Well, hell, some of you subscribed. Guess I have to write this thing, eh?
I’ve actually been thinking about starting a newsletter for years. This is partly because I am a child of the Xanga/LiveJournal era of social media, partly because I have opinions I am arrogant enough to think you want to hear, and partly because I write as an outlet for ~*eMoTiOnS*~ and other things I am no longer afraid to mention to people besides my therapist. The desire to start a newsletter was strongest during grad school, when I sat open-mouthed in a “town hall” meeting with our director of graduate studies as he told a room of students that he did not pay attention to racist incidents happening on campus, his campus, the campus where he worked and where everyone for whom he was responsible went about their lives, and that it was in turn their responsibility, our responsibility, to tell him about them. He said it as though it were a generous invitation. He said it as a point of pride.
And I thought, the fucking audacity, my dude. (This newsletter will feature swearing and bad 2010s slang.) But I also thought, audacity aside, that his sentiment reflected a wider one in higher education: that our communities are our departments at most, and probably our particular friend circles within our departments in reality. When a scandal strikes our entire discipline, we may pay attention (Jorge Dominguez comes to mind), but maybe not even then. For the most part, the happenings beyond our office walls, positive or negative or messier than that, remain a mystery to us. Academia, with its focus on the research success of individuals or small teams of co-authors, encourages this dynamic.
But this is silly. It is silly to pretend that the labor struggles currently taking place on every University of California campus between graduate workers and university leadership does not bear on labor relations at every university in the United States. It is silly to pretend that we can carry on with our professional business without running up against Canadian visa law or UK terrorism law. I have learned a lot from people I follow on Twitter; Yolande Bouka taught me to always ask “who is ‘we’?”. The we/our here is mostly white, mostly tenured or tenure-track, and it’s also a we/our that’s endemic across an entire sector that, paradoxically, is trained to only hear I/my.
My ethos behind my Twitter presence, and my entire praxis in academia, is to challenge this. I’ve written about community before, so suffice it to say that I want to craft spaces where the “we” is contingent faculty, international students, first-generation TAs, across the US and across the Atlantic. I’ll be transparent that I’m from the US, I work in the UK, and I study Germany, so I write from what I know. Those are the main contexts that will feature here. And, sometimes the context we need to make most visible is down the hall or across the quad. If it’s possible to get academics to stand in solidarity with folks in the building next door, think about what sorts of momentum we can build. What picket lines we can form. What transformation we can muster.
And I’ll be transparent that there is a selfish thread running through all of this: my own search for community as a queer adult living what feels like a second adolescence, compounded by trying to build a life outside of my home country. I write this the day after queer and trans comrades in Colorado Springs were targeted for their light and love. Every year I light a candle on the anniversary of the Pulse massacre. I study violence that gets called terrorism for a living, and there is a numbness that comes with that kind of work. So I pay attention to things that shake me out of that, things that still remind me that I’m human. We could use more of that humanity, and openness about it, in the study of people and their politics.
So, if you did not find this via my Twitter feed and are starting to wonder about this word-vomiting ginger: hi! I’m Anna, I use she/her pronouns, I am a teacher and writer and researcher, and my favorite holiday is Samhain. I work broadly on institutional responses to white supremacist violence and liberatory practices within and in relation to the academy. I am very loud and very queer. There will be a mix of all of that here. I’m aiming for once a week posts, but like my Twitter account, it will be ad-hoc and driven by ~*eMoTiOn*~. My therapist would be so proud.
In California, 48,000 graduate workers are on strike for a living wage. Or, in other words, for the University of California to spend 3 percent of its operating budget on the people who keep its teaching and research functions, well, functioning. As we know, striking workers don’t get paid, so you can support them via their strike fund: https://givebutter.com/uc-uaw.
In the UK, 70,000 lecturers, professors, PhD students, librarians, and academic support staff will strike on Thursday for fair pay, pensions, and working conditions. If you are confused as to why this is happening yet again, the intransigence and cruelty of university vice chancellors confuses us too. Our strike fund is here: https://www.ucu.org.uk/fightingfund. I chatted with a student journalist at Nottingham (where I work) about staff-student solidarity here: https://impactnottingham.com/2022/11/should-we-support-our-striking-lecturers/.
Shameless self-promotion section: I’m speaking on a panel with Amar Amarasingam and Kathleen Blee on the far-right in the US, as part of the European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on Political Violence’s seminar series. My bit, at least, will address Club Q and structural white supremacy. Wednesday the 23rd, 2 pm BST/9 am Eastern. It’s open to all, but you need to register: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/120143/lomakkeet.html.
I’m also running an event next Tuesday, November 29, at 3:30 pm BST/10:30 am Eastern on COVID as a mass-disabling event and implications for university instructors. It features the ever-excellent Cate Denial and is also open to all. Just register first: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/covid-as-a-mass-disabling-event-a-pedagogy-of-kindness-in-pandemic-times-tickets-439466053797.
Opportunities:
Voices of Academia are looking for folks to write posts on academia and mental health. They’ll pay £25 per post. Pitch them here: https://voicesofacademia.com/contact-2/.
The Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR) at Syracuse University is looking for ECRs to serve as new instructors in its summer program. The deadline is WEDNEDSAY (sorry!!); info here: https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/docs/default-source/research/cqmi/iqmr-nvi-call-for-applications-22-0-11-09-acc.pdf?sfvrsn=e614c9fb_1.
ECPR workshops are incredibly expensive to attend, but if you can swing it, the call for papers is open until January 9. This workshop on intersectionality and violence looks particularly cool: https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PanelDetails/12456.
The University of Delaware is hosting a conference on equitable approaches to gender-based violence next September, and the call for proposals is open until March. More info here: https://www.wgs.udel.edu/gbv/conference.