Archive

Dear friends,

It's been awhile! I hope that the summer months have offered a welcome change of pace. I've been lucky enough to spend a few weeks visiting family in the mountains of Alaska and Colorado, and have loved the chance to breathe clean (if thin!) air and see all kinds of plants and animals and fungi. My kids still don't love hiking, but tasting wild huckleberries may have gotten them one step closer.

🎉 Celebrating Successes! 🎉

Dear friends,

Summer! For many of us, it's a time of different rhythms—longer days, more family time, a mix of laze and wanderlust. It also tends to be a moment to pick up the kinds of projects that need a little breathing room, and a chance to think through ideas for future projects and possibilities.

With that in mind, I want to invite you to stay connected with the Inkcap community in two ways that I hope will be useful in this summer period especially: a Slack workspace and a weekly co-writing group. Read on for more details.

Slack!

Dear friends,

I joked on Mastodon recently that I've spent the year building up my shadow CV. Taking more risks has meant racking up a not-insignificant number of rejections. While it never feels good to hear 'no', I do think that it's a sign that I'm pushing into new terrain in ways that are meaningful and challenging. A sign that growth is happening, albeit in nonlinear ways, like mycelium testing out new pathways—advancing, retreating, connecting, determining the areas of greatest promise.

It feels like a season of breathing. Inhaling new learning as I take classes on botany and mycology. Exhaling as I teach others in my class at CUNY Graduate Center. Inhaling possibility. Exhaling disappointment. Breathing in, breathing out, letting that rhythm continue, knowing that I breathe in the exhalations of plants, that I breathe out and support their growth as well.

In our April discussion session, guest leaders Kendra Sullivan, Carrie Smith, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick focused on activist and coalitional administration at several levels of the university. Building on the ecological metaphors, we talked about weeds—plants growing where they’re not supposed to grow, where they’re unwelcome. The plants that push through disturbed soil most readily, along with the fungi that support their growth. Perhaps weedy growth is a way to rethink possibility—emerging through the cracks, growing opportunistically when the moment presents itself.

Dear friends,

It has been awhile since we last gathered and I am missing the energy of our conversations! We have something really special in store for our next session.

Join us this Wednesday, April 5 from 3-4pm EDT for a discussion on activist and coalitional leadership. This session will be led by three scholar-administrator-friends whom I deeply admire:

• Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of DH and Professor of English at Michigan State University

• Carrie Smith, Vice-Provost for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the University of Alberta

• Kendra Sullivan, Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center

Dear friends,

Thank you so much to everyone who joined our February session! It was a special joy to have Jade E. Davis join us to talk about her forthcoming book, The Other Side of Empathy. I carry from that discussion the firm emphasis that it is ok just to care. And that, in fact, the rhetoric around empathy may lead us in the opposite direction.

These newsletters have been feeling quiet lately; lots has been going on, but not much has been finding its way to this particular space. I've been teaching a graduate class (Power, Precarity, and Care in the Digital Humanities); I've been co-leading a series for the Association for Computers and the Humanities, called Making DH Work for Us: Labor, Care, and Careers); I've been working on a handful of writing projects including my mushroom book (the current working title of which is Unexpected Flourishing: Academia, Mycology, and Growth from Decay—feedback most welcome). I've also been spending a great deal of time editing and reviewing for others. As new growth begins to emerge from the soil, it's also a season of review and revision, of reexamining what we've planted and doing what we can to help it thrive.

And, because caregiving and embodiment is part of what I'm trying to bring into this space, I'll also say we've been grappling with bouts of mild but irritating illness, competing schedules, and time out of school. For all those reasons, I'm going to cancel the March 8 session, where we were going to discuss Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboiron. I hope you will read it anyway! It is giving me so much to think about surrounding the very real, material colonial practices involved not only in creating pollution, but also in trying to clean it up. As I've begun exploring environmental humanities scholarship more deeply, the imperative and impossibility of building and maintaining an ethical relationship with the land has grown ever stronger.

