Category Archives: grad school

Disruptions and things

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I’ve had one question that has been my research question for the entirety of my graduate school experience, whether it was in DR Congo or Haiti (a well-advised location-switch from the chairs): what is it that the people being “helped” really actually truly want or perceive to need in terms of health and health care.

This, of course, was to be tempered and compared to: what is it that people bringing the “help” think the same people want / or need?

In the past two months, several things have come to light that will prohibit me from going into the field for at least 12 months. I have had two weeks to come up with a new dissertation proposal – if only generally. I’ve been stuck.

Working with the diaspora population just won’t get to the questions i most ardently want to ask. In no way could it. I could ask: what does the diaspora community want / perceive the need to be of their families still in Haiti? and how does this differ from UN/USAID/NGO perceptions? But it is just not the research question i want to ask.

This is the thing with life, isn’t it? Facing these moments of disruption and interruption – facing the possibilities of roadblocks and frustrations. But somehow, in this infant stage of my career, i feel paralyzed (no pun intended). To me the important answers are not everybody else’s. Rather, who is asking the people most affected by decisions made everywhere else but there?

I came back to school with the mission to be willing to ask those questions in the places that most needed to be heard – to fight the fight that required power. I came to graduate school explicitly for the letters that would make people listen – not to me, but to the people lifting me up and pushing me forward, for whom i hoped to be a megaphone – to shout over the noise of marginality and into the speaker of power.

Protests, anarchism, animal laws and education

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I woke up to Twitter madness this morning – Oxford Circus was trending madly, but not Hyde Park – which where most of the protestors were headed and (one hopes) ended up. Of course, most of the coverage was of anarchists – both good and bad coverage. There was, quite frankly, relatively very little about the peaceful marches and speeches.

We have a visiting scholar with us these next few weeks. In the four days since she’s been here, she’s twice asked about anarchists here in the US. I can’t speak to the US, but here in Seattle – i have to say that the few who do identify tend to approach it from the side of personal anarchism. But i have seen and heard of bullying from within anarchist collectives elsewhere.

I’ve struggled to really comprehend what anarchism means to people who identify. I was kicked out of the only anarchist collective i was involved with for going back to school. Two years later, i wandered into Revolution Books and bought Days of War, Nights of Love. In it, i found what had been my own interpretation of anarchism – that true anarchism begins without notions of universal moral rightness, rather, through a recognition and reorganization of our own personal values.

But i think that’s a difficult one to swallow – even amongst the most ardent radicals.

I have a dear friend who recently declared that without laws, humanity would crumble to a maddened din of chaos (well – not in so many words). I know she was taking a particularly strong stance out of interest in protecting animals – her entire graduate school’s work has been dedicated to undermining notions of “compassionate slaughter” or the “humane” dairy industry. She struggles against unquestioned hierarchicized valuations of human life over animal life, against such a superb devaluation of animals’ lives overall, and the specificities of laws protecting certain animals and not others (e.g., my cat versus a corporation’s cow).

So this is where i begin to come undone – it’s not that i believe that without laws against murder, we’d murder each other at will – yet without laws to protect animals (and even with laws), there is mass animal cruelty. Whether you are full-fledged meat-eater or an ardent vegan, you cannot deny that absolute horror that individual animals suffer within (and with out) the animal product industries – all in the name of food and fashion.

And i somehow end up where i always do – trying to make sense of the struggle of a few individuals for the collective(s) and the complacency / complicity of the rest. But is that fair? If, at its root, a true anarchism is a self-anarchism, then what is the political movement? and If it is a political movement – is it a political movement toward non-politics? and If it’s a political movement toward non-politics, then where does that leave education?

As educators and researchers, we hope that we’ll reach our students to, at the very least, learn to think critically about the world around them, to not simply accept the Truths (with capital T’s) of so-called common sense. The difficulty is that by being in academia, we know that we are already reaching only the elite. Only 29% of American adults have earned a college degree, and that number is slipping fast. My favourite comment from Business Weekly:

for the first time ever, America’s educational gains are poised to stall because of growing demographic trends. If these trends continue, the share of the U.S. workforce with high school and college degrees may not only fail to keep rising over the next 15 years but could actually decline slightly, warns a report released on Nov. 9 by the National Center for Public Policy & Higher Education, a nonprofit group based in San Jose, Calif. The key reason: As highly educated baby boomers retire, they’ll be replaced by mounting numbers of young Hispanics and African Americans, who are far less likely to earn degrees.

