Whose free speech are we talking about?

December 6, 2017December 6, 2017 aimeemorrison

Today we have a guest post, from Eileen Mary Holowka, who also finds that she has to say something about the Lindsay Shepherd rolling nightmare. It just keeps going: the Chronicle of Higher Education is now covering this (poorly) and that National Post (ridiculously) gave Shepherd the helm of an editorial.

In case you are not caught up, on Friday November 10^th, the National Post published an article that criticized Wilfrid Laurier University for their response to complaints made about a first year communications course.

Since then, a number of similar articles have been released, arguing that the university is censoring “free speech” and that the teaching assistant of the course, Lindsay Shepherd, was mistreated. Most recently, the Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer has chimed in to say that, if elected Prime Minister, he would “ensure that public universities or colleges that do not foster a culture of free speech and inquiry on campus will not receive federal funding” (Huffington Post).

But whose free speech is he talking about?

Almost all of the articles published since November 10^th have done approximately the same thing: they present quotes without full context, accuse Wilfrid Laurier (as a whole institution) of being anti-free speech, fail to mention the rights of trans individuals, and continue to splatter a certain U of T professor’s name across Canadian media headlines yet again.

It was not until November 24^th that anything was published about how the recent events might impact trans and non-binary people. Abigail Curlew’s piece published on Vice questioned the neutrality questions the neutrality of “free speech” and argues that “[t]rans folks have been historically marginalized by academics who have been embroiled in debates concerning the authenticity of [their] existence.”

There are, of course, many complicated issues at play within this whole ‘controversy’, including our universities’ often poor training for TAs who themselves may have only recently left undergrad as well as the limits of institutional protocols around complaints. But the issue that calls out to me the loudest is the one that has been left almost completely untouched by the majority of Canadian news platforms. That is, the lives and experiences of trans and non-binary people whose bodies are being “debated” without thought.

Shepherd’s argument that anything can be brought up for debate in a classroom without bias is simply not true. There are always power imbalances at play in the classroom and it is frightening to see how quickly the Canadian media jumped to defend Shepherd’s “free speech” while subsequently dismissing the voices of trans and non-binary individuals.

As we have seen in the recent discourse of the alt-right, free speech privileges whiteness. It privileges the people who already have the power to say whatever they want without the risk of losing their jobs. Free speech is not so easily afforded to the already marginalized, the trans and non-binary, or the people at the back of the classroom who do not know how to speak up. At least, not in the same way it can be claimed by the Petersons of the world, the Shepherds, the CBC, or the Globe and Mail.

This is nothing new either. These same defences of free speech have come up in response to Charlottesville and ACLU, Milo Yiannopoulos and Berkeley, and of course Jordan Peterson and McMaster. There is much more work that needs to be done to question the way free speech is being talked about in the news and we cannot let ourselves blindly join the hype. Instead, we need to look for the stories that are not being told.

Unlike popular belief, making a classroom a safe space does not require censorship or “handholding.” (Or, as Christie Blatchford argued, “Thought Policing.”) But it does require an understanding of our entanglements and responsibilities. A safe classroom means that even more ideas can be talked about in critical ways without the risk of losing students’ voices. A safe classroom means “staying with the trouble,” with an understanding that this “trouble” does not need to be exclusionary and, in fact, is troubled more so in its attempt to account for all responsibilities, all affects, and all voices.

Due to confidentiality, the complainant(s) who originally reported Shepherd are left unheard. While it is important that they are protected, they need not be erased entirely from the narrative.

Despite what the news has been telling us, Shepherd is not the victim we need to worry about. The free speech of Shepherd and Peterson is safe, is being broadcast loud and clear.

What we must now consider are whose voices we are losing in all the noise?

Eileen Mary Holowka is a writer, editor, researcher, academic, programmer, musician, and sometimes video editor who lives in Montreal, Canada. She is currently doing my MA at Concordia University in English and Creative Writing where she is working on an interactive narrative ‘game’ about the act of narrating sexual trauma on and offline. Her research interests include trauma theory, feminist studies, queer theory, and media studies, but she is currently focusing on self-imaging, Instagram, online affective labour, and the intersections of trauma and media.

best laid plans · feminism · politics · winter

Planning for the Holidays, Holidays for Planning

December 15, 2016April 18, 2017 melissadalgleish

I’m seven working days away from my first vacation in a year and a half. All of my time off from work in 2016 was used to go to the MLA, teach at DHSI, and finish and defend my dissertation. All good things, but none of them a vacation. And I’m tired. Bring on the holidays.