Dear friends,

As I write this, I’m gearing up to teach my first solo class in… a long time. CUNY’s semester starts late, so I’m sure that many folks reading this may already have met the students in your spring classes, may be getting a feel for how the term will go. I’m excited and nervous to join that rhythm.

The class I’ll be teaching is called Power, Precarity, and Care in the Digital Humanities, and I welcome anyone interested to read along with us. I think there will be interesting crossover between the Inkcap space and the more structured class space, and I’m curious to see how each shapes my thinking.

For our next Inkcap session, I’d like to pull a bit from that syllabus to talk about the ethics of care. Let’s discuss the following texts:

Dear friends,

I feel like I blinked and a month has gone by. The outside-of-time feeling of the holidays, at once lazy and busy, shifted to restlessness—a hunger to return to routines and rhythms. And now I look up and it’s January; winter still hasn’t unfolded in full force here, but at least the days are getting longer.

In part because of the unusual rhythms of the winter holidays and the ways they change our typical patterns, I’ve been thinking again about communities of various kinds. ‘Community’ is so overused as to be meaningless, and so I find myself looking for other ways to describe interdependence and mutuality.

I’ve been lucky recently to read work by Inkcap friend Kendra Sullivan, who writes about ‘choreography’—which makes me wonder about the choreographies of relationship, the ways we come together and apart. Donna Haraway writes of ‘oddkin’—the strange and unexpected chosen kinships that emerge not only between people, but across species. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes of ‘patchy assemblages,’ again focusing not only on human beings but on the myriad living and nonliving elements of an ephemeral ecosystem. There are so many ways of being together, of influencing one another, of helping one another grow (or competing for resources, inhibiting growth).

Dear friends,

The solstice. For me, more than the day that the calendar year changes, the moment when we finally begin adding slivers of daylight feels like a turning point, one that I mark with hope and reflection in a moment of darkness and busyness.

What this year has looked like for me: Finding my footing. Coming to terms with being outside an institution. Celebrating the freedom of being outside an institution. Working toward gathering community in a meaningful way (that’s you all). Learning about and reveling in ecology and mycology. Writing.

I’m proud of the writing, and as the year draws to a close, I want to celebrate that. I’m proud that I have a another (mini-)book coming out next year. I’ve got a third well on its way, and it tackles entirely new-to-me fields of knowledge. I have five book chapters in the pipeline with various collections (each of which represents an enormous undertaking by the editors, who should also be super proud!).

Dear friends,

A lot of our discussions together have focused outward, on the contexts and infrastructures of higher education. This month, we’re turning inward, with an Inkcap discussion session focused on values and discernment, and a new co-writing session to make time for your own highly valued projects. Details are below. I hope you’ll join us.

Next Inkcap session

Join us Wednesday, December 14 at 3pm EST to discuss Hannah Alpert-Abrams’ Finding Your Purpose. (Even if you can’t make it, it’s free to download!)

Dear friends,

I’ve been lucky to step back into in-person speaking and conferences in recent weeks, the busyness of November buoyed by the joy of seeing old friends, meeting new people, and exploring unfamiliar cities. I’m between talks now, and am writing this from a warmly lit research desk at NYPL’s Schwarzman Library—the one my kids call the Lions Library. It’s a beautiful place to work; quiet, calm, almost reverent.

And yet: it feels off-kilter to be here today. My mind is anything but calm as the multiple crises of higher ed swirl in my peripheral vision.

This morning, like so many, I awoke to the news of gun violence at the University of Virginia. The too-familiar horror that has wracked so many campuses, yet again. I was supposed to be there this past weekend as part of their celebration of 30 years of Digital Humanities at UVA. In the end I spoke virtually, but really it doesn’t matter where I was. People were there. People I care about as well as people I don’t know. People interacting with the university in countless ways, who deserve to feel safe as they live and learn and work. This is a crisis—one that goes far beyond higher education, but that too often unfolds on university campuses.

Hi, friends,

I hope everyone is doing well even as the days get shorter (at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). I’m writing with a conference recap and two upcoming opportunities.

