Mini 501 Portfolio & Reflections

December 11 2017

This fall quarter in BCULST 510 Engaging Cultural Studies, I was challenged several times to reconsider the direction, audience, and tone of my scholarship. This class marked the beginning of my second and final year in the master of arts in Cultural Studies program. At this point, I had begun to finalize my capstone project idea and the theories that held it up. My capstone proposal, a collaborative community reader on activist culture, relied on the premise that public scholarship (or community engaged scholarship) is a worthwhile and noble pursuit for scholars. As the final product will be a digital reader in PDF format, the project privileges arranged text and images, which allows me to utilize my previously acquired graphic design skills to create a more visually compelling reader.

The three artifacts I have included in this mini portfolio all pushed back against the above established premises of my capstone. The artifacts are the Forrest Stuart evening talk on his book, Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Every Day Life in Skid Row, the grad student coffee hour with Robin Kelley, and Em and my impromptu skit on queer sexuality and online “wokeness”. The intended audience for my reflection are other students in IAS and Cultural Studies programs, both undergrad and grad.

Forrest Stuart, a sociologist and self-named activist-scholar, came to speak at UW Bothell on Thursday, November 2, 2017. Below I included my notes from the talk. His current work focuses on the over-policing and criminalization of residents on LA’s Skid Row. In this talk, Stuart shared details of his ethnographic work of how he assimilated himself into these destitute communities to give name to their survival strategies (for cop avoidance), such as cop wisdom, doing innocence, and faking heteronormativity. I had been anticipating this event because I majored in Sociology as an undergraduate at the University of Texas, and those core courses were what cracked open my mind to be able to think about societal issues on a systemic level. Sociology was what introduced me to concepts like white privilege, injustice in the US education system, and criminology. It was what got me started on the road to Cultural Studies.

Near the middle to end of the talk, my cohort and I started to exchange frowns with each other. This was because Stuart’s conclusion to his presentation, after outlining the many needless abuses of the police against the poor, was to free the police from these non-criminal situations to do so-called real policing. His research, while rigorous and well-documented, ultimately was not conducted to relieve the residents of Skid Row of constant police disruptions, but to serve the University of Chicago and the Chicago Police Department. Upon hearing this, I felt very disappointed in him and in the current field of Sociology. After a day passed, I remembered that despite these political misgivings, I had found Stuart’s talk fascinating. It was honestly the most enthralling ethnographic research I’ve encountered in my graduate education. And as troubling as I found his pro-police ideology, it was clear to me that he considered himself one of the “good guys” in traditional Sociology, and that most of his colleagues probably operate under more odious, self-serving ideas. What I learned from this experience and processing it with my cohort is that MACS is a sweet little bubble of progressiveness and liberatory thinking, and if I want my work to reach outside of this arena, I must venture out and see what other adjacent disciplines are doing. I must become attuned to their jargon, biases, trends, and learn how to speak back to them on the same topics from a Cultural Studies framework. Otherwise, I risk only speak to people who fully agree with me and miss out on necessary bridgework for organizing the academy.

My other artifact are reflections from an intimate conversation with visiting Black scholar Robin Kelley on Tuesday, November 7, 2017. With the rest of my 510 class, I attended Kelley’s talk on racial capitalism at Kane Hall the evening before. I was invited, along with 4 other MACS students and alum, to chat with Robin Kelley about our individual research projects the morning afterwards. As I said in the introduction of this reflection, my capstone proposal is premised on the discourse of public scholarship. That quarter I was also taking HUM 594: Scholarship as Public Practice, the introductory class for the Certificate in Public Scholarship at the University of Washington Seattle. In that class, we went through a stack of readings about public scholarship and wrestled with the following questions: What is public scholarship? Who is public scholarship for? How do I do public scholarship as a graduate student? How do I do public scholarship as a professional academic and still succeed professionally? How do we get the academy to see public scholarship as actual research? These are all questions that are raised at various points in MACS curriculum, and in the Imagining America PAGE cohort of which I’m a part.