But I’m also mad and scared and sad. I’m not terribly good at being mad and scared and sad. I grew up in a family with only two emotional temperatures–everything is great, or nuclear. I love my family dearly, but being raised by them has left me with, as Hermione Granger would say, the emotional range of a teaspoon when it comes to the less cheery feelings. And so my natural tendency is to shy away from strong negative feelings because my body and mind don’t quite know how to distinguish between “kinda, and justifiably, angry” and the nuclear option of my childhood and adolescence. But I’m learning. (Guts’ new “In the Cards: Ask a Feelings-Witch” column was super on point this week–subject: anger–and super helpful). I’m furious about a lot, including how little the Canadian government is doing, diplomatically and otherwise, to intervene in Syria, and so I spent last night in a righteous rage, calling and tweeting and pulling out my credit card. It turns out that I’m pretty okay with being angry when the alternative is feeling impotent and helpless

What does all of this have to do with the holidays, you might ask? I love a good plan–see, as evidence, the fact that I never go anywhere without my Hobonichi Techo planner, or my way over-the-top first week post-PhD schedule–and while I’m planning for the holidays, I’m also going to use my holidays for planning. I’ve got a long list of things I want to do, for fun and self-care. I want to finish reading all of the Miss Fisher novels. I want to work on my novel every day. I want to go shopping in Kensington Market and cook an amazing anniversary dinner with my partner. I want to finally figure out what the hell to do with that stupid corner cabinet in the kitchen. I want to finish crocheting the giant blanket I’ve been working on. I want to go to the movies. I want to take my godson on his first trip to the art gallery. I want to spend time feeding and hugging and listening to my people. I want to sit in front of the fire.

But I also want to use my holidays to do some research and learning and planning toward a more sustainable approach to anger and advocacy next year. I’m pretty sure–Rebecca Solnit’s hope for a miracle aside–that 2017 is going to be a crappy, crappy year. It’s going to be full of all of that fear and rage and sadness that I’m working hard to get good at. And I need to figure out the most useful and sensible ways to channel those feelings into sustainable, mindful, planned action. And so I’m going spend part of my holidays planning for 2017. What local organizations can I get involved or more involved in that support the work of intersectional feminist joy-killing, combatting climate change, helping refugees? What organizations, local and international, most deserve my money and do the most impactful work with donations? What and who should I add to my reading list to help me be a better advocate and ally? What’s the contact information for the most powerful and responsive people in local, provincial, and federal governments? How can I better connect and collaborate with the amazing people in my life who share my concerns and goals? What does sustainable activism–a steady blaze, not a flash fire–look like for me, in good balance with work, research, creative, and family life?

Obviously, I’m not going to be able to do all of things I want to over the holidays, but in planning for both self-care and activism, I’m hoping to head into 2017 feeling recharged and ready to keep working and fighting. This is likely our last post of 2016 on Hook & Eye, and so from all of us, wishing you a restful and rage-filled winter break. Let’s burn down the worst parts of the world and make s’mores while we’re at it.

fast feminism · feminist win · hope · politics

Because It’s 2015

November 5, 2015April 18, 2017 melissadalgleish1 Comment

Photo credit: cc//Rt. Hon. R.B. Bennett, Prime Minister of Canada, surrounded by members of the Cabinet (1931), Library and Archives Canada

Inuit girls throat singing, and giggling, at the swearing in.

A cabinet “family photo” with fifteen women in it. And people of all kinds of races and ethnicities. And people with disabilities. And gay people.

A First Nations woman as Minister of Justice and Attorney General.

The reinstatement of the Minister of Science position, and the assignment of that position to a woman. With a PhD.

A female Minister of the Environment and Climate Change.

A Minister of the Status of Women who was, until her election last month, the head of Thunder Bay’s largest homeless shelter.

The reinstatement of the long-form census, and of the ability to collect data that will allow us to accurately count vulnerable women and girls, conduct gender-based analysis of programs and policies, and evaluate the impact of programs and policies on the status of women.

A promise to immediately launch a national public inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.

A female Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs who has publicly committed to the principle of “nothing about us without us,” and who has indicated that consultations with First Nations, Métis and Inuit people about the inquiry will begin immediately.

administration · emotional labour · gradschool · guest post · ideas for change · politics · solidarity · strike

Striking across Borders

March 10, 2015April 19, 2017 bjohnstone1

Striking is in the air, dear feminists. As I write this, my partner David Klassen sits with his fellow NYU AWDU bargaining committee members in a room with the notoriously pernicious and overpaid NYU Board of Trustees, negotiating for a fair contract for graduate student workers. If they don’t come to an agreement tonight (update: THEY DID!), strike action is planned for the rest of the week, joining our picketing friends across the border at York at the University of Toronto. The meeting stands as the culmination of over a year of other meetings and negotiations and protests and demonstrations since they resumed their status as the only private school in America with a graduate student union, and I have watched from afar as my partner has volunteered his time and physical and mental energy to fighting for this cause–doing so, ironically enough, without pay, dedicating time to collective action that he could be spending on his dissertation. Notably, four out of the five members of the reform caucus (AWDU: Academic Workers for a Democratic Union) are female. I have no doubt that they are similarly dedicated and fantastic, and probably similarly exhausted.

One of the most compelling recent developments is the swelling of support from undergraduates, over 500 of whom have signed a petition which, amongst other things, avers that “[g]raduate student working conditions are undergraduate learning conditions,” because “[g]raduate students teach our sections, grade our papers and exams, answer our emails late at night, and support our academic growth.” Uh, sob! Rarely do we see such bonds formed between undergraduate and graduate students. An impressive number of undergraduate and graduate allies gathered earlier for a sit-in outside the meeting, demonstrating support and solidarity, and forming a gauntlet as the admin officials entered.

