Q&A with Margaret Price

Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University and author of Crip Spacetime, which intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics.

When I think about access in academia, I often start from my own experiences. I work from the minoritized position of a disabled, genderqueer faculty member, but also from the privileged position of a white faculty member with tenure. I arrived at Ohio State in 2016, after having taught at a liberal-arts school, Spelman College, for twelve years. Spelman is a small, private, historically Black college for women; Ohio State is a gigantic, public, predominantly white research university. To say that change was a shock is an understatement. I had an extremely difficult transition, and yet, what exactly made it difficult was hard for me to figure out for quite some time.

This book began with your own experiences as a disabled academic. What is it about those experiences that necessitated the writing of this book?

During my hiring process at Ohio State, I talked candidly about my disabilities. I continued to talk about them after I arrived on campus. Yet at no point did anyone ask me about my access needs, either through formal or informal channels. The atmosphere wasn’t at all unwelcoming or hostile—rather, I was often told, “Just let us know if you need anything.” I felt generally deeply welcome, and specifically deeply unclear on exactly what form this welcoming might take, especially if I were in need of something other than targeted advice (“here’s how to use the printer”) or general goodwill (“we are glad you’re here”).

Unfortunately, the support I had wasn’t enough to get me through that first semester as I attempted to navigate dozens of doctor’s appointments with new caregivers, figure out OSU’s health-care infrastructure, and manage my increasing debilitation. Four months after my arrival, one of my doctors sent me to the emergency room in an ambulance, and after several days in the hospital and yet more meds, I