Reflecting on Inkcap x ASA

Dear friends,

October's session on white feminism in the academy was powerful and necessary. I'm so appreciative of the work the Britt Munro and Houda Ali were willing to share with us; it opened a useful and nuanced conversation that touched on a range of complicated viewpoints, identities, and experiences. As they write:

By thinking through our different relationships to these tensions we hope to reach a better understanding of the role of whiteness in mainstream liberal feminism, and of the ways in which race and class frame the concept of feminist ‘choice’ in the West. We do so in the hopes of contributing to a feminist ethic that does not depend on the erasure of non-liberal lifeworlds, one that is adamantly anti-capitalist and that embodies the praxis of deep listening and care that we seek to practice in relation with one other. (Ali & Munro, "Beyond Choice")

Many, many thanks to everyone who joined the discussion. I admire and am inspired by all of you who work daily to loosen the tightly bound logics of capitalism, individualism, and white supremacy that are so pervasive in academia, even/especially in spaces that claim feminist values. We talked about complex interdependence, about negative and positive liberty, about the impacts of language's limitations. It's a topic I hope we continue to delve into throughout future discussions, too.

Hi friends,

Just a quick note to remind anyone who wishes to join us that our next discussion is today (Wed, October 12) at 3pm EST; please register here.

Our topic today is white feminism in the academy. The starting point for our discussion is “Beyond Choice“ by Britt Munro and Houda Ali. Even if you can’t be there, Britt and Houda welcome everyone to read and share comments/feedback on the piece. And, as a reminder, you can always take a look at our collective notes here: bit.ly/inkcap-notes-2 .

As I mentioned earlier, Britt is in Australia and can’t join us, so she shared some introductory thoughts and discussion questions:

Dear friends,

I've been putting off writing and sending this, and now it's too long! Apologies—and hope you'll stick with me to the end, there are some great events linked at the bottom.

Many thanks to the group who joined us to talk about Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science. I especially loved the thinking we did together about how to practice a kind of intellectual generosity—something that goes beyond a standard bibliography, that can instead somehow point to the depth and breadth that someone's writing or thinking has had on our own work.

In the days since that conversation, I've also looked back at The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, and I'm struck by their exploration of the same generous impulse, this time in collaboration and with sharp formal constraints (each segment is precisely one hundred words long, or written in multiples of a hundred). Formatted like a typical works cited, one index—called "Some things we thought with"—includes not only texts but gestures, material objects, moments.

Dear friends,

Perhaps you, like me, are shaking off a summer fog and preparing for the onrush of the school year. For me it has been a summer outside of time—a summer of travel after years of COVID confinement, a summer of flexibility and movement and family and new horizons. I am so grateful. I wonder how the sights and experiences I've been lucky to have in the past few months—desert and sea, mountains and glacial lakes, mushrooms and rosehips—will work their way into the landscape of my thinking.

As a reminder, our next discussion will take place on Wednesday, September 14 at 3pm ET. Please register here. All are most welcome to join, whether you've participated in a past discussion or not.

We'll talk about Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick. You might read them while listening to the playlist that McKittrick created in association with the book. We'll focus on two chapters:

Dear friends,

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to share your availability. For this fall, let's plan to meet on the second Wednesday of each month at 3pm Eastern. So, please mark your calendars for our next session on Wednesday, September 14 at 3pm. Register here. All are welcome to join, even if you've never come before, and there's no pressure to commit to being there every time.

For our next session I'd like to talk about Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick, especially "Curiosities (My Heart Makes My Head Swim)" and "Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered About the Floor)." You might read them while listening to the playlist that McKittrick created in association with the book. I am especially interested in considering how we know what we know, how we show our work, and the roles of curiosity and wonder relative to knowledge.

In our discussion we might also revisit the introduction of How to Make Art at the End of the World by Natalie Loveless, and "Arts of Noticing" from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World.

Dear friends,

Request: Please fill out this availability poll if you'd like to be part of our discussions in the semester ahead. whenisgood.net/inkcap —Thanks!