Since it seems as though there’s a growing climate of change and protest against precarious working conditions in academia which is spreading across many former divisions and borders these days–including #NAWD two weeks ago–I wanted to set the actions in Canada and the States in conversation with each other a little more intentionally. I’m not qualified to discuss the U of T/York strikes; however, I got in touch with my friend Norman Mack, a doctoral student in the English Department at U of T, and he was generous enough to type out some answers to my questions. The following is lightly amended from our online exchange:

Photo: Norman Mack

Q. How (if at all) has the strike brought the student body together?

NM: Solidarity and camaraderie have never been stronger than with this strike. From the strike vote last November on (which saw a record turnout and record yes votes in favour of the strike), there has been a widespread concern over the state of the funding package, and its depreciation over the years since it was last negotiated in 2009 (the year of the last increase in the minimum funding package from $13,500 to the present value of $15,000).

On the picket lines (in this I can only speak from my own experience), there has been as much support from the undergraduate community as here have been uninterestedness and hostilities. I get the sense, however, that support from undergraduates is increasing judging by social media and the students who are everywhere reported to be approaching us expressing sympathies. This increasing support is likely in large part due to the Administration’s tactics thus far: their misrepresentation of facts and the insistence that, despite a work stoppage that’s disrupting classes for thousands of students, the university can function normally.

Furthermore, because of the high number of CUPE3902 members showing up for picket duty and marches, the most varied bonds and conversations are occurring across the many faculties at the university and across the three campuses, particularly on social media, which otherwise might never manifest. There is undoubtedly a community forming, all determined to attain significant gains through the strike.

Q. How do you balance striking action alongside all your other demanding work as a graduate student?

NM: Again, I can speak only for myself and perhaps those in my particular situation in my department (English): the problem of balance has not been easy. Unlike York University, which has also been on strike since [last] Tuesday, the University of Toronto has decided to continue with classes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. For graduate students like myself, who are taking a full course load, the combination of picketing for upwards of 20 hours a week (along with other strike-related activities) and keeping up with course work has been incredibly taxing. This is not to say that others, who are either preparing for candidacy exams or writing/researching for their dissertations, have it easier. Many have expressed how exhausting this last week has been, particularly as the weather has not been kind, reaching upwards of -24 degrees with either snow or freezing rain. And yet, there remains a strong sense of commitment to the strike, particularly those in the humanities, those in other words who both stand the most precarious, the most at risk.

Q. Do you believe that collective action will benefit your graduate education (even if you don’t get the results you desire)?

NM: As I’ve mentioned above, I believe that strong ties are forming both internal and external to those represented by CUPE3902. As I write this, more and more open letters of support are emerging from both faculty and students. (For a particularly strong version of this, see an open letter by Dr. Paul Downes, Dept. of English) If the new buzzword of the university today is interdisciplinarity and collaboration, there has been no better example of these practices than those in the strike I have witnessed thusfar.

Of course, the goal is ultimately to raise the standard of living for the most precarious of our ranks: those who are living on $15,000 a year in a city where the cost of living has skyrocketed since our last increase; those who are finding themselves past the funded cohort trying to finish their dissertations while making ends meet with low-paying TAships or Instructorships, and in some cases part-time or full-time work outside the academy, while also paying some of the highest tuition in Canada ($8,500/year in my department). Many of us are in this fight with much on the line. It was not an easy choice, but it was a necessary one. And we intend to win.

Photo: Norman Mack

———
HUGE thanks to Norman for answering these questions so thoughtfully, expertly, and thoroughly. We at H&E extend you and your comrades our warmest wishes of solidarity and support as you continue the fight. May NYU’s victory give you hope!

This post has been edited to correct an error in the original: I had said that 7/8 bargaining committee members are women, but in fact there are two other men.

fast feminism · politics · slow academy · social media · solidarity

Queer Feminism?

November 25, 2014April 19, 2017 bjohnstone1

We on this blog don’t often discuss LGBTQ issues (perhaps because we all happen to present as straight), and today I’d like to think about some of the implications of conscientiously adopting a more “queer” feminism: one that is, perhaps, more explicitly open to alternative lifestyles, more open-ended, less harmonious, more agonistic. Feminists who remain silent on LGBTQ issues risk reinforcing a perceived divide between feminism and queer studies that limits our possibilities for collective change. The rift, however simplistically conceived, between “frumpy, sex-phobic feminists” and their “kinky, stylish queer cousins” (6) is an issue that Lynne Huffer addresses and in some ironic sense attempts to ‘resolve’ in her 2013 book Are Our Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex. While she acknowledges that the opposition is clearly facile, it is the case that some amongst the queer community perceive feminists disparagingly as “convergentist,” attempting to “coalesce under one feminist umbrella an array of positions that complicate gender as a single category of analyses” (7); queer activists, on the other hand, tend toward “divergentism,” dedicated to rupture, to discontinuity, to the antisocial (even as I write this, these binary claims don’t ring entirely true). Huffer yearns for and endeavours to make possible through her book a feminism that is “only convergentist in a contestatory, rift-restoring sense,” a “ruptured convergence” that calls upon divergent positions to clash and clang together, to hang out together in shared spaces without necessarily coming to some sort of enforced consensus (8). Huffer wants women to tell stories that sit in uncomfortable relation to one another.

