven’t yet broached larger activist conversations online. When Everyday Feminism articles are shared among my friends, I feel both grateful that the conversation is sparking and also very belittled. Nearly all of their articles follow a standard structure: an instructive title, list of problematic or suggested behaviors, and a final statement of hard opinion. The titles, the educational tone, and the prescriptive checklists contribute to creating the idea that there is only one way to think about and do activism. And it’s a swiftly moving target that is always just out of reach. In trying to liberate readers from the legitimately oppressive structures, I worry that sites like Everyday Feminism are replacing them with equally restrictive orthodoxy on the other end of the political spectrum.

Have I extricated myself from a church to find myself confined in another?

At this year's Allied Media Conference, BLM co-founder Alicia Garza gave an explosive speech to a theatre-ful of brilliant and passionate organizers. She urged us to set aside our distrust and critique of newer activists and gracefully accept that they will hurt and disappoint you. Don’t shut them out because their politics are outdated or they don’t wield the same language. If we are interested in building mass movements to destroy mass oppression, our movements must include people not like us, people with whom we will never fully agree, and people with whom we have conflict. That’s a much higher calling than railing at people from a distance and labeling them as wrong. Ultimately, according to Garza, building a movement is about restoring humanity to all of us, even to those of us who have been inhumane. Movements are where people are called to be transformed in service of liberation of themselves and others.

I wish to spend less time antagonizing and more time crafting alternative futures where we don’t have to fight each other for resources and care. For an introvert like me, that looks like shifting my activism towards small scale projects and recognizing personal relationships as locations of mutual transformation. For me, it means carefully choosing whether I want to be part of public disruptions or protests, and feeling OK about my decisions. It means drawing attention to the ways in which other people in the margins have been living out activism, even if no one has ever called it that. It means slowly building relationships with those outside my safe and exclusive community. It means honoring their humanity, in spite of their hurtful political beliefs and violent actions. It means seeing them as individuals, not ideologies or systems. It means acknowledging their agency to act justly. It means continually inviting them to join together in love.

6/27/17

2017 Allied Media Conference

This summer got off to a whirlwind start, and for the most part, I have been ignoring my scholarship. At the end of the quarter, I met once with my capstone advisor Sarah Dowling to introduce ourselves to one nother. While she is not a visual designer, she is a poet who is seasoned in critiquing art and engaging in the aesthetics of a piece. I'd like my capstone project to be a non-traditional academic submission in the format of a manifesto. I look forward to our working relationship over the next year very much!

Last weekend, I attended the 2017 Allied Media Conference at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. It was my second time there; the first time was in 2015 when I had recently moved to Seattle and was still working in the tech industry. I remember being completely overwhelmed by all the amazing activists and media-makers I met who came from across the country. I was part of a day-long API queer/trans network gathering and was shocked at the comfort and familiarity of finally sharing space with so many others like me. I left Detroit galvanized for social justice and queer API identity, and wound up applying to this program and quitting my corporate job less than a year later.

My experience this time at the AMC was unexpectedly low-key. I loaded my schedule with sessions, but ended up not being able to sit through 90 minutes of instruction because my body was still rebelling from being subjected to weekly 4 hour classes for the last 3 quarters. So I didn't learn a whole lot. Instead, I prioritized having meals with my Seattle friends and colleagues and strengthening our relationships in a new geography.

On Saturday morning, I sat on the Data and Power plenary with micha cárdenas, Sasha Costanza-Chock and Sadie Barnette. micha and I talked about our collaborative digital security project Hold Your Boundaries. micha discussed the more technical aspects of community security, your legal rights to your data, and the idea that the internet is stealing its structure from indigenous ways of networking. I brought in my tech industry background into the conversation, speaking as a designer who thinks it's critical to invite minoritized perspectives and their needs at the start of the product development lifecycle. I also talked about how I wasn't an expert in digital security, and that all of us can engage with these ideas and create interdisciplinary art projects. We can do this by having other, more flexible kinds of relationships to knowledge other than mastery and domination. It was an energizing experience being up there, and for the next few days, attendees came up to me and thanked me for being part of such an informative panel and asked me about my research. I spoke to a UW Seattle librarian who was interested in bringing micha and me to campus to do more workshops, so we'll see!

Official description:

State surveillance, biometrics, racist algorithms, and more – it is easy to become fearful and overwhelmed when it comes to data. And yet, our communities are resilient and full of genius. Beyond the many hands-on tools of circumvention and protection we share at the AMC, we need creativity and inspiration when it comes to data too. This plenary will highlight the work of three artists who transform the fear of data and surveillance into power and healing: instagram poetry that makes security culture accessible and compelling; a father’s FBI file reclaimed and transformed into art; an open source software for surveilling the surveyors and fostering cross-movement collaborations.