Yes – it must be a demographics problem! The article goes on to say:

Education Secretary Margaret Spelling argues that President Bush’s 2001 education reform law, the No Child Left Behind Act, is working to lift minority education levels.

To be fair, the article is five years old. Nearly four years later, the NYT reported that in fact:

The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.

A report by the Foundation for Child Development found that pre-kindergarten students are expelled at three times the rate of K-12 students. Vulnerable children benefit the most from pre-Kindergarten programs, and yet, they are precisely the ones being kicked out before formal schooling even begins – cut off from their right to equitable education before it’s even begun.

No Child Left Behind has aggravated this issue. Because funding is tied to student achievement scores, students are being held back (to the extent that it is creating a ninth-grade bulge – a triple fold increase of the number of students held back); suspended during testing periods; and, “pushing out” under-scoring students (Madeleine Cousineau, 2010).

What does this mean for my rambling today? I and my colleagues will never see these children.

When i stare out at the sea of (mostly) white faces, i’m ashamed. Not for the students who have made it – but for being part of a system that is finding ways to continue to exclude massive portions of the population. I am more deeply ashamed that the honors sections have even fewer students of colour.

So i suppose i bring it all back around…

As i think about our coming fight to save university funding (Washington State is unique in that budget cuts, by law, cannot be made to K-12 education), i wonder how we can do it without alienating both the elites and the non-academics. We sit in the middle – despised for being Marxists / Socialists / Communists / Trust Fund Kids / Anti-American (these all blend rather uncomplicatedly for most Americans, unfortunately) as well as for being Part of the Elite (a confusion i really struggle with as we graduate students who are paying our way through school with RAships and TAships are actually paid at the Federal Poverty Level – a level that is recognized to not be a living wage by any stretch of the imagination).

How do we stand up for everyone’s rights? How do we make this a moment of collectivity? And who am i to even think that i happen to know what it is that you need…?

Stumbling toward the precipice

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I was asked to fill in today as the professor was at a Chair’s meeting with the Dean. I had a plan: talk about the Haitian Revolution in the context of the Age of Revolution and in relation to the American and French Revolution. I wanted to bring the students around to understanding the 200 year history of the American – Haiti geopolitics. That’s a lot to cram into 15 minutes. It was more of getting the students to understand the deep historical connection of place, to understand their own implicatedness in the plight of Haiti today. The Haitian Revolution did not exist in a vacuum of time and space – it was a deeply complicated and multi-layered revolution about freedom, race, class, and personhood. It was about freedom from France (or not – depending on which general you follow) and from each other.

That the Pearl of the Antilles left a massive void where half the world’s coffee and sugar were concerned led to the reopening of the South Carolina slave trade and a marked increase in slave traffic all along the Americas and in the Caribbean, including Cuba. But the Haitian Revolution also (partially) birthed revolution in Gran Colombia and uprisings in Cuba.

Wait – that’s tomorrow’s talk – i’ll get ’round to that later.

Plan for today, part de deux: Show Aristide and the Endless Revolution. I’ve watched it four times online on Youtube. There is a remarkable section with Maxine Waters (one of my new Heroes of All Time) that was missing from the 60 minute VHS student version. I suppose they decided that students shouldn’t see a strong black woman throw down with a panel of powerful white men…? I don’t know. The VHS version that our library holds was a watered down version of what is available online. Most of the punchlines that i was leaning on to place the second part of my talk were missing. Foiled!

But that’s not the matter – actually. Before we got there, the VHS machine decided not to work. It was one of those days.

So i bolted into lecture, part de deux while the Classroom Support Services fixed the cables in the back of the console. That was unfortunate. I was missing 40 years of set-up. I’d taken them through to the American Occupation from 1915-1934. And onto the Duvaliers. But poorly – i was waiting for the film.

It was a wonderful opportunity to talk about my research. I’d intended to go over my notes through the film, so had to free form. I missed a lot of important points – but it did open up the conversation with the students. I think mentioning Sean Penn probably helped.

It was both an enlightening moment (i barely read my notes) and a frightening moment (i think i wandered aimlessly though the 20th century). But mostly, it rekindled my passion for thinking about Haiti.

The difficulty with being a graduate student is the number of ways that we are pulled from our studies through the intricacies of the process. I didn’t end up doing a Regional piece in my exams. In fact – i could have pushed them out for a few more months and probably done two full more sections – one on Critical Race and the other on the Caribbean. The exams finished and i immediately set to work on my syllabus for next quarter and on getting my IRB through.