At least one of the things Huffer is enjoining us to remember, what queer feminism might bring to our feminisms and to our blog, is that although it is important to maintain common goals, this does not mean we always have to agree, always encourage each other, always enact the socialized impulse towards unconditional support and smiling and deference and happiness that is generally expected of us. I have to say I get a little sick at the nurturing impulse I witness (mostly between women) in academia–we have the tendency to tell each other things are okay, to hug, to support each other unconditionally, to celebrate with each other, and sometimes the whole goddamn lovefestness of it all gets to me. Maybe I’m just a hardened grumpycat New Yorker (impostering on a Canadian blog!). But I yearn for more disagreements, more stories that unsettle us and challenge us, more world-shaking opinions and perspectives that do not easily accord with our own received paradigms regarding what feminism is and can be.

Huffer locates this kind of “ruptured convergence” in close-reading and storytelling (72), which enable the emergence of specificity and disallow others from becoming versions of the same, mere reflections of ourselves: narrative performance becomes

an intersubjective model that, paradoxically, undoes the subject, [enlarging] the transformative potential of interpretation, where speaking subject, reader, and discursive traces themselves remain linked but porous, interdependent, and open to change. (72)

Linked porosity. Collective undoing. Huffer calls this an “ethics of bounded alterity” (72).

This week, after Rolling Stone published the horrifying UVA gang-rape story to which I am certainly not linking, Professor Bruce Holsinger (@bruceholsinger) began taking screenshots and tweeting some of the comments that appeared at the bottom of the article, raising more awareness of voices that might otherwise be overlooked. Although I’m not positive if this can be categorized as “queer feminism,” I think this is one possibility for the sort of activism we can practice.

Here (STUNNING), a victim of sexual assault at #UVA recalls the non-appearance of a Cville cop at a PO hearing! pic.twitter.com/GpacNVxNX2
— Bruce Holsinger (@bruceholsinger) November 20, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Here, a 2011 #UVA alum recalls sexual violence as “an accepted part of the fraternity culture.” pic.twitter.com/2aIHgAFIP0
— Bruce Holsinger (@bruceholsinger) November 20, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAnother recent excellent example of speaking out and creating rifts in a possibly convergentist manner is Dorothy Kim’s post on sexual harrassment in the academy, which sprung from an extended conversation on the Facebook wall of well-known medievalist Alexandra Gillespie (University of Toronto). In her Facebook thread–which responds to the Ghomeshi case and is still public if you are interested in spending an hour feeling increasingly hopeless about the state of the academy–dozens of female academics described instances of harassment involving (more) senior male scholars, speaking to “a long and persistent history of sexual harassment in medieval studies spaces,” as Kim puts it. And of course there’s #beenrapedneverreported and all of Erin’s understandable questioning of the appropriateness of social media for issues of restorative justice.

a long, persistent history of sexual harassment in medieval studies spaces – See more at: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2014/10/medieval-studies-sexual-harassment-and.html#sthash.HffR5eHx.dpuf,

Is this queer feminism? What does queer feminism look like? Really, I don’t know, and to be honest, this post has been extremely hard to write. I guess I’m mostly just opening up questions, as many of our blogs in this limited realm of the digital universe tend to do. Challenges to my [underdeveloped] reading of Huffer or thoughts on queer feminism are welcome in the comment section below. How do we open spaces for more diverse and intersectional voices, more uncomfortably convergent stories and perspectives? Let’s keep trying. For my next post, I will describe my recent experience with an LGBT Ally training course at Fordham, which will hopefully provide more possible answers to such questions.

adjuncts · grad school · notes from the non-tenured-stream · politics · professors

Repost of "The Teaching Class"

June 17, 2014April 19, 2017 bjohnstone1

Hey all. It’s been a really long time since I’ve posted. I know you’ve missed me dearly.

Life post-research trip has been fairly hectic and social-filled, in really very good ways, and I have been making strong progress on chapter one and heading back to the UK very soon (spoiled this year!) and feeling pretty okay about everything. Yet in the tumult of summer I have struggled to brew up a post, and even today the ingredients are looking a little scarce. I hope you’ve all been following Erin’s excellent Empathy Trap entries, and who knows what lies in store over the next few weeks.

Today I just want to repost an excellent, important, smart, compelling article on, yes, the rising phenomenon of the adjunct, or adjunctivitis (a name which to me still sounds pretty silly but oh well), that just came out in the fantastic Guernica Magazine (thanks to my pal Ali for drawing my attention to this!). Perhaps you’ve already seen it. Here CUNY adjunct Rachel Riederer discusses the contradictions inherent in being an underpaid and undersupported worker in the still ostensibly middle-class and even, in some senses, “sacred” job of university teaching. Some instructors have been facing backlash for including statements regarding the material realities of adjuncting in their syllabi; a common approach is to urge students not to call them “professor,” since the term remains hallowed and obscures the actual conditions of labor that the human beings responsible for educating future generations often face. Riederer cites a fellow adjunct:

“The conditions of labor must always be obscured,” she said. “Work is good, work is noble, work is disciplining, work is what gives you social meaning in your life, so you can’t say, ‘Oh, this job is killing me.’ And they certainly don’t ever want you to talk to other people and realize this is structural, this is planned, we are the effects of other people’s choices and perhaps we should have a bigger voice here.”