Huge thanks to Danica Savonick for leading our most recent discussion session. Danica shared part of her book manuscript, Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions.

One thing I loved about this discussion was the emphasis on material conditions and inflection points. From broad concepts like the value placed on teaching to granular details like salary schedules and coarse loads, material conditions and stability have a huge impact on the ways we engage in our work. Narratives of arrival and departure are often laden with tacit values—do we celebrate or grieve someone's decision to stay in a precarious position? What about someone's decision to leave? What are the words we use to talk about these moments?

Hello friends! I am so excited for next week's discussion, which will be facilitated by my friend and colleague Danica Savonick (ACLS Fellow and Assistant Professor at SUNY Cortland).

As a reminder, we'll meet on Tuesday, Aug 2 at 2pm. Please register here.

In this folder, you'll find three documents:

1. An overview of Danica's book manuscript, Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions (under contract with Duke University Press)
2. Chapter 1, “Dancing is her way to learn now”: Toni Cade Bambara’s Multimodal and Anthological Pedagogy
3. Chapter 2, “This class has much to teach America”: June Jordan’s Public and Project-Based Pedagogy

Dear friends,

Warm thanks to everyone who joined us at our recent discussion. Despite my nerves about sharing a rough-stage project, it felt incredibly generative to talk about it in the context of this group; I came away with fresh ideas and energy, and the process of actively thinking together felt powerful and interesting. Our notes, as always, are here.

I'm happy to say we'll do it again at our next session (Tuesday, August 2 at 2pm; register here), when we'll talk about Danica Savonick's work-in-progress, Insurgent Knowledge. Danica will put materials here when they're ready, so check back next week or so. In the mean time, here's what Danica has to say about her work:

The reading I'll share is an excerpt of my book manuscript, Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions (under contract with Duke University Press).

While these authors are best known for their literature, Insurgent Knowledge explores their overlapping experiences teaching at the City College of New York during one of the most controversial moments in U.S. educational history. I look at their archival teaching materials to explore stories from their classrooms, revealing how these renowned writers were also transformative teachers who developed creative methods of teaching their students to advocate for social change. Insurgent Knowledge also considers how their experiences teaching in open admissions fundamentally altered their writing, and with it, the course of American literature, learning, and feminist criticism.

This manuscript is still very much a work in progress. I’m hoping that our session can be a continuation of “In Our Own Words” (in the sense that feedback and suggestions are very welcome!) as well as a discussion of how it relates to the broader themes and questions we’ve been addressing. Thank you, in advance, for reading! 

Dear friends,

I hope you'll bear with me for a longer-than-usual message. (And do join us next week, July 5, for our next discussion if you can. Details here.)

Last week I celebrated a milestone birthday and found myself reflecting on my intellectual journey, how I came to think the way that I do. I don’t tend to talk a lot about my undergraduate experience; my college was a complicated place, and I never quite landed on an easy way to talk about it. It was a small liberal arts college, academically rigorous, with the beautiful brick buildings and grassy green quad that we often picture as the quintessential college experience in the US (even though it is far from the norm). It was also an extremely conservative, Evangelical Christian school, with mandatory chapel three days a week and an honor code so strict people often don’t believe me when I describe it.

I got an amazing education there, and worked with dedicated, brilliant, caring professors. I also learned how toxic that kind of moral/religious environment was for me. For a long time, it was hard for me to find ways to talk about both things being true. After graduating, I went straight to grad school at the University of Colorado, a large, liberal, public institution that bore little resemblance to the place I had just spent four years. I tend to be good at noticing and mirroring the language and postures around me, and as a result I learned not to talk much about the religious part of my college experience—even though it was deeply woven into the ways I was taught and my own emerging scholarship.

Dear friends,

I’m writing to you on the northern hemisphere’s summer solstice. In some ways this is my favorite day: perfect summer, not too hot yet; so many hours of evening sun; school is out or will be soon. It’s a day of pleasure and anticipation (and it doesn’t hurt that my birthday follows soon after). But it also carries just a touch of melancholy for me, since the days start to get shorter tomorrow. The winter solstice, conversely, is always hard for me—and yet brings hope that longer days will come. I appreciate that balance, particularly as we continue to think together about rhythm and attunement. It’s a good day, as always, to pause and notice, a good day to reflect and set intentions.

