—Katina

I posed two questions in the syllabus:

How might we think of care not only as an affective practice, but also an intellectual one? How does caring change our ways of thinking/knowing?

To begin thinking about these questions, I want to share a little bit of Vrinda Dalmiya’s Caring to Know, which is available from the library with your CUNY login.

“Caring and knowing are thought to be independent of each other. Indeed, the typical Enlightenment knower is trained to be careful not to care for the object of knowledge. She knows most effectively when she knows non-affectively, dispassionately, and impartially. Subsequently, an analysis of what it is to know is kept separate from an analysis of what it is to care. Going against this trend, the argument of this book is that caring is not the ‘other’ of reason and that our lived experiences of caring and being cared for can be useful resources for truth-seeking. Care, then, lies at the heart of not only ethical relationships but also successful cognitive enquiry.”

—Vrinda Dalmiya, Caring to Know, chapter 1

“Of course, existing literature already points to the inevitable entanglement of care with knowing at least in one direction. Whether knowers always need to care or not, carers always need to know. We cannot attend to a person’s needs in caring for her without first grasping what they are. […] A care-based epistemology bridges this conceptual gap between good knowing and good caring. Thus, it is not enough that mothers as caregivers be knowers. Rather, the pristine world of cognitive enquiry must soil itself in the messy world of mothering. Care practices—it is now suggested—are an epistemological resource; good knowing and its analysis are modelled on successful caring and its theorization.”

—Vrinda Dalmiya, Caring to Know, chapter 1

Thinking with and through these ideas, I also want to spend some time today talking about the question of attunement. When we spoke in class last week about pacing and about moving at the speed of trust, we spent some time grappling with whether that speed was always slower than the norm, or if sometimes speeding up might be the thing that is needed. We talked about the relational foundations of trust. This is where I think attunement comes in—it is not only about being in relationship with others, but about a sensitive listening, a watchful awareness of an other’s needs.

If that is the case, how can we ascribe value to attunement in an academic setting? In a capitalist setting? And would we want to?

For further reading on this topic, I highly recommend “Attunement in the Cracks: Feminist Collaboration and the University as Broken Machine” by Natalie Loveless and Carrie Smith (who will be co-facilitating the Inkcap discussion on April 5). Which, in retrospect, I probably should have put on the syllabus—maybe we can add it to a future week.

— by Jen

I really appreciated Connection Established because of the way it clearly illustrates the complexity of caring for others while needing care yourself. I also appreciated that the things in this story that felt like the most important instances of care are actually (feel free to argue with me on this…) some of the simplest: stopping to talk with someone; finding moments for personal connections; recognizing that prioritizing someone else’s needs doesn’t necessarily mean you’re deprioritizing your own (care doesn’t have to be a zero-sum activity).

Translating some of those concepts over to the introduction of Design Justice, I can see this kind of care in the design firm And Also Too, which believes that “absolutely anyone can participate meaningfully in design.” I’m interested, then, in what the mechanisms are to facilitate listening / making space for anyone to participate, when the typical methods for design work haven’t made space for everyone.

Empathy is an ideology was a really interesting read; I appreciate the way that Jade Davis articulates the weaponization of empathy. And, I agree with their statement that “empathy does not lead to radical action.” I suppose that I want to push back on that a little: empathy doesn’t necessarily lead to radical action, but it could. And, a lack of empathy also doesn’t lead to radical action…but, it could. I suppose the problem comes in assuming that empathy is enough; that empathy is care; that empathy is an end point rather than part of the process towards action and change. While reading this piece I was thinking a lot about Gloria Ladson-Billings’ writing on culturally relevant pedagogy (summarized fairly well here; also in this fairly short interview from 2022). The cultural competence and critical consciousness elements of her work rest on empathy, but I think she’s articulating that we need cultural competence (empathy) as well as critical consciousness (which I read as action, rooted in empathy). So what I’m trying to say is: I can agree that empathy isn’t enough, but I’m not convinced that empathy in itself needs to be read as quite so negative is I thought Davis does.