‘How can we complain about our work?,’ some may ask. Adjuncts may get paid less than managers at McDonald’s, but that does not mean they are not more fulfilled. Our jobs as educators on pleasant university campuses are by many accounts very good, no matter the material conditions of being there. But, as Riederer claims, “of course it’s possible to love what one does, be good at it, and still be exploited.” (or, I love this: “A professor should not be so vulgar as to talk about the material reality of her life.”)

There’s so much more to this article, but I’ll leave you to experience it on your own, and I’ll get back to conference-paper-drafting. Oh, and here’s a video of a parrot talking with a stuffed rabbit, which if you can get past the awful clickbaity title, is pretty great. Because animals.

being undone · coming out · family · feminism · politics

Identity Trouble

May 13, 2014April 19, 2017 bjohnstone14 Comments

Have y’all read this? It’s long, but oh-so-good: Jordana Rosenberg’s captivating essay-cum-personal memoir on making sense of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble as a young lesbian whose conservative mother cannot accept her sexuality. It’s a tale of abandonment, grief, confusion, and self-doubt, and anything I say about it here cannot really do it justice. Beyond the sheer pathos and engagability of her story, I think it admirable that Rosenberg deploys the notoriously jargony pages of Butler’s prose as an element in her life-narrative and struggle, thus challenging the artificial divide between critical and personal we as scholars tend to maintain. Further, she opens a space for “unknowing” as a crucial political and academic act, urging her students and her readers to embrace texts and situations that we don’t understand, which would allow us to internalize the value of risk, of humility, of un-understanding the world. Only once we learn to extend ourselves into unfamiliar situations will we learn to truly become ourselves and enact political transformation. The idea of empowerment as rooted in our own epistemological undoing is, I think, highly radical.

Rosenberg got me thinking about the issue of how open we should be to our parents, family, nonacademic relations, people we love: not just regarding our sexuality, but also regarding such potentially objectionable things as feminism, atheism, leftism, advocacy for reproductive rights, whatever. In making this kind of comparison between Rosenberg’s coming out and other kinds of coming out, I in no way mean to imply that the different forms are equal: sexual politics hold a particular transgressive valence for most conservative folk, and emerging LGBTQ people often meet with more violence than emerging feminists. Personally, I will never be disowned for my political beliefs, though I might still be faced with the pain of wounding people I love and possible subsequent alienation. Outing oneself is something we tend to applaud and support at all costs, and I am often ashamed to admit that I have not expressed to eveeyone the extent of how much my beliefs and convictions have evolved in the last few years. Interestingly, however, Rosenberg expresses an at least initial sense of regret after having come out to her mother: she claims that she “decided the whole project of coming out had been bankrupt – that [she] had been misled by identity politics into a contraction of the political field to the microuniverse of the bourgeois family.” She never mentions whether the clashing of these two very different worlds in the name of identity politics is something she ultimately supports, but her lifelong struggle with communicating with and forgiving her mother may give us some indication of how she felt. We are not left with a sense of redemption and self-discovery here; her story seems to answer the question of “Does it get better?” with a resounding “….not really.”

Perhaps, then, honesty is not always the best policy–especially involving cases that might incur irreparable damage upon your relationships and your future, and lead family members into believing you may be a lost cause, or into fearing for your soul. For me, it is an ongoing challenge to negotiate my identity as scholar and daughter, and deciding when it might be appropriate for my various selves to be made available to my various worlds at various times. So to the broader question: how do we ethically maintain our pursuit of feminist politics within the academy while minimizing emotional damage and trauma incurred upon people we love (who actually may believe we’re going to hell if they knew the extent of it! Can you imagine believing that about someone??)? How do we cultivate our identities as ethical scholars and loving daughters? What selves and what bodies should we exhibit to the different communities of which we are a part?

These questions do not have easy answers, just as Gender Trouble commits itself to refusing (or troubling) easy answers as well. As Rosenberg observes, Gender Trouble “has to be hard” because you

have to subject yourself to the difficulty of its language in order to begin to unstitch the only-seemingly coherent logic of gender, order, and discourse that you have grown accustomed to, that has been made natural to you – no, through which you, your gender, has been made to seem natural.

And so we are back to an issue I’ve blogged about before: the issue of committing ourselves to difficult language and struggling through our complicated networks of desires, relationships, and responsibilities. Reading Gender Trouble for the first time has to be hard–and so does composing our intersecting identities as scholars, daughters, wives, partners, mothers, teachers, and feminists. I’m trying, and good lord I might be failing in all sorts of ways, but that is all part of the impossible quest to discover the evasive and forever deferred “I.”