UWB Press Release

5/23/17

Body Phantom

Three quarters in

I have to remind myself that

I have a body

My body sends me signals

My body is worth caring for

Even if scholars I admire

Do not speak of body care

I absolutely can't be planted in a chair

at a long desk in a white-walled room

for four hours

talking theory

even theory about bodies

its materiality

who gets to live

who has to die

who dies slowly

I leave class moody af

Then drive home to hop on my steed

And pedal through the rolling hills

beside black waters

bombing down hills in utter dark

Feeling life coming back to me

Via exhilaration and terror

Buttbones aching

This is my body

Screaming at me

Because it exists

Wanting encounters

With environments outside of the classroom

And is a part of me even if I ignore it

Its subjugated knowledges

Crispy

Burnt edges

I need summer to come

QUICK

4/26/17

Resistant Technology Collective

Today, I met up with Maggy for coffee to talk about digital technology as a space for resistance. This was informed by readings we've been emailing back and forth, primarily Tara McPherson's "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?" and Barnett et al.'s "QueerOS User Manual". What struck us about this scholarship is the insistence (and truthfulness) on the deep cultural linkages between the genesis of tech/engineering and race/gender/sexuality social movements in the 20th century up until today. Unlike I had previously thought, they are intertwined and for us who possess both tech and academic skills, there exist a multitude of openings for critical interventions.

We talked about how burnt out and disgusted we are by working in the tech industry (her more so than me!), and how important it was to disaggregate technology from the mainstream tech industry and culture. Like Dr. Anup Dhar's presentation on capitalism/World of the Third last night in our joint class, what we know of the tech industry (white cis male dominated, Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, consumerist) is but the tip of the technology iceberg, only one of the many formations and applications of coding, design, software and the internet. We admitted that walking away from those skills (really, throwing the baby out with the bathwater) was foolish and ignoring the myriad of yet to be imagined ways we could integrate technology into our activist agendas. We brought up Ricardo Dominguez's impressive work with The Electronic Disturbance Theater, which strategically and aggressively employs technology to make statements and push back against the oppressive US government.

We left the conversation by deciding to form a tech arts collective. Our task was to catalog our tech skills and figure out how to employ them in a way that draws in our "non techy" community members and demystifies these powerful tools. I've been wanting to be a part of a creative collective for some time now, and after the 502 collaborations class, I am fully convinced that together we can do so much more than the lone individual, lionized as she is by society. I also think there needs to be a hi-tech presence that actively counters and resists the Microsoft/Amazon/Facebook versions in Seattle. So maybe that'll happen this summer!

4/22/17

Seditious Acts: Graduate Students of Color Interrogating the Neoliberal University

This weekend, I traveled with asaya plumly and Haliehana Stepetin to Minneapolis to attend and present at the Seditious Acts Symposium hosted by the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. It was a non-traditional conference fully organized by CRES, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Group, with support from various departments, like GWSS, African American Studies, and Chicana/Chicano Studies.

During the two days of sessions, I heard from scholars coming from UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, UT Austin, and many more institutions. A common thread among the presenters was the oppositional, hostile relationship the university administration had with its minoritized graduate students of color. Some key concepts: diversity programs as a white paternalistic never-ending deferral of requests, these programs as yet another way to produce docile minds and bodies and preserve institutional hierarchy, the struggle of WOC to procure tenure, "privilege" used as a specious tactic to invalidate graduate students of color protest, not owing the academy a dime, academic ventriloquism (you say something intelligent and it is dismissed, and when a white student repeats it they get the props), the need to recognize and promote ancestral wisdom and ritual within the halls of the university.

Haliehana and my workshop was one of the two offered during the second day, titled "Passing: Performing White Scholarship" (outline). Unlike the other presentations, this was a generative workshop that drew upon the knowledge of the participants to answer the question, how do we use our cultural knowledges to unsettle white supremacy in our roles at the university? To my relief, folks offered up their truths and vulnerabilities, writing them on the board in 3 sections: Values of the Academy, Cultural/Community/Family Values, and Strategies of Resistance. At the end, questions that needed more than our 45 minutes of time together arose: How do we get our white professors to take the lead on changing culture? How do we inform and keep accountable white allies? How do we express this to people who don't even know this is a thing?