I realized recently that graduate school is like a series of pushes to the edge of the precipice. And each time we jump, we move that much closer to becoming the kind of professors and academics we want to be. It’s a fascinating process. Each time, i think i might tumble into the hole, at just the right moment, i take that deep breath and jump – only to find that no matter how hard the landing – the reality is: i’m still standing. We’re all still standing.

Today was one of those jumps – it was rocky and messy, but i got there – even if a bit bruised and bloody. After watching two job talks in the past two weeks, i’ve really come to understand the importance of talking in front of people – of fielding questions, of being, well, just ourselves in all of this. But also, that we have to find a way to hang on to all of those passions, balance them against each other as we weave not only the complexities of graduate school but also of the totality of the stories we are here to tell, of the theoretical mobilizations that we’re meant to bring forward, even as we are remembering to grow within ourselves.

And the best bits? all of the fantastic support we receive – my dear co-TA Magie and her encouraging smiles, the students who ask questions, a nod from the professor, the “standing meetings” of tea with colleagues, the intense explorations of the things that matter most to us…it’s what makes our world go ’round.

PhC’d

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I’ve passed. Four weeks of non-stop writing, thinking, scribbling and worrying culminating in three hours of my stuttering, stammering, going blank, scribbling notes, laughing nervously and generally willing time to speed up (oh worm-hole, where were you?!), and i got four signatures.

I promptly wandered out, in a daze, and thought quite thoroughly about crying, changed my mind, and went with a friend (a co-Geography-PhC just back from the field) to have a lemonade. And a few french fries. She generously listened to me prattle on and on abou what an ass i made of myself and how excited i am about Next Steps. Visited another friend, met another PhC, who kindly gave me the look of sympathy i needed. It helped that, although she’s in Literature (American Lit), she also knows Geographers (Matt Willson – what-what!). She gave a sympathetic, “I cried my eyes out, afterward.”

It is what it is…

Two things came out of the exam (besides the utter horror at my inability to think on my feet) – i need to get going on that critical race theory that i’ve so inelegantly avoided and that i need to finish disentangling the strands of the capital-citizenship-place nexus.

How did we get there?

I do health citizenship geographies. So, what is citizenship, and how does health citizenship fit into this Millennial Development moment? The usurpation of state legitimacy – through so-called humanitarian intervention (Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti) as well as through global health programs (PEPFAR, USAID; Afghanistan, Hatiti) – has brought the legitimacy of the nation state as a territorially-bounded container into question. There’ve been politely ferocious debates about the de-territorialization and re-territorialization of the nation-state. Recently, there have been discussions of the transnationalization of citizenship. All of this, even in the humanitarian and global health projects, has been driven by money.

Think: who is funding GH projects? Where does that money go? GHP is a $21 billion a year industry – and growing. How many national health systems would that build? How many jobs? Instead, that money is used to buy American or European supplies and expertise. So, here we have a growing industry that is transnationally managing health. What does that do to citizenship?

Taking TH Marshall’s three citizenship projects – his was a utopic vision of an ever-expanding inclusionary progression – health citizenship emerges as a late-capitalist project that is both exclusionary and inclusionary through the very ways that health has become a vehicle for extra-national social service delivery. Targeted health programs create variable health citizenships through enclaving – Who resides within a particular space (place?) – IDP camps, a remote African village, a city; What diagnosis they have – HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria; What demographic they are – women, children, mine-laborers, prostitutes, orphans – these are all markers for enclaving. So then what happens?

There is the inclusionary aspect in the provision of health services. (yay!) There is an exclusion based on a lack of particular specification (boo!). There is negotiation happening to identify through biological markers (citizenship? – see Rose and Braun’s discussion on this point). But to the detriment of political, social and economic citizenship (refer, TH Marshall)…

There’s something there…there is something emerging. But what? Where is that point of juncture…I think i know what i’ll be chewing on for the next several months. (Years?)

Sacrifices

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Women in academia give up a lot. Or don’t. How do we gauge? Most of it is self-imposed, but i can speak for myself, that even the self-imposed is guided by a higher principle (principal?).