Naturally, I brought up the term public scholarship to Robin Kelley and talked about how that was the driving force of my capstone project. To my surprise, he responded with a sharp critique of so-called public scholarship. He claimed that the divide of academic and activist knowledge is a purely artificial divide, one that was created when academic labor was made precarious with an overabundance of temporary adjunct positions and fewer tenured jobs. At the heights of social struggle in the US in the 60’s and 70’s, both groups were in deep conversation with one another. And that this idea of a scholar being a translator of ideas and theory is a new construction that comes out of the commodification of knowledge. Yikes! That put a pin in my public scholarship balloon and began to deflate it.

This conversation gave me great pause. It also made me want to talk to other people in the academy about the histories of scholar-activist organizing, because I knew there was more to the story. Later on, I talked to my portfolio advisor, Jed Murr, and he agreed with most of Kelley’s assertions, but also complicated them by saying that due to student protests in the 70’s for identity studies departments, the only way for administrators to get community members into the university immediately to meet the demands was to create adjunct positions. This discussion is one that I want to continue to research, discuss, and read about, because the idea of public scholarship is integral to MACS. I think that at this point, I will only use the term public scholarship as a strategy to gain legitimacy for my research within academic settings. In activist community settings, I will refrain from using the phrase, because it doesn’t describe anything new, and in my opinion, all scholars are responsible for doing this kind of public scholarship.

My final artifact are notes and a free-write from an in-class capstone workshop where pairs acted out collaborative capstone ideas on Tuesday, November 14, 2017. My partner was Em Fuller. We started the exercise by writing on post-it notes the sites, discourses, expertise and knowledge that we had located for our respective capstone project ideas. Upon sharing, we found that we had many overlaps, as Em’s project is on queer sexuality, online social spaces, and the limitations of radical queer body politics. Similarly, my capstone on activist culture provides commentary on toxic online networks and self-righteousness. In the five minutes allotted to us for coming up with a one-minute skit, we brainstormed a performance of two radical anti-oppressive queers who are judging each other harshly for each other’s personal life choices over the internet. It starts with me publicly berating Em for not having multiple partners when she says she is polyamorous, and then her shaming me for openly celebrating the hegemonic Judeo-Christian holiday Christmas with my family. The skit ends with us meeting up at a later time in person, apologizing to each other, and re-committing to our friendship.

While I originally was not excited to do this exercise, I am so glad that I did. Doing performance almost always brings me back into my body, which is so often ignored when I am being a traditional scholar. It reminded me that embodiment is a critical way that knowledge is produced and transmitted. That ten minutes or so shook me out of my scholarly mindset and forced me to come to terms with the physically shattering feelings of being harshly criticized by a good friend for things that are true about me. It did more to deepen my project than reading for hours on these topics. Through the minute of performance, I grew more and more nervous and unsure of myself and our skit. It was remarkable how quickly my confidence started to fall apart when venturing into an unfamiliar medium. As I am using to getting recognized for my writing, which is all done without an audience, it was a useful exercise to do something and not know if I was going to fail or succeed. Ultimately, Em and I shared a rush of exhilaration at how performing the skit changed us, and we felt literal relief when we repaired our friendship at the end, even though it was all pretend. So, we are considering crafting an expanded workshop for the MACS conference in May for attendees to experience. I acknowledge that these healing performative practices have a history in Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, and that I should do some more research on this practice to prepare for our future workshop.

What I have learned from these three engagements during the quarter is that I must stay alert to my formed biases and worn grooves of thinking. This is especially true for someone who writes about dogmatic activist culture and the dominant patterns that shape leftist activist behavior in the US. I am not immune to culture and those around me! I am grateful for these insulated reminders to stay humble in the work that I do, invite dissention, and be open to other ways of doing things that might not feel comfortable at first. Because of what I’ve learned through these experiences, I will apply a renewed focus to creating additional forms of my capstone project in an embodied group format, in an effort to invite others to acknowledge that performance has long been an epistemology. In talking about my capstone, I will consider my multiple audiences, and be sure to not take the institutionalized language of public scholarship too seriously.

Artifacts

Artifact 1: Forrest Stuart Notes - November 2 2017

Artifact 2: Reflections on Grad Coffee Hour with Robin Kelley - November 7 2017

Artifact 3: Em Fuller Skit Notes and Reflections - November 14, 2017