And I wonder if other readers have similar struggles.

grad school · politics · public engagement · structural solutions

In Defence of Turgid Prose: A[nother] Response to Nicholas Kristof

February 25, 2014April 19, 2017 bjohnstone13 Comments

A couple times recently, I’ve had to answer the very difficult question of what kind of “impact” my dissertation project might have on the world. The first time I was faced with it when I was required to present a very embryonic piece of my proposal at a university colloquium: one of my co-panelists, from the philosophy department, asked me what relevance my dissertation on medieval dream visions has to the contemporary world. The second time I’ve had to answer it was last week, during a phone interview for a prestigious fellowship. Both times this question came from other people working within the academic sphere, and thus people who we might assume are on “our side”–but both times, I stuttered and faltered for much of a substantive answer. It’s a question that I would like to work out better for myself and become more fluent in addressing–and I can, I think. Indeed, we should want the work we invest so much time and energy in to have some sort of life-changing quality, if only in terms of the degree to which we perceive and continually re-perceive the world around us.

But that said, as most of us know, the term “impact” carries a lot of baggage in the context of the modern, corporatizing, increasingly neoliberal institution; academics in the United Kingdom have been plagued with this word “impact,” often meeting with funding refusals if the impact of the research project is gauged to be minimal or, worse, politically threatening. The New York Times‘s Nicholas Kristof’s inflammatory article from last week on why academics have become “irrelevant” and “marginalized” calls upon this very language of impact as part of its attack: “A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” Much of the problem, he claims, is based on academic publishing’s composition standards, which to him promote “turgid prose,” and one should also note his embedded snub at leftism in universities, and his defense of Republican-dominated economics. He cites a Harvard historian who, as an exception to his rule, writes for The New Yorker: academic institutions produce “a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose.”

Kristoff’s editorial has produced a medley of variously excoriating, thoughtful, and defiant rebuttals–including Corey Robin‘s, which remarks upon Kristof’s complete disregard of the material conditions that prevent untenured scholars from fully engaging in the public sphere (“It’s the job market. It’s the rise of adjuncts. It’s neoliberalism”), and Laura Tanenbaum‘s, which manages to say almost as much as Robin does in 2% of the word count (The very form of her brief address, in intelligible and concise prose, launches a challenge to Kristof’s assumptions). The New Yorker also chimed in with the rather defeatest claim that it is not professors who are “marginalizing themselves,” as Kristof suggests, but “the system that produces and consumes academic knowledge is changing, and, in the process, making academic work more marginal.” Kristof’s comment that academics are “slow to cast pearls through Twitter and Facebook” has inspired its own string of disgruntled pearls in the form of the hashtag #engagedacademics. A month ago, I tried to plea for more engaged and reckless politics on Facebook. And additionally, Mr. Kristof, may I hold up for your scrutiny the existence of Hook & Eye (which, though powered by women writing within the academic institution, is certainly not confined to that institution in terms of readership or concerns, as I think each contributor has demonstrated at various points).

I have one more cry to add to the anti-Kristof chorus, in particular against his attack on what he deems turgid prose. Is academic writing so turgid? And if it sometimes attains a level of obscurity, is that always a bad thing? Of course, we all want to be heard and understood, and our prose should never be obscure for the sake of obscurity–only the worst kind of writers opt for flowery writing in order to doll up a weak argument. But sometimes, I submit, obscurity can serve a political purpose. Faced with a governing institution that demands we translate the value of our research into economic and marketable terms, it may be a political and ethical act to resist the urge to simplify and make our research legible to the vocabulary of merit and progress. This idea is not mine, of course–I’m drawing it from none other than Judith Butler in her excellent essay “Ordinary, Incredulous,” in the brand new book, The Humanities and Public Life, published by Fordham University Press (omg, an academic press engaged in the public sphere! Shocking!). As she defiantly puts it, “[i]f obscurity is sometimes the necessary corrective to what has become obvious, so be it” (33). Her essay addresses the problem of speaking out in favor of the humanities without falling into the very language of instrumentality that is used by its detractors:

Socially and politically, we are in a bind because the imperative to ‘save’ the humanities often propels us into states of urgency in which we imagine that the only future left to us will be one secured precisely through those metrics of value that are most in need of critical re-evaluation. Oddly, our very capacity for critically re-evaluating is what cannot be measured by the metrics by which the humanities are increasingly judged. This means that the resource we need to save the humanities is precisely one that has been abandoned by the metrics that promise to save the humanities if only we comply. (32-33)

This is the double bind: we want to prove to funding organizations and the government that the work of the humanities is valuable. But in order to do that, we need to fulfill their criteria for what constitutes value and what doesn’t–we need to speak the language that the neoliberal institution demands of us, and that language is often coded in instrumental terms of tangibility and productivity that are antithetical to the very nature of the humanities. What we do must have concrete use value that is recognizable to the broader world. But as Butler describes, much of the value of the humanities lies in their ability foster critical re-evaluation, to learn to read and reread the world and texts around us–to question and challenge the pervasive “climate of the obvious” (25) that assumes that profitable “impact” is something to be desired. So we resist “use value” and tangibility through our practices of reading and critiquing, and these critical capacities are antithetical, indeed actually dangerous, to the metrics that are offered to the humanities as saving resources. So, in short, if we want to save the humanities we have to abandon the humanities.