I’m also writing with a reminder that our next discussion will take place on Tuesday, July 5 at 2pm EDT. Please register here. We’ll be talking about my own writing this time, a project that has co-evolved alongside Inkcap. I am both nervous and excited to share it with you. I welcome comments, even if you can’t be part of the discussion.

If anyone else has writing you would like to share in this session or down the road, please let me know and I’ll circulate it to the group. We’ll likely spend a few sessions talking about works-in-progress.

Dear friends,

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our recent discussion on Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. We brought together many threads from past sessions, focusing on the many valences of “nothing”—and particularly how the term nearly always signifies not something absent, but something imbued with meaning. Odell is not actually encouraging us to do nothing, she notes. Rather, by focusing our attention differently, by pushing back on narratives of efficiency and productivity, we make space for so much more.

Next Session

Our next session is scheduled for Tuesday, July 5, at 2pm EDT. (Right after a holiday weekend for U.S. folks—I hope the timing works for at least some of us! Summer is tricky.) Since many of us use summer as a writing-intensive time, we agreed to share works in progress that we would like to discuss or get feedback on.

Good morning everyone! Hope to see many of you later for today’s discussion of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. (1pm EDT, sign up here.)

If you can, please bring something that you noticed recently—in the form of a photo, a sound recording, or just something you can tell us about. It can be something astonishing or something mundane; something from nature or your apartment or something you noticed in a passerby. Think about what, if anything, you had to shift in your attention in order to notice it. Your pace, your routine? Something else?

Alternatively, you might bring with you something that you noticed because of its absence. What isn’t there but used to be, or should be, or could be?

Please also come with some ideas for our session scheduled for Tuesday, July 5. Since many of us are working on writing projects this summer, I wonder whether it might be a good moment to workshop one or two pieces that people in the group have been working on. Give that some thought and see if it seems like something we’d like to do together.

Hi friends,

Happy June! As a reminder, we will gather next week on Wednesday, June 8, at 1pm EDT to discuss How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. I’ve been listening to it on audio, often while walking in Prospect Park or Green-Wood Cemetery, and have found it provides some really interesting ways of thinking about what I notice with my actual senses—what I see, hear, smell as I move through the world.

We will also consider two artworks:

• The Bureau of Suspended Objects, also by Jenny Odell
• The Library of Missing Datasets by Mimi Ọnụọha

Hi friends,

I'm writing with a quick update on the plans for June 8. I'd like to read How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. It's a bit more book-clubby than most of our usual reads, which for some reason I feel like I need to apologize about 😂. That hang-up aside, I think it will offer a good way to mentally transition to a summer season that is hopefully spacious, expansive, restorative.

Following on our previous session's emphasis on attunement and tempo, I think Odell's work will give us some additional framework for thinking about how to create space for uncertainty and inefficiency (and why we might want to).

Alongside the text, I'd love to consider two artworks:

Dear friends,

Our recent session with Natalie Loveless and Carrie Smith focused intensely on attunement. How do we build fluidity into our work so that we can modulate our priorities, our tempo, our focus as needed? The elements of profound care and accountability that are inherently part of attunement feel radical and inspiring to me. What would it look like to find ways to deeply, powerfully value the quiet noticing that is fundamental to this mode of working?

Part of this is also an attunement to ourselves and our own needs. We may work differently when we are feeling hopeful vs. when we are feeling outraged. When we are running on empty vs. when we are bubbling over. When we need to absorb vs. when we can't help but write.

I think about how my kids move when time constraints are not a factor. Sometimes they sprint, jump, nearly fly. And sometimes it takes us ages to go a block, as they stop to examine everything that crosses their field of vision. Perhaps if we can strengthen the ways in which we are accountable to one another, the ways in which we support one another, these ebbs and flows may come to feel interesting and fruitful rather than depleting or worrisome.

