#gradposting

[impossibletruths]

me this morning: surely this 50 seater theory grad-level class will not fill up within 12 hours. surely I can confirm my course registration status without losing a seat in a class I need to take to fill my program requirements

me now: 🙃

#registering for fall courses has been a massive fucking comedy of errors and I'm the clown #I hate it here #oh well if I get locked out of my mandatory surveys at least I can take the TV course without double dipping #gradposting

[ciceroniantrash]

my phd will be in committing to the bit actually. yeah i’m yes-and-ing my way through my entire doctoral program

#gradposting #personal #classics

[fracturescope]

why does telling my mfa crush that i'm down to meet up and chat about / read their work feel like asking somebody out.

#gradposting #wes.txt #aaaaaaaaaaaah #i am a highly regular person

[mildly-irritated-scientist]

I must not drink the red bull. Red bull is the sleep schedule-killer. Red bull is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my distraction. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the distraction has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

#gradposting #Gradblr

[clare-with-no-i]

rereading Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism for the first time in ~5 years. forgot how much my mind is melted and re-formed by reading it wow wow wow

#clare shitposts #gradposting #(kinda)

[ban-joey]

turning off my phone and dunking my head in the sand for the next 12 hours. adios

#gradposting #my back is hurting like crazy and i want to walk into the desert to be gently torn to bits by many scorpions and yet i have to take an exam

[howldean]

btw said “everything you do, do it for love” in my graduation speech

#you invite the clown to the circus and we’ll #bee says things #gradposting

[dridersgeorg]

I Did It i Graduated

#gradposting

[gothprentiss]

by state of the humanities i mean i cannot tell you the number of times (ok. 3. but that's a lot considering how much of my time in this program has been eaten up by covid) i have been at a talk and some Notable professor of Big Stuff is like, blah blah blah language fails us! grammar fails us! it is a violence against ideas! and then not ten minutes later is waxing big-style poetic about the aorist or the future anterior or so on. i just found my notes for one of these and i was drawing melting bats and question marks and writing an abstract for a campus novel called dream of a common language but inspired by house of leaves wherein a brave new materialist postdoc finds suddenly that they have wandered into grammar and there is no clear way out or even through...

#gradposting

[montrosepretty]

Festo: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “the fall of the heroic oversight guild” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

Me: yeah whatever. I don’t feel shit.

5 minutes later: dude I swear I just saw some demons in the unknown forest

My buddy Argo pacing: chaos is lying to us

#love making silly gradposts it’s what those guys deserve #the adventure zone #taz graduation #devo’s devotionals

[yxkanna]

realizing that i need to somehow transcribe long horizontal stripboards and things to a vertical format for this stupid production book while still maintaining the 1 inch margin/minimum 10pt type size criteria and. now i am weeping,

#ooc #moopisms #LIKE GIRL THIS IS NOT WORKING. #either the screenshots are too small or the copy/paste of the info becomes nonsensical #bc it's meant to be read horizontally not vertically !!!!! #this feels like an impossible problem and i just emailed the grad office to ask wtf to do about it but hgbdkfsj #somehow i think they're going to come up with a TERRIBLE ANSWER and i'm scared #sorry for all the ooc/gradposting btw i'm just like................ wtf

[impossibletruths]

grad school sucks cause on the one hand it's like. yes I want to engage with the media I consume through theoretical and academic frameworks. but on the other hand it's like. please god can I enjoy the media I consume without thinking about theoretical and academic frameworks

#class was. not great today. and now I can't watch netflix because everything is too ~connected~ #haha rip #gradposting #tbd

[girlwithnoface]

and to think they said tumblrinas couldnt graduate college

#OKAY. im done gradposting now. i prommy #ang.jpg #the textbook is upside down on purpose bc of my failed stem degree

[optimisticdinosaurcloud]

Diversity and literature

Part of writing a dissertation also means that I need to buck up and face the inevitable fact that I will, sooner or later--hopefully sooner--be graduating with a PhD. School will not exist as a buffer anymore; I’ll have to find a real job. 

Yikes. 

What this means is that, between bouts of dissertating, I’m also composing documents that I would use to apply in an academic job market. (The futility of applying for such jobs is a discussion for another post.) One of the key documents is a “Diversity statement.” 