Those of us over 30 spend an awful lot of time talking about children – having them, adopting them, loving them, knowing them, wondering about them, dreaming of partners who can be supportive of us having them…
We spend a lot of time wondering if we gave up having children to be in academia or if academia demanded that we give up having them. I get a special insight – i look mid- to late-20′s but am mid-30′s with a family history of unhealthy reproductive parts. I’ve probably missed my window of opportunity. But maybe not. It’s hard to tell. But people say things like, “Well, get that tenure track, then have babies.” or “Are you sure you’re in the right relationship? Because you’re running out of time!” or “Is that who you want to be with? Because once you start the process…”
Worse still is the thought that i will one day walk into a job-talk and be looked at as some kind of baby-mongering puddle of hormones. No one will ask because it’s either a) impolite, or b) illegal – most likely some combination of the both.
If i dye my grey streak and leave out the short-lived stint at PSU, i can pass for about 10 years younger, but will i be able to side-step “the look”?
There are women in our department who just go ahead and have the baby(ies) while working on the dissertation. Some get baby-brain. Others don’t. Those that don’t get the mushy, half-wit, unintelligible side-effect of pregnancy and breast-feeding (no offense to all of my wonderful breeding friends who i love and adore!), get held up as The Example. “Well, so-and-so didn’t have a problem!” Aren’t we above and beyond that? Don’t we work tirelessly to work against The Shining Example of What Makes the System Work? Black Single Mothers who become Lawyers; Hispanic immigrants who become Teachers; Poor White Folk who work on Wall Street…there will always be Shining Examples to uphold your ideology of how this all should work.
Fuck you. (not the Shining Examples, themselves – just everyone else)
When i worked at the Children’s Clinic we went on a hunt for the perfect supervisor. Traditionally, the position was held by an African American Woman (so was my job, but they made an exception for my brain…). I don’t know how many applications and resumes came in, but it was an arduous six month task. There were very few qualified candidates, even after throwing out certain criteria. One woman looked great on paper: African American, from the Central District (!), had managed clinics and other non-profits, multiply-degreed. She was our dream candidate. Her interview lasted less than 10 minutes (i timed them all). One of the first phrases out of her mouth: “I grew up poor – but i pulled myself up by my bootstraps. What we need to do is be tougher on these people. Teach them discipline.”
Fuck you.
We all suffer and experience life differently. We all internalize the messages we receive differently. We act on them differently. We move through life differently.
Academics are a special kind of crazy. We know that about ourselves and about those around us. We pay attention. I watched a mom nearly lose her funding because she had Baby Brain for two years – it was not her fault. She had women on her committee…but there was no compassion or understanding. I know that when i go for my job, they’ll be peering at me: “Is she thinking about having babies? Will it get in the way of her publications? Her teaching? Will she need time off?” or worse “What is wrong with her? Why doesn’t she want babies? Why doesn’t she have them?” Do i tell them that my uterus is likely rotten and that my eggs are probably cancerous? Will they believe me if i say “I want to adopt.” Do i believe that i want to adopt?
I sound cynical and single-minded. I’m not. These are the conversations that we 30+ year old female grad students have with each other. These are the conversations that our chairs have with us. Those lucky enough to get their heads screwed on at just the right angle early enough in their lives get to by-pass this madness. Men get to bypass this madness.
Oh men.
The men have it easy. I don’t care how many diapers you change, how many sleepless nights you get, you are still in control. You don’t get baby brain. I watched one MA student send his wife, repeatedly, home to her parents while he finished his thesis. I’ve watched others suddenly take an interest in their offices or the library. It’s easy for them – no aching breasts, no hormonal fluctuations, no swollen feet, no 80 lb weight gain, no loss of self-esteem, no post-partum depression, no baby brain.
Fuck you.
You have it hard – i get it. But never as hard as women. Never as hard as the body that went through 9 months of gestation + 6, 9, 12, 18 months of breastfeeding. You will never experience the emotional highs and lows of motherhood. I’ve watched men quietly keep their wives’ pregnancy a secret for 9 months – even longer! Can a woman? One day, a baby comes into 4th floor Smith. “What’s this?” They beam proudly for a moment or two, showing off the child…then a peck on the cheek, “I’ll be home soon.” or…”Well, we’re off.” I barely catch their names. The mothers’, that is. Never, never-ever the childrens’.
So here we are. I’m making an appointment with my hairdresser tomorrow for a trim (i donate my hair to Locks of Love – for the children whose lives are in peril – i’ve been working extra hard, this time, for a girl with extra-long hair) and a daub of dye to cover the grey…