work & refuge -

[a pic of me and the group at Lake Arrowhead]

In April and May, I worked with a group of graduate student who had won competitive grants from the UC Humanities Research Institute to write public-facing essays on the theme of work and refuge. They participated in a larger set of initiatives exploring refuge and its refusals. After having met only once via Zoom for a workshop, we found ourselves together at the University of California's well-appointed lakeside vacation cabins. I have a suspicion that my presence may have been a kind of glitch in the budget. But however it happened, the graduate students opened their hearts to the process.

We played a game of Moniker, walked around the privatized lake, cashed a few bottles of wine from TJs and talked about their ideas. This stimulating set of conversations resulted in a series of luminous essays, now out on Foundry. The group has generously credited me, but I'm the one who should be grateful to them, not only for the experience, but also for giving me an excuse to carve out the time to read each piece in the series.

Writing is work. Especially as an editor and an instructor, I am exquisitely aware of how much it takes to envision and execute a good essay and of how that work is being devalued in today's landscape. I'm also exquisitely aware of the way that knowledge is created in epistemic communities. Oftentimes, the corporate university and extractive media systems use labor of love discourse to pressure scholars and writers into doing too much for too little. We become complicit in our own exploitation because we do love the work. And yet, sometimes supportive communities form, around a lake, like drops of water coalescing. It takes a lot of administrative attention and luck to give people the resources and the space they need. And yet. And yet. Sometimes you get lucky.

I can't do them all justice here, so go read all of these essays, but:

Rosie Dwyer's sound art, in her meditation on university labor in "Sounding Graduate Student Work," brought me into sharp, embodied awareness of my longing for human conversation.

Sammy Solis wrote about the impossible exhaustion of trying to separate the personal from the scholarly in always-already politicized spaces and places, in "Oversharing in the Academic Borderlands."

In "The University’s Two Bodies: Crip Labors of, and Beyond, Survival," Andrew David King links ableism to the constraints of a false Cartesian dualism in the space of knowledge production. He pushes against those constraints, in an effort to imagine a way of flourishing "that accounts for the desires as well as the needs of disabled and non-disabled bodyminds."

In " Whose “World” Is It? Global Educational Justice in the Age of Neoliberalism," Joshua Tan names the international universities' colonial tendencies and defamiliarizes its power structures. Side-stepping another false dualism, he gets outside of an easy "Brand USA"/"Bad USA" dichotomy to recognize an international scholarly community that wants to reclaim "the university as a space to reimagine more just futures."

In "Time to Go South: Memory Work and Political Dialogues from South America" Yuri Fraccaroli writes that"even the most disruptive and critical academic work relies on unequal relations of power." And yet. They encounter the bold and transgressive political work of a Black Brazilian trans activist, Neon Cunha, in its relevance to the current context. "By engaging with shared memories of dictatorship, violence, and disappearance, these activists transform the persistence of fascist ideologies into opportunities for contemporary rights claims." They bring the archive into material contact with the grounded conditions for action.

In "Workers On Strike Find Abundance Through Mutual Aid," Jeremy Rud feels along the sharp edges of belonging and struggling at a university--in a union, in a mutual aid collective helping refugees and migrants, on the picket lines. The essay comes down to an elegaic meditation on a strike kitchen and a backpack full of persimmons. I think of Jeremy, and of mutual aid and collective experience, every time I see or taste a persimmon now. What a gift.