Butler asks, “[i]s instrumentality the only way we have of thinking about what it means to make a difference?” (29). She challenges us to think about the notion of impact in different ways, to redefine what it means to speak to the “public” and to reclaim the humanities as a valuable–I hesitate to say profitable–resource for society (and if anyone is a public intellectual, it’s J.B.!). Sometimes our careful and deliberate critical re-evaluations of society may result in prose that is viewed by some, like Kristof, as “turgid.” But through this putatively obscure (but actually just nuanced, evaluative, and sensitive) prose, we may learn to challenge and perhaps redefine the metrics of of the obvious that are forcing us, in this current difficult academic climate, to give an account of ourselves as academics working within the discipline of the humanities.

adjuncts · grad school · PhD · politics · slow academy

Adjunctivitis and the PhD

February 11, 2014April 19, 2017 bjohnstone12 Comments

You guys (/girls!), things are bleak. As I tumbled down the rabbit hole of related articles for this post, I found myself variously in need of taking a shower, having a drink, listening to this song on repeat, something. This post was hard to write.

You may know that on January 24, the US House Education and the Workforce Democratic Staff released a report on contingent faculty in higher education in America entitled “The Just-In-Time Professor.” Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Ed observes that this report “marks the first time Congress has so formally acknowledged a situation that adjunct activists have long deemed exploitative.” It’s based on an eForum that Democrat Rep. George Miller of California initiated in November 2013, asking adjuncts to respond to an online survey, and 845 adjunct faculty in 41 states (some of whom have been working for over 30 years, and some only a semester) responded. Here’s what the report concludes, worth typing in full:

The eForum responses were consistent with news reports and other research that indicate contingent faculty earn low salaries with few or no benefits, are forced to carry on harried schedules to make ends meet, have no clear path for career growth, and enjoy little to no job security. The contingent faculty trend appears to mirror trends in the general labor market toward a flexible, ‘just-in-time’ workforce, with lower compensation and unpredictable schedules for what were once considered middle-class jobs. The trend should be of concern to policymakers both because of what it means for the living standards and work lives of those individuals we expect to educate the next generation of scientists, entrepreneurs, and other highly skilled workers, and what it may mean for the quality of higher education itself. (2)

Yikes (and AMEN). The numbers are shocking, or at least may be to those outside academia: as Flaherty’s article summarizes, in spite of claims that adjunct profs are better educators than tenured profs, 98 percent of respondents believed they were “missing opportunities to better serve their students because of the demands on their schedule.” Median respondent salary was $22 041, and on average, respondents had been adjuncting for 10 years. Most respondents (89 percent) teach at two or more institutions, and they often rely on family members and government assistance to make ends meet. Further, 75 percent have no access to health insurance (you may also know that in response to the Affordable Care Act, which requires employers to provide full-time workers access to health insurance, many American institutions have cut maximum course loads for contingent workers). A whopping 49 percent of respondents stated that they teach between 8 and 10 classes a semester, though it’s important to note that this is based on those respondents who provided such information, which is difficult to measure given their constantly fluctuating workloads. Adjuncts often do not have offices or access to secretarial help, and must foot the bill for classroom books and handouts. In many cases they have staggering debt leftover from their own postsecondary education that they cannot afford to pay off.

Adjuncts are, on average, the highest educated and lowest paid group of workers in the country.

Here’s just a tiny sample of their stories:

During this, we lost our home. We could no longer afford to make the payments on my poverty wages and my domestic partner’s wages from her job. We moved in with a friend and now had to commute an hour each way and a half hour between schools. I was driving three hours a day and teaching five days a week switching colleges during the day. I had no office space, so I often carried all of my work with me. Piles and piles of manilla [sic] folders in the back of my failing car. (8)

During the time I taught at the community college, I earned so little that I sold my plasma on Tuesdays and Thursdays to pay for her daycare costs. Seriously, my plasma paid for her daycare because I taught English as adjunct faculty. (8)

[W]ith two small children, living with food stamps in my mother-in-law’s house, I just can’t continue to subject my family to this. It is beyond embarrassing. (9)

During the Fall of 2013 I taught [a course at my school for three days a week] while working 40 hours night shift at Walmart to make ends meet. My take home remuneration for [the] course was $796 per month for the duration of the semester. I literally was paying the college to teach the course! (15)

I taught four course[s] in the fall, but was not told until the day before spring semester started that I wouldn’t have any classes for the spring. I was unemployed with no notice. (22)

Living with friends/family, selling one’s bodily fluids, subsisting off of food stamps, working at Walmart, dealing with sudden unemployment. This devastating report could signal the beginning of hope for institutional change, maybe, perhaps…or at least the issue is beginning to receive official state recognition. I was happy to see that PBS, who has labelled the issue “adjunctivitis,” is featuring adjunct faculty this week as part of their Making Sense series, and Paul Solman’s 8-minute video report is a succinct summary of the problems facing the contingent labour force today. (n.b. around 3:40, Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education blithely declares that “in some disciplines, particularly occupationally oriented fields, you may be ahead by having an adjunct faculty member who’s got extraordinary levels of real-world experience.” Wait, what? Who? Where?)