Hi friends,

Quick reminder about our next reading group session; details are below. Hope to see you then!

—Katina

Hi friends,

Somehow the entire month of April has come and gone, and the first flush of spring blossoms has already faded to summer green. For me it has been a month of intensity and reflection. And as I open my eyes to May, as I take in the warmer air, I realize I have been holding my breath. I welcome the ease and delight of being outdoors, noisier birdsong, longer days (even as I rage about the Supreme Court 😭).

Recap

Hi everyone, just a quick reminder about our upcoming April session! I hope you’ll join us on Thursday, April 14 at 3pm EDT to discuss Poor Queer Studies by Matt Brim. This book has changed the way I think about higher ed. I’m especially pleased that author Matt Brim will join us for our conversation.

Please register here!

Readings

• Poor Queer Studies chapter 4, “Poor Queer Studies Mothers“
• Poor Queer Studies introduction
• Reflection post by CUNY Graduate Center doctoral student Janan Shouhayib (from a spring 2021 course that Matt and Katina co-taught)

Dear friends,

Thanks to all who joined us for our most recent session.

We talked about the connections between capitalism/precarious funding and the restricting of academic freedom, the US’s tendency toward exceptionalism, and the challenges of thinking critically about the language we use in moments of conflict when complexities can so easily be flattened. The conversation pushed my thinking and opened my understanding to a wider range of international contexts.

I wanted to share two texts that have come across my path since then, both via my friend Meghan Vicks (who has joined many of our Inkcap discussions). The first is Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, a 2017 poetry collection edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky. The second is Letter from Kyiv: to keep from weeping, we start cursing by Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk, a powerful reflection on language, emotion, and violence in the context of the current landscape in Ukraine.

Hi friends,

Quick reminder that our next reading group session will be tomorrow, March 15, at 2pm EDT. Cihan Tekay, PhD candidate in anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, will join us to help contextualize and lead the discussion.

Readings and discussion questions from Cihan and me are below, and can also be found in our collective notes document (https://bit.ly/inkcap-notes).

Register here if you’d like to come. Hope you can join us!

Hi friends, this is a quick note to share a few links, announcements, and reminders. Enjoy! —K

Postcards of Rage and Renewal

Sign up here

Dear friends,

Words are coming more slowly than usual. My mind is wrapped up in matters both global and personal. I'm writing now to find my way back into my thoughts, writing my way back into connection and community. I'm glad to have a place to do that.

Our most recent discussion on love and work was vibrant and deeply felt. The topic always touches a nerve. So many of us in higher ed, as in other mission-driven spaces, care deeply about what we do and the people with whom we work. So much so that it can become difficult to set boundaries and find ways to preserve and nourish ourselves. This has probably always been true, but with two years of COVID wearing everyone down the reserves are even slimmer than usual.

Together we talked about pleasure, about the tension between individual and collective power, about ephemerality and accountability and reward structures. About gender and race and precarity. And, eventually, about capitalism—a topic underlying so much of what we were talking about, but that we didn't name directly until quite late in the conversation. Thank you to everyone who was a part of it.

Dear friends,

I waited to name my consultancy after stepping out on my own, wanting to find something that felt just right. Now that the contours of this space are taking shape, I’m delighted share its new name…

Introducing: Inkcap!

Starting today, I’ll be using Inkcap Consulting for my solo work, and Inkcap Collective for this space. Big big thanks to my friend Andrea Scott for designing the fabulous logo!

Hi friends,

Quick reminder that our next session will be on Tuesday, February 15, from 2-3pm EST. The new day/time snuck up on me! Please register here if you’d like to come, and join our discord space if you want to chat about it asynchronously.

We'll talk about the nature of work in the academy—especially care work, precarity, and racial and gender inequity. Please join me in reading/listening to these two texts:

• Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves by Fobazi Ettarh. Not just for librarians! An excellent consideration of the risk that people in mission-driven work experience when it becomes impossible to critique their workplace or labor conditions.

