Its ironic that CES plenary speakers make these wonderfully radical calls to critical thinking & action yet they are highly professionalized & successfully entrenched in the academic industrial complex, as complicit institutionally as those at whom they level…
“Come on CES where are the critical voices of your very own conference/professional/ journal/careerist aspirations?”
I left a tenure-track academic position because I could no longer sustain a livelihood that left no time for creative and collaborative practice within alternative, independent spaces. Since then, I’ve participated in and supported an array of decolonizing creative-activist organizations.
I organized a panel for CES, got accepted, and looked forward to attending, for many, many reasons. But, as an adjunct instructor, the financial costs of attending got too high. Actually, the psychological costs got too high. I’m still recovering from a re-traumatizing experience in the job market, where I learned how little value I am to people who handle money in the academy. I canceled my trip and handed over the reins of my panel to a younger colleague who just got a good tenure-track job. I am rechanneling my professionalizing aspirations, the ones heavily internalized as a transgenerational gamble for security and survival that kept me in my tenure-track job too long.
I know a little bit of what it took to get CES off the ground, and the financial constraints set by the state of California that made it impossible to offer travel fellowships for people like me to attend.
This isn’t a defense of any plenary speaker or the conference.
This isn’t even an argument.
For nearly a decade, I spent my time in the tenure-track position building ethnic studies and it was a losing gamble for job security.
It also cracked open the contradictions in my identity and social position within the neoliberal university.
I am certainly not the only or the first person to have this experience. The ones who still have their jobs, or have their jobs because of our labor, or kept their jobs while pushing us out, are certainly alive and kicking.
I know conference organizers who have a bigger vision than this academic meeting.
I know I have one.
PLUM POSITIONS
for CM, JH, AVS
Women of color are
Often fired or leave
They get plum positions
Yes they do all hurrah
After so much hustling but
Some are not agreeable
To security know too much
Too little I write this wired
You are like the light wind
To security loved by all
I desire wounds sealed up
Forever women of color are
Often fired or leave
Then pop up now and again
In the afterlife of this dream
Crushing acorns beneath
Their feet facing true wind
Obits seal true
Cause: ABD WOC UC
Berkeley lover of house
Music aunt of a dozen
Northeast Ohios and pink
Satin funeral homes black
Girls are from the future
Naked and intergalactic
I wear dresses to activate
Armored force fields
When they no longer hire
Me I’ll go naked as bad taste
Get off on sovereign porn
Where POC = POC
And oversleep
(c) The author of this tumblr.