I feel so grateful to be a part of this symposium, and to spend time with CRES, which is an amazing graduate student of color support group that organized this symposium somehow while teaching, doing research, looking for work, and opposing the racism in the U of M administration. They secured enough funding to ensure that symposium had no registration fee, and that all meals were provided for attendees. What a model! I did a reportback to Nejat this week, and she suggested that our cohort host the next CRES symposium at UW Seattle next spring. What an idea! I worry that it will overload our second/last year in MACS with portfolio and capstones needing to be completed. And yet, what an amazing opportunity to continue to support and keep up with fellow radicalized graduate students of color. Yes, Seditious Acts was a place for sharing scholarship, but as the panels went on, it became clear that that was secondary- we were all there primarily to affirm one another, be in solidarity, share strategies, and... love each other in the ways that we were able. I am grateful to have been invited to share that precious space, and I have renewed feelings about the possibility to disrupt systemic injustice as a graduate student.

4/16/17

Disability Justice and Transformative Justice

This evening, I went to hear Mia Mingus speak at the HUB on UW Seattle campus. She is a Korean American adoptee (with white parents) whose first experience of disability was as a disabled child. She defined the distinctions between being descriptively disabled (having the lived experience of disability) and being politically disabled (an active identity, having an analysis of disability). She talked about how in college, she was a part of queer feminist people of color organizing spaces that had no mention of disability justice, and that because the desire to belong was so desperate, she ignored that absence and invalidation of her disability. Even though I am not disabled, I could and can currently relate to that feeling of "taking what I can get" in queer spaces and Asian American spaces. I never feel like all my identities are being honored in either space, so I cobble together community by being part of multiple groups.

Mia spoke of her entry point into Transformative Justice (TJ) as purely oriented towards disability survival: "How do we keep disabled people safe in our communities, when they are coming from histories of sexual abuse by caregivers and trauma in the medical industrial complex?" She also decided that after years of doing reproductive justice work, she no longer wanted to be part of resistance movements, as it was like running on a hamster wheel - there would always be new legislation to oppose. Instead, she wanted to be part of a movement to build alternative structures and futures for her communities. She gave a brief overview of the pods framework for creating networks of accountability and support. This system is designed to address the intense isolation experienced by people with disabilities and people experiencing violence and sexual harm.

More broadly, her opinion about Disability Justice (DJ) is that we've got such a long way to go. That people can kinda be disabled in public, but asking for access needs is still difficult, and claiming disability is not seen as an act of pride. Then, she tossed some truth bombs: Due to the rampant violence and toxicity in our world, disability is increasing, in many ways for more vulnerable populations, it is inevitable. Able-bodied people must do most of the work towards DJ, not disabled people. And then she made the statement that queer parenting, even as amazing as it can be, could be considered a move towards able-bodiedness and away from being seen as "less than." Mia asked those of us queers who wanted to have children to question our desires, as the ownership of children and land are interconnected (both are commodified). And that if you do decide to have children, meaning, to be responsible for another human being, it is the parents responsibilities to locate/build community resources to respond to sexual assault and disability before becoming parents. She states that it is a total disservice to ourselves and our children to romanticize the nuclear family as a "safe, natural" space.

She ended with an exhortation to spend time with disabled youth, as we all have much to learn from them. For example, she straight up said that the way we construct gender in activist spaces is ableist. I was shocked. She told us about the time she asked a group of disabled youth to go around and say their pronouns, and how it played out like two different languages unintelligible to each other. That disabled experiences of gender are different from able-bodied people's experiences of gender. That being asked their preferred gender pronouns was not useful or relevant, as these youth couldn't even choose when to go to the bathroom, much less decide what bathroom to go to, or what clothes to wear, or what haircut to have. Ableism runs deep!

And the end of the talk, I was awestruck. As an able-bodied person taking my first DJ class, I didn't really feel like I could talk to Mia, but I went up anyway and quickly thanked her for speaking and told her how meaningful it was to see Asian American activists. I left for class, feeling fired up. Is there room for able-bodied folks to do DJ scholarship? Going forward, how can I pivot my activism to include DJ?

4/15/17

Ableism and Community Building

This morning, I attended the BASE Community Self-Defense Workshop at the Henry Art Museum. Dr. micha cárdenas co-facilitated this event with James and Ryan from BASE. As micha's research assistant this and last quarter (Winter and Spring 2017), I volunteered to design the flyer for the event (below). As we were going through group introductions, one of the personal details James asked each of us to provide was our accessibility needs. As we went around, I heard attendees say things like "I don't have special needs" or "I don't have any accessibility needs." Even a month ago I would've thought nothing of it, and would've wished intros to speed by faster so we could get to the meat of the event. But since taking DIS ST 499 Queering Disability Studies, I have not been able to stop noticing how ableism penetrates our everyday lives.