• We Don’t Have the Same Job, from the Hear to Slay podcast. In this episode (available here courtesy of Luminary), hosts Tressie McMillan Cottom and Roxane Gay speak with Patricia Matthew, editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure.

Dear friends,

Thank you all for being a part of this experiment in reading, reflecting, and learning in community. As this space grows and takes shape, I want to offer some different ways to connect.

Discord?!

The monthly reading group has proven to be an incredibly nourishing space. But I know it has been hard for some people to get involved, especially since we’re in a range of timezones and with different commitments within and beyond our workplaces (a strength!). Plus, a newsletter is one-directional and I’d like a way to hear other voices.

Hi friends,

Warmest thanks to all who joined for our most recent discussion. Following Sara Ahmed, we talked about the patterns and grooves that grow deeper with each repeated use, and the comfort or discomfort of navigating spaces depending on whether or not they are made with us in mind. We talked about rupture and disruption through Clélia O. Rodríguez’s writing, about the unsettling feeling when we expect to find one kind of meaning in what we read and discover those expectations upturned.

We also talked about the moments where we see people in our institutions using systems in unexpected ways. From participatory budgeting to relationship building to a refusal to comply with arbitrary guidelines, these moments of “queer use,” as Ahmed calls them, bring us hope. And yet, can those queer uses lead to structural change, or does it stop with individuals?

We talked about fatigue, overwhelm, apathy, uncertainty; but also, within that, the pleasure and nourishment of gathering. And so, with that, I have some questions about what’s to come.

Hi friends,

Just a reminder for our next reading group session, one week from today! Details below; sign up here for the link. Hope to see you there.

—Katina

****

Hi friends,

Well, the new year is here but the same challenges remain. It's hard not to feel like we're stuck on repeat in the cycle of fear, restrictions, and hope as we enter yet another pandemic year.

And yet, we are not in the same place. Time is passing: kids are growing, seasons are changing, vaccines are working, and all of us keep putting one foot in front of the other to try and make things just a little bit better. I appreciate the calls to find pockets of hope and beauty even as the challenges continue—this echoes what we have discussed together in terms of critical hope, or hope as a discipline.

Thinking back to our last reading group session, we found ourselves talking a lot about refusal. But refusal is only one side of the coin; on its own it will fall short. I've been ruminating on these questions:

Dear friends,

Deepest thanks to everyone who joined our most recent discussion on epistemic injustice—and thanks especially to Alyssa Arbuckle for the incredibly rich readings and thought-provoking questions. We talked about individuals and infrastructure, reciprocity and community. We considered the potential power of student-centered teaching, of radical coalitions for change, of time and relationship and storytelling. Our notes, as always, are here.

This discussion took place within a context of yet another COVID surge. I'm sure I'm not alone in noticing a great deal of mental health struggle right now, among people from all walks of life. It's easy to understand why; as we wrap up a(nother) extremely difficult year and look ahead toward a year of continued uncertainty, it's hard not to feel powerless. And yet, we all have spheres of influence. Perhaps that is one of our individual and collective challenges in the year ahead: to find the areas in which we have power, and to focus our limited energy there.

One topic we kept circling back to was that of refusal and its potential power. Whether in the context of a collective action like a labor strike, the patterns seen in the great resignation, or individual decisions (honestly, like my own decision to work differently—I hope), saying no can be an act of strength and optimism. But is it always? What are the valences of refusal—courageous or timid, active or passive, toward change or simply a retreat? What are the ways that saying no can be transformative, can move towards a different kind of "yes", can be an act of support and solidarity?

Hi friends,

Just wanted to send a reminder that our next session, focused on epistemic injustice and led by Alyssa Arbuckle, will be this Thursday, December 16 from 5-6pm ET. Sign up here to get the zoom link.