Along with the release of the report on Jan. 24, adjunct professor and unionization activist Arik Greenberg presented his story in Washington. After 11 years working as an adjunct, Greenberg is burdened with a tremendous amount of student debt and is in danger of losing his family home. “I’ve followed the rules to realize the American dream,” he says, “but I am now living the American nightmare.”

Given the urgent nature of these issues, I don’t find articles like this one, which was popping up in my social media feed this week, especially helpful. Written by an adjunct faculty member who seems unaware of the eForum report, and featuring an image of a youthful woman gazing hopefully off into the distance, sun shining on her face, this is the story of one adjunct professor who happens to be, like, okay in terms of prepwork, pay, commute, and institutional resources, despite being a precarious worker at two colleges with no guarantee of continued employment (and there is also no mention of how much time or support she has for her own research). The clincher: she has a husband in higher education who “makes a decent salary.”

What’s the purpose of circulating articles like this? We need to address these problems, not just convince ourselves that we will be fine as long as we find a partner who makes more money than we do. I’m angry and frightened, and stories like Marshall’s only lessen my fears by a modicum, as they are clearly (as the author herself admits) the exception to the rule. My partner and I are both students. We have no job security, our families are not wealthy, we have leftover student loans from undergrad. The reality is that our dissertations may be academically original but professionally irrelevant, and by the time we finish–roughly two years from now–we will have been in graduate school (MA & PhD) for about eight years. What are we supposed to do?

There are no easy answers, of course, but I would love to hear from you. Adjuncts, what are your stories? Are they more like Greenberg’s or Marshall’s? Do you have any advice for us PhDs? Should we all prepare for #alt-ac and #post-ac careers? Is there anything you wish you had done differently? Please, let’s continue to generate a database of stories, outrage, and advice as we address the abysmal state of a profit-mongering institution that relies on contingent workers for, on average, 76 percent of American educational positions.

election · media · politics · popular culture · women

Mission accomplished?

February 7, 2013April 19, 2017 erinewunker3 Comments

There has been a lot of media fanfare about the status of women in recent weeks. With the final episode of Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, the New York Times featured an article “Tina Fey Signs Off, Broken Barriers Behind Her” in which Alessandra Stanley elaborates on the milestones Fey has reached, and the doors she has opened for other female comedians.

“When ’30 Rock’ had its premiere in 2006 Ms. Fey was that rare thing, a female writer starring in her own prime-time network show.” – Alessandra Stanley

In Canada, we have our own little version of women’s liberation supposedly realized, with 5 provinces and 1 territory currently featuring a female Premier, a majority of Canadians are now governed by a women.

Kathleen Wynne

Kathleen Wynne (Lib) – Ontario

Alison Redford (PC) – Alberta

Kathy Dunderdale (PC) – Newfoundland and Labrador

Christy Clark (Lib) – British Columbia

Pauline Marois (PQ) – Quebec

Eva Aariak – Nunavut

Politics, like comedy writing/production, has pretty much been a man’s game. So what should we make of the sudden proliferation of female leaders?

Is it time to be cautiously optimistic that talented women are not just breaking barriers, but changing the industries in which they work, permanently opening them up to a broader spectrum of participants? Is this it for the boys’ club?

While Stanley admits that other female comedians have also made it in the past (Lucille Ball, Carole Burnett, Roseanne Barr), she suggests that there is something different about the impact that Fey has had, having paved the way for other comedians like Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation) and Whitney Cummings (Whitney; Two Broke Girls).

Has Tina Fey really broken the glass ceiling in television production, or is she just this generation’s Roseanne Barr? Maybe every generation gets one female performer that makes it through into a position of relative power. Overall numbers of women in comedy remain low (don’t believe me, go to a comedy club tonight and count them), so a handful of successful female comedians on television is perhaps proportional to their overall participation in the industry. In that case, until numbers increase overall, not much will change, no matter how successful individuals like Fey become.

Michaelle Jean

David Johnston

And what of our female politicians? There is a precedent in Canadian politics for women to be handed parties when they are imploding – for example, Kim Campbell for the post-Mulroney Progressive Conservatives. The argument could certainly be made that Kathleen Wynne has been handed a hopeless case.

I worry is that this random moment in which women happen to hold powerful positions will be taken as a sign of mission accomplished. We might believe equality has been won, even if in the coming years, overall numbers of women in positions of power don’t actually improve all that much. This week, as John Kerry took up the position of Secretary of State in the US (formerly held by Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton), he joked that the question on everyone’s mind is “Can a man do this job?” We might have said the same thing a few years ago about Canada’s Governor General after both Adrienne Clarkson and Michaelle Jean proved very capable and popular in the position, but then current GG David Johnston looks a lot like every other accomplished, grey-haired, white-man to hold the position prior to 1999.

Are we really going places fast? Is Clinton the next President? Or was this just a blip on the gender equality radar? Will it be back to business as usual?