A core Disability Justice principle is that disabled people are so because of hostile, inaccessible environments (not because of their individual failings). And that the socially constructed notion of normalcy divides people into able/disabled = human/subhuman. So the term "special needs" plays into the normal/abnormal binary, privileging the speaker above the other people with "special needs" they have differentiated themselves from. According to crip theorist Robert McRuer, like compulsory heterosexuality, the system of compulsory able-bodiedness is what produces the category of disability. Even as the facilitators say they want a world free from ableism, where people with disabilities can have access to community self-defense, much more work is needed to change approaches to being accessible and talking about disability. I am merely at the beginning of my journey to politicize disability and destabilize the "common sense" attached to it. At the same time, as a non-disabled person, I must be careful not to co-opt the field for activist-scholar points.

In "Decolonizing Transgender: A Roundtable Discussion," micha discusses the danger of appropriating decolonial theory and taking it places where it does not belong, or does not do anything to improve the lives of disabled people:

Jin Haritaworn cited Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s article “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” (2012) to raise some incredible questions about the intersections of decolonization and transgender studies. They questioned the sudden popularity of interest in decolonization in academic journals whose study might not benefit from a decolonizing framework or whose work might not benefit decolonization struggles, going so far as to say that some people’s interest in decolonization may be a self-serving way to add more lines to their CVs, and pointed out how much activist-oriented scholarship treats oppressed people in an interchangeable way, where who is being oppressed is not as important as the appearance of doing work that is saving someone.

Boellstorff, T., M. Cabral, M. Cárdenas, T. Cotten, E. A. Stanley, K. Young, and A. Z. Aizura. "Decolonizing Transgender: A Roundtable Discussion." TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.3 (2014): 419-39.

4/15/16

Portfolio Re-org

Last week, we had Susan Harewood come into our 502 class to talk to us more about crafting our portfolio. She offered the term "intellectual journal" to describe our portfolio-in-progress, which is why I've spent this afternoon rearranging the hierarchy of my portfolio pages, adding writings, and creating this top-level Reflections page. Going forward, I will be putting in here my reflections on my class readings, class experiences, community projects/events, paid work and the ways in which they all intersect.

4/12/17

1st Capstone Research Question

One of my colleagues in my Queering Disability Studies class, Cindy, is a PhD candidate in the HCDE program. Her dissertation is on feminist HCI (human-computer interaction) methodologies, and when I told her about my design + cultural studies background, she connected me with her mentor, Daniela Rosner. To prepare for the introduction, I scrapped together an encapsulation of a potential capstone idea that's been sparking this month:

As a trained UI/UX designer who also worked in the tech industry in Seattle for the past three years, I'm interested in the social construction of design standards and aesthetics, ideals which are considered "universal" and broadly taught in American design schools. Sylvia Wynter in her book On Being Human as Praxis refers to the mythoi/bio hybrid model of human knowledge: what our senses observe in the world are not simply what is, but rather something wholly separate created by the interplay between our biology and cultural stories we tell ourselves. 

Rather than accept that humans are purely biological, it is this interplay and invisibilized force of culture that I would like to uncover and interrogate. Other framing questions: How can we construct an alternative language and structure of design in the US that is not founded in white, eurocentric, male ideologies? When we talk about "Human Centered-Design," for which humans, as the social category of human is exclusive (see Critical Ethnic, Black, Queer and Disability Studies)?

I quite like it. It excites me to have something of my own to suck on after 2 quarters of absorbing the brilliance of postcapitalist politics and performance studies. Per Christian's exhortation to formulate a research question that is narrow enough to be done by next June, it needs to be more specific, like a particular Swiss designer.

This research question came to me after I attended a Chilkat Weaving demonstration and presentation at the Burke Museum. The talk by the two sisters was about Chilkat and Raventail weaving, which they learned from their mother, who tragically passed away last October. “The spiritual life of a weaver” includes coming in with a clean heart and a clean mind, and maybe not eating before sitting down for a day's worth of work. Weavings are used as ceremonial robes and are seen as a sign of massive wealth. They take up to 4 years to make, or 2000 hours. The crowd was small, maybe 60, though it filled the classroom. There are only about 15 living weavers in this tradition.

What does it mean that some cultural practices are left to die out, while others thrive via mass efforts and institutionalization?

As a UX/UI designer, what does it mean to create design without deep cultural significance? Design for consumerism vs. cultural knowledge?

These questions troubled me deeply. I came across a Medium article discussing the biased foundations of western design that continue along as unquestioned assumptions. I'd like to go visit Dave Ellenwood sometime to dig around in the UW library for more writings on this topic.