We'll look at the following texts:

• Denisse Albornoz, Angela Okune, and Leslie Chan, "Can Open Scholarly Practices Redress Epistemic Injustice?,” from Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (2020)

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, "Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass" from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2015)

• Azar Causevic and Anasuya Sengupta, "Whose Knowledge Is Online? Practices of Epistemic Justice for a Digital New Deal" (2021)

Hi friends,

I'm excited to share this news! This is a bit outside what I usually write here, but I think it may be of interest. Next-Generation Dissertations, a project I've been working on with The Graduate School at Syracuse University, is now live. Many thanks to the NEH for making this project possible through their Next Gen PhD grants.

I worked on this with Chris Flanagan and Glenn Wright at Syracuse Graduate School. Featured scholars are A.D. Carson, Sonia Estima, Ivan Gonzalez-Soto, Jesse Merandy, Justin Schell, Amanda Visconti, & Anna Williams.

The site includes interviews, project examples, resources, rationale for supporting creative dissertations, and a rubric that could be used to help with evaluation. Super practical, we hope!

Dear friends,

Thanks to everyone who gathered last month to think together about place, memory, universities, and knowledge work. A phrase that has stuck with me from that discussion is “critical hope“—that seems to capture the spirit of what we are creating together in this space. The kind of hope that Mariame Kaba speaks of when she says that “hope is a discipline”:

It’s less about “how you feel,” and more about the practice of making a decision every day, that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you’re still going to get up in the morning. And you’re still going to struggle, that that was what I took away from it.

It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling. Like, you have to actually put in energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible, to change the world. You know, that we don’t live in a predetermined, predestined world where like nothing we do has an impact. No, no, that’s not true! Change is, in fact, constant, right? Octavia Butler teaches us. We’re constantly changing. We’re constantly transforming. It doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily good or bad. It just is. That’s always the case. And so, because that’s true, we have an opportunity at every moment to push in a direction that we think is actually a direction towards more justice.

—Mariame Kaba on Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill

It’s helpful, for me, to think about hope as a discipline rather than a feeling, because my feelings are so often at cross-purposes with anything resembling hope. But a discipline can be practiced regardless of feelings. Even now.

Hi everyone, just a reminder that the next reading group session is happening soon! We'll gather next week on Thursday, Nov 18 from 5-6pm EST. Britt Munro will be leading a discussion on these texts:

• Excerpt from Trace by geographer Lauret Savoy (Front Matter; Prologue: Thoughts on a Frozen Pond; and The View from the Sublime, p. 11-27)

• "A Journey in Writing Place" by Waanyi fiction writer/essayist Alexis Wright (Meanjin Quarterly, Winter 2019); read & annotate with hypothesis

In addition, consider reading this excellent piece by Coline Chevrin, which ties the questions of place more directly to the projects of education and universities: "Bringing the territory into the discussion: how to work towards a situated university?"

If you'd like to join, please register here. Hope to see you there!

Hi friends,

Our first reading group session has left me thinking about cycles—of academic years, of musical rhythms, of migratory paths, of life and death and life again. Thinking with Tsing, I keep returning in my own cyclical way to to the difficulty of letting go of linear progress, maybe especially in the context of higher education. I am trying hard to create spaces that push against that tendency—in this newsletter, in the reading group, in other places still to be seen. As we settle more deeply into fall, I think about the ways that these often-quiet spaces can allow time for introspection, synthesis, and preparation for what is to come.

Next Session

Hi, friends. If you're reading this, then we share a desire to make higher ed a better place. A place imbued with curiosity and care, built on principles of equity and sustainability. I choose to hope that we can collectively move in that direction.

(First—I hope those of you I took the liberty of signing up based on our past work or conversations together will forgive me! It's totally fine to unsubscribe if you don't want yet another email in your inbox.)

What can you expect from this newsletter? I'm not 100% sure yet. I'll definitely share links for upcoming talks and workshops, and I'll most likely include some reflections on what I'm noticing and learning.

I'm also going to experiment with something new: a low-key reading group focused loosely on how to make higher ed better. Each month, we'll consider a text together. It could be a book or an article or a film, long or short, theory or fiction or history. Anything, really, that will get us thinking about what higher ed is, what it could be, and how we can bring about change.