Adrianna

I’m still making my way through the readings for next week but as I do my mind has been shifting in different directions. I think that as I continue reading I will most likely have other thoughts and questions. To do something different, I’ve decided to use my post to write my initial reaction instead of my final reflection. I just read “Empathy is an Ideology” and am now working on “Connection Established”.

This image from “Empathy is an Ideology” really stood out to me. It made me recall a discussion from another class I had today. We were discussing the sexism behind telling a woman to smile. During class we also talked about the downside of care as a feminist praxis. How sometimes (in early literature) those that performed care often uphold patriarchy because of their (gendered) line of work. I’ll stop here because I don’t want to digress too much… Now that I played around with the interactive story in “Connection Established” and read the Manifesto, I’m once more thinking about the “dark side” of care. As I say this, I’m referring to this quote form the “Labor” section in the Manifesto “…we’re seeing staggering job losses—over 650,000 since the start of the pandemic—with low-paid staffers, workers of color, and women suffering the majority of these cutbacks. In other words, the workers who already take on the majority of care work, both at home, in our schools, and in our economy at large, are the first to be put on the chopping block“. It seems that those who perform care are often uncompensated for it and their care goes unrecognized.

Further down in the Manifesto’s “Audience” section they write to those in positions of power. “If you are a decision maker, a person with power, a dean, provost, VP or president at UVA reading this: the following are not suggestions or requests, but demands…We want to remind you that you do have power. Many of you have people on your payrolls. Some of you can grant your workers healthcare. You can do away with grades. You can leverage UVA’s strong financial position to borrow more money for workers. You can use UVA’s immense resources to lobby politicians. We all have levers we can pull.” This made me go back to Moya Bailey’s article and her call for community building. It’s clear that everyone, including those in power, needs to work together in order to have a fully functional community of care capable of overriding precarity.

As I continue reading I find myself thinking about the following questions: Who performs care? Who should be performing care in order for it to be effective? Do we consider care as something positive, negative or both?

Also, I’m curious to know how others reacted to the picture above…

Tuka Al-Sahlani

First and foremost, thank you Adrianna, Brie, and Nelson for these readings! I resisted highlighting everything, especially in Bailey’s article. Also, Adrianna, I very much appreciated the annotated pdf! I need to do this for my students! Thank you for setting this example. 

Now on to Bailey…

I want to agree with everything Bailey says because  it resonates with me as a PhD student, a DH researcher, a former K-12 teacher, a parent, and just living in New York City, but I kept thinking of the affordances and privileges that are required to make Bailey’s proposal feasible. I had this conversation with my observer only yesterday: pace and funding. First, this being a post observation conference, I asked her where I could improve and she mentioned I could consider slowing down, although my students were able to match my pace, it would be good to consider pace. I agreed with her because, well, as a trained K-12 teacher, one is trained to meet objectives and complete the curriculum and I need to remind myself I am in an institution (despite our grievances with it) that allows me more room to conduct a course with more flexibility. Second, as a graduate teaching fellow, she asked what I anticipated to do in the future and I told her I am more concerned of doing as much as possible with these five years of guaranteed funding. This brings me back to Bailey: I believe in the proposal and know that DH is exemplary in nurturing movement at “the speed of trust”, but this will require more than a community to create an ideology of process vs product or practicing “ethics of pace”. 

On “ One Way to Think with Precarity in the Classroom”…

I chose to read this article because although I know precarity exists in the classroom, I wanted to read an intentional implementation of it in the course. I decided to copy the quotes I favored and my thoughts. 

“mutual accountability and community” I want to be brave enough to do more. 

“What do they need to learn, then, to inhabit this world well?” Shouldn’t this be the purpose of all higher education, if not the essence of education itself? 

“such as precarity, can liberate the curriculum from canonical restrictions” love it

“inside/grievable – outside/precarious” I find this nothing to signify whose life should we value and I’m reminded of all the injustices ( sanctioned and unsanctioned to stem from this expandable quality of the life on the outside.