Not all academic job postings ask for a diversity statement, but it is common enough on the market at this point that it’s useful to have a statement prepared. In the barest possible terms, a diversity statement is exactly what it seems: a statement in which you lay out how you incorporate diversity into your teaching and / or writing / academic work. For me personally, this is mostly embodied in my teaching, and is conducted, pedagogically, from an intersectional feminist perspective that takes into account race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. I was privileged to have multiple professors during my undergraduate education who introduced me to such concepts and provided a platform from which I was able, once I reached my Master’s program, to begin a more thorough exploration of such concepts on my own. This was a decidedly good thing as well because I grew up smack dab in middle class white suburbia, and really needed the exposure to different perspectives. 

So what does this mean for my teaching? Well, as I’ve worked to create courses and syllabi, I always try to keep that intersectional feminism in mind. I think: I need to choose texts that are canon, but I also need non-canon ones. I need texts about bipoc folks, and texts that will allow us to talk about class, and queerness, and ability. I also strive to construct the space of the classroom as a space in which students can explore their own identities, learn about those of others, and come to their own conclusions about why diversity is so crucially important in all aspects of our lives. 

This is not always easy, nor is it always pleasant. Certain moments stick in my mind: the time I used a book called Women in Politics as an example of how to cite a book, and a male student snorted and said, “Yeah I bet that’s real interesting”; the time I showed the Nicki Minaj music video for “Anaconda” and a non-black female referred to Nicki as simply “trashy”; a time when, in a discussion about chattel slavery in the US, a white student declared, “But what about white slaves?!”; the time one class had a “real talk” discussion and nearly every female student in the classroom spoke up and shared moments of sexualized violence against themselves, and I saw the shocked and horrified look on so many of the men’s faces because they hadn’t realized what an epidemic violence against women really is; the time I decided “to hell with it all” and, in a discussion about a potentially homoerotic convent of women (the play “The Female Convent” by Margaret Cavendish), I defined myself in relation to queerness openly in the classroom for the very first time. (Side note: ended up being less terrifying than I thought it would.) None of these moments were easy or even necessarily enjoyable, but they did open up important avenues for us to talk and learn, and that is what we all needed. 

And that opening of talking and learning can produce good--great--results. I recall the time that, in an end of the semester reflection assignment, this big burly white man who quite literally lived in the mountains wrote about how now that we had studied racism in advertising, he was beginning to realize such racism was prevalent everywhere. I recall the time a Latina female student spoke openly, before the entire class, about her own violently misogynistic encounter with a white male police officer. I recall how a male student became so interested in the topic of women in science (based off some readings we had done in a “Women in Science Fiction” course) that he used some of those ideas when he taught at a summer camp for elementary school kids. I recall when a student took another (a third!) class with me and declared that she, a young and highly privileged white woman, had learned so much from Assata Shakur’s autobiography that it was now one of her favorite books. I recall students coming to me and discussing their own trauma and experiences privately because they felt safe speaking with me. I remember a student who was struggling with depression writing in his evaluations that my class was the only thing he had looked forward to all semester, and how it kept him going. And when I recall these moments, I remember the power of diversity in the classroom amongst texts, students, and ideas, and strive for even more. 

Diversity should not, and cannot, be ignored in the literature classroom. Can any one text or class cover all areas of diversity at once? No, and it’s wrong to expect that they could. But when they do, we--instructors and students--need to talk about it, learn from the text, and learn from each other.

Anyway, that’s what my diversity statement is about.

#phd #gradschool #gradstudent #gradposting #diversity #literature

[clare-with-no-i]

Hi Clare! You talk about grad school sometimes and I was curious what you’re studying? 💕

hello hello hi!!

yes of course! I’m getting a Masters in Public Policy. hoping to do research for a prison reform organization or pursue a PhD in history and become a professor, which is kind of the dream. thank you for asking! 💕

#ask #theesteemedladydebourgh #gradposting

[podcastwizard]

yo i fell off the grad train a couple eps in bc life happened but ur gradposting made me have a maplekeene dream last night out of nowhere so i guess im bingeing what i missed after work today 🎉🎉🎉

i love this because i’m like ten episodes behind rn but i’m still influencing your dreams and that’s what would make me a perfect #influencer

#let me influence you #every time someone mentions that they talked about me or thought about me irl i grow stronger #queuelia burnsides #Anonymous