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Thinking about how UC caved (because how else would they have functioned as a university?) and rehired the students they fired for a wildcat strike--thinking about this in light of ongoing graduate employees strike at the U of Michigan.

#strike #solidarity #graduate school

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#writing #grad school #social distancing

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#covid 19

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And this is a vivid imaginative pair for the last post.

#social distancing #universities in the time of covid-19

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This is really spot on.

#social distancing #universities in the time of covid-19

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I remember being an undergraduate student and being put off by queer theory’s constant pointing out of homophobia and opening up of queer wounds. I understood that the world was anti-queer. Anti-me. I didn’t need queer theory to tell me the advertisement on my cereal box also wanted me dead. When I came across Sedgwick’s reparative reading as a grad student, I felt suddenly engaged with queer theory again. What can academia do to heal, to comfort, and to reform dominant understandings of the world into something that enables queer people to keep living?

Game Studies - Time and Reparative Game Design: Queerness, Disability, and Affect by Kara Stone

#what i'm reading #reparative reading #queer theory #hermeneutics of suspicion

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#zoom university #working from home

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#zoom university #strikes

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A nice little graph of alternatives to live meetings, in case you too can hardly hold one thing in your head at a time.

#zoom university

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I remember long arguments with fellow graduate student at the University of Wisconsin about whether 'history from the bottom up' was the only socially responsible history to write and about whether, indeed, one could justify one's desire for graduate training at all. In the end, most of us got degrees and became university teachers, accepting the need for discipline even as we hoped to make our history more relevant by overturning canonical teachings and exposing their (conservative) foundational premises. Without discipline, there was no way for us to articulate the problematics that concerned us, no historical frame within which to pose our questions and answers, no structures in terms of which (and against which) fundamental critical challenges could be posed. Disciplines carried with them a whole intellectual history of contest about the legitimacy of questions and the frameworks for answering them and so provided the conditions of possibility for their own critical transformation.

Joan Wallach Scott, Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom, p. 25

#disciplinarity #graduate education #academic freedom #what i'm reading

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In the borderlands deserts, the distinct smell of the creosote bush is the harbinger of the single most important environmental factor: water. It is the smell of desert rain. I always take a little sprig of creosote bush with me when I conduct oral histories about the plant. Its smell often conjures nostalgic memories of childhood that speak to the ways that the environment seeps into our personal histories and identities.

Problems of Place: How My Nana Taught Me to Listen to Plants – Environmental History Now

#creosote #desert #rain

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We do not all need to be race scholars. But we must all be cognizant of race. We need the voices and presence of racial rhetorical scholars to be widely circulated, cited, and canonized. We need the voices and presence of rhetorical scholars whose work is less about race to remind themselves that rhetors and discourses, bodies and places, effects and affects, are fundamentally raced, and to participate in circulating, citing, and canonizing the work of racial rhetorical scholars. We need the histories that we tell to signal and center the ways that race has made those histories. We need the moments that we identify and the futures we envision to attend to racial specificity. Race must be centered in our disciplinary practices, if not because of the fundamental racial-ness of discourse and the art of rhetorical criticism, then because race informs our political possibilities and limitations and our critical judgments.

Lisa A. Flores, “Between abundance and marginalization: the imperative of racial rhetorical criticism,” pp. 17-18, in Review of Communication, vol. 16, no. 1

#race #rhetoric #racial rhetorical criticism #rhetorical analysis #what i'm reading

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Critiques of the university that presume the derivative nature of the academy from the economy implicitly and unconsciously place a ban on modes of differences as sites of political subjectivization. They become spaces of consensus as they dismiss minority culture and minority difference as formations completely overwhelmed and determined by commodity culture, whether within or outside the academy. Such stances disqualify minority difference and minority culture as potential sites of dissensus with the potential to create fissures and to make room for the inadmissible.

Roderick A. Ferguson, in The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, p. 18

#universities #neoliberalism #it's not all just economics #what I'm reading

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Radical scholarship includes often conflicting customs and traditions and it is also shaped by the temperaments and experiences of its producers who lean in one way or another as a result. Radical scholarship is absolutely truth-telling, even when it knows there are no absolute truths; and it is oppositional, often cranky if not unrelentingly angry. Radical scholarship also harbours lived epistemologies that structure, either implicitly or explicitly, the questions its practitioners ask and they answers they give.

Avery Gordon, “The future of radical scholarship,” p. 84 from Race & Class, vol. 47, no. 2, 2005

#radicalism #radical scholarship #avery gordon #what i'm reading

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#democracy #demagoguery

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I found this really useful and much needed as I get in my last few writing days of 2019!

#writing #writing a first book

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Denise had no idea her student loans could be erased. In 2007, a truck rear-ended her car. The accident ravaged her legs and back, and the pain made it impossible for her to work.

“I have basically been in pain — chronic pain — every day,” says Denise, who asked that NPR not use her full name to protect her privacy. “I live a life of going to doctors constantly.”

For over half a century, student loan borrowers like Denise — with a significant, permanent disability — have been protected by federal law. If they can no longer work enough to support themselves, they can ask the U.S. Department of Education to erase their debts. But an NPR investigation has found that hundreds of thousands of potentially eligible borrowers — more than enough to fill a city the size of Pittsburgh — have yet to receive the relief they’re entitled to.

Not only that, the Education Department told Congress earlier this year it had discharged the loans of 40% of eligible borrowers with significant, permanent disabilities. But new data obtained by NPR from a department official show the real number is much lower: Only 28% of eligible borrowers identified between March 2016 and September 2019 have either had their loans erased, or are on track for that to happen.

Borrowers and advocates say the Education Department doesn’t do enough to inform borrowers like Denise of their rights, and those who do apply for help have to navigate a years-long, bureaucratic obstacle course. A department official says the department has made incremental improvements to the process since 2016: “We continue to look for ways to make the process easier to navigate for disabled student loan borrowers, while maintaining the integrity of the taxpayers dollars associated with the discharges.”

Why Student Loan Borrowers With Disabilities Aren’t Getting The Help They Deserve

Illustration: Zoë van Dijk for NPR

#student loans #loan forgiveness #disability #department of education