“ A course on precarity keeps history and the state of the present live and “in play” in ways that focusing on the -ism alone might not. “ This is an actionable item–something to think about and apply. 

“Precarious Bodies accomplishes this by engaging phenomenology and its tools, connecting to issues of precarity and its differential distribution, and inviting students to consider the interplay between what they’re learning in class, how it meshes with their experience (or challenges them), and how they’ll take that learning into the wider world.” I think I was trying to express this last week when I said we need this course “Power, Precarity, and Care to be a core course offering–this is why?

I look forward to our class discussion!

by Sean

(Swear words ahoy!)

We have to watch what we say in a professional environment, but how much we have to censor ourselves can vary based on who we’re dealing with. 

Case in point, my former supervisor, Louis, was like me in that he was blunt and had very little filter. Also, he was a linguist and so am I, so he understood what I do in the Voice and Diction classroom and approved. 

So, when I decided to start teaching the use of the word “fucking” as an infix, I knew he would have my back.* Students really enjoy this lesson, and it works in the class because I discuss it during discussions of word stress, which in English, is both dry and complicated. It breaks up the class and reinforces the idea that the things we’re discussing aren’t just theoretical. 

When I told Louis I was teaching this lesson, he laughed and said that it was great. 

Unfortunately, Louis passed away in 2020, and was replaced by someone else, Andy, who doesn’t really understand what I do. He has a much different view of our area and major, and, frankly, I don’t know how I fit into it. 

As a result, I’ve stopped teaching this lesson. I don’t know how Andy would react to it. Rather than deal with whatever fallout would come from a discussion of this, it was just easier to drop the lesson. 

It’s unfortunate because I think it’s a great lesson, but I don’t need the drama of dealing with someone saying that what I’m teaching isn’t worth focusing on. 

*Short form explanation: English speakers insert the word “fucking” as an intensifier – for instance “incredible” is great but “in-fucking-credible” is MORE. Inserting “fucking” into a word follows rules and is predictive. It is inserted before the primary stressed syllable of a word. For instance, the base word is “fantastic”… the correct inflected form is “fan-fucking-tastic”: it’s not fantast-fucking-ic”. Speakers of English know this without explicitly knowing the rules involved. 

db

I was really struck by Bailey’s reading on the Ethics of Pace. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to move, at times, against the expectations of productivity and efficiency, and to move more in sync with something…more intrinsic? more in tune with our learning, growth, and connections? i appreciate that Bailey called in the work of adrienne maree brown, which got me thinking of her work around Pleasure Activism. what if our labor was tied to our deepest yes within ourselves, rather than away from it, as Audre Lorde teaches us in the uses of the erotic? this feels so much more humanizing to me, and suddenly, the care piece of our class feels that much more crucial. how do we resist the precarity? the abuses of power? through these deep radical connections with one another, and…with ourselves.

I was also reminded of this piece: https://youtu.be/qgAaIBlq-cs

Katina

Thanks so much to Adrianna, Brie, and Nelson for compiling such interesting readings and questions. I found myself (digitally) scribbling all over “One Way to Think about Precarity in the Classroom,” the interview between Sidra Shahid and Becky Vartabedian. Some of the thoughts/questions it raised for me:

• I was struck by this quote:
  “In the classroom setting whiteness as an orientation was still the default, not because any members of our cohort had bad intentions or were attempting to uphold it, but due to the pure nature of the system of higher education.”
  How would you describe our class’s orientation, thinking about the term in the way that Ahmed uses it (a point of departure, looking into a future direction)? What have we disrupted, and in what ways have we maintained the status quo?
• Community agreements. I’ve often thought about developing one in a classroom or team context, but have never followed through. Have any of you used community agreements in class? How has that gone? What did your agreements look like? If we were to build a class agreement now, what might it look like?
• The idea of “latent curriculum in every classroom that needs somebody/somebodies other than me to bring it to bear.” I love this; it articulates something that I deeply value but haven’t seen expressed in the same way, the fact that a classroom is a space of mutual and reciprocal learning that changes depending on who is present and what they bring to the space. What are some examples of “latent curriculum” that have emerged so far in our class?

Looking forward to the discussion later today!

Disclaimer: I’m posting this on the course blog of the other course I’m taking.

On Thursday, the college president’s office sent out a mass email apologizing for “the misrepresentation of our students on the LaGuardia website.”

The administration had already taken down the webpage in question before this apology was published, so I had to go looking for the offending webpage. I turned to Twitter, where I found a copy, which I’ve posted here. 

The text starts off fine:

LaGuardia Community College students are not what most people have in mind when they think of college students.

If it stopped there, I don’t think anyone would have cared. Unfortunately, here was the next  sentence: 

Our students are frequently from low-income households, with limited to no skills, few or no social connections, and no manners, faced with language barriers or immigrant challenges, often older, sometimes needing a high school equivalency diploma and balancing work and education. 

Nan, this is wildly offensive. You could rephrase this as, “Our students are the dregs of society  and aren’t we spectacular for trying to civilize them?” (I do not believe this, to be clear) There is absolutely a tone of white savior-dom here and a great deal of self-congratulation. 

While this would be awful at any time, right now, when the student population has crashed, this is especially damning.

Everyone I’ve spoken to who has looked at this have had the same reaction: we are horrified and we have questions. Let’s start with these:

Who wrote this? How did this get approved? Who looked at this and said, “Yup, This is perfect! Let’s go!”?

Now, let’s look at the apology:

Here’s a relevant quote 

The inappropriate and offensive content on the Student Profiles page was written in 2018 by outside fundraising consultants who are no longer affiliated with the college. How it was allowed to see the light of day is a mystery to us.

So,…

1. This was written in 2018? The administration is either saying that this webpage has been up for five years, or the college has been sitting on this thing and decided to unleash it now. It is almost certainly the second, but having it in storage for FIVE YEARS is … an interesting choice. Even if it was not looked at while archived (which I can understand), how did someone somewhere not check it before it was posted. 
2. Outside fundraising consultants? I doubt this one. This feels a little too personal, like the person writing the copy was burned out and/or angry at the college. We have been on emergency footing since 2020, and that wears on you. 
3. The last part… they mystery thing… I do believe that our administration is that clueless, though I’m guessing that they could find out if they wanted to. IT carefully controls who has the ability to edit the website. However, I read this as “We’re going to claim that this is a MYSTERY so that no one has to take responsibility for it.” And, yes, in my opinion heads should roll over this. 

— Jen

Thanks so much for this reading, Adrianna and Brie and Nelson! I really enjoyed spending time with it.

Bailey’s note that “graduate students are expected to enter the job market with at least one published peer-reviewed article” made me pause and think about an incident that happened to me when I finished my MLIS and started working as a librarian. I think that different students have different experiences at different institutions, but I had attended graduate school for library science at a very research-focused institution; I wasn’t really aware of that at the time (and honestly, I regret it a little). The need to publish peer-reviewed articles was drilled into us so heavily; I graduated in a panic about how I could start publishing.

I started replying to CFPs. Sure enough, I was invited to submit full articles — two peer-reviewed submissions, as well as two chapters for a non-peer-reviewed book. The immediate problem was that I no longer had any academic affiliations — I was running the library of a small research institute — and so I had no way to access the literature I needed to cite. My quick solution was to audit a university class so that, for one semester, I could access the university’s databases. I cannot believe that the “logical” solution was to add more to my plate, so that I could do the things I’d already committed to.

The longer-term problem, however, was that no one at my fancy graduate school had taught us, while instilling us with anxiety about publishing, that some publishing opportunities are not good. I’m still proud of one of the articles I wrote during that period; it was really positively shaped and supported by the editors and peer reviewers. However, a second article from that time is one that I’m generally embarrassed to mention; it became clear that the editor didn’t have peer reviewers available and just had her own graduate student review it (thanks to non-anonymized tracked changes). That student really couldn’t give any useful feedback. I wanted (and needed) peer review for that article; I didn’t really get it, and I think the final product is sub-par.

I had proposed a chapter for a trade publication on libraries, and the editor invited me to write two chapters instead of one. I wrote them; she replied that they weren’t at all what she wanted and asked me to re-write them, which I did. She then rejected them entirely. There was a really clear lack of communication about what she ultimately wanted, but also, I later realized that this editor had a reputation. She was notorious for flooding the market with sub-par “how to” guides for librarians; she was also notorious for issuing CFPs for books that ultimately didn’t get published. How many other people worked hard to produce content for her, for projects that didn’t materialize? And, do I actually trust that she didn’t take my (or others’) rejected content and use it in other ways? No one told us in graduate school that this could happen.

What I was thinking about while reading Bailey’s note on the heightened anxiety around urgency of peer-review publishing and similar tasks, is how this anxiety causes us to put ourselves in harmful situations. If I hadn’t had a clearer sense of myself and known that I was ultimately a decent writer, my early experiences with publishing in my field would’ve likely left me unwilling to try it again. There aren’t really support groups for scholars who have to deal with terrible editors.

As a possible prompt for thinking more about this in class, some of the things I think about a lot as someone who continues to write but is also in an editorial role:

• What are the small things that editors can do to make the publishing process more transparent and supportive?
• What are parts of the publishing process that are traditionally understood as urgent but could, in fact, be slowed down?
• What changes to the publishing process would make it more inclusive?

A bonus post from Sean

On Tuesday, I brought up that a Digital Humanities class wouldn’t happen at LaGuardia. I think I should explain why in some detail. 

1. We don’t have that many people interested in it, and those that might be are scattered across areas and departments. 
2. I would prefer to have support from our area coordinator and department chair. I don’t think I could get that right now. 
3. Even if I had their approval, I would face a fight at the departmental curriculum committee. Some of their questions would be on point, such as what skills would this class highlight, but there would also be fights over turf. We have ten (soon to be eleven) different major programs in the Humanities Department, and I would be asked why the DH class should be in the Communication Studies Area, why shouldn’t it be in any of the other ones?*
4. When last I checked, when we propose new courses now, we also have to figure out where it fits into Pathways and start that process, too.** 
5. So, after doing all of that, I would need to go to the College Wide Curriculum Committee. Turf issues would likely show up again. After all, the folks in the English Department and in the Modern Languages could say that a DH class should be under their auspices as well.***
6. Finally, if I got it through all of that, since my full time position is non-instructional instructional staff, and my teaching is an adjunct, there is no guarantee I would get to teach it. Any of the full timers could request to teach it and bump me.****

*When an adjunct and I proposed Intro to Sports Media, the New Media Studies and Film and TV people said we had no business doing this. We had to rework the proposal to “Sports COmmunication”, focusing on podcasting and radio work, which has worked out, but the Film and Studies person actually went to the Dept Chair to try to squash the proposal all together. 

**And this process isn’t a guarantee. I have tried at least six times to get Voice and Diction into Pathways and I’ve never had success. At first, because it has a focus on linguistics, I tried Scientific World. I was told it was too “creative”. Then I tried Creative Expression, but I was told that there was too much linguistics material in it. In sum, Pathways is an idiotic system.

***After the departmental curriculum committee mess with Sports Comm, I expected a turf fight at college-wide because our English Dept has a journalism option. They didn’t, though, mostly because their work is mostly written word, and we avoided that with the podcast assignments. 

****This almost happened with Sports Comm. One of our full timers went to our then coordinator saying that even though she had no background in sports, she should teach it because she wanted to teach all the courses we offer. Our coordinator said no, but he passed away a few years ago, and the person in charge now might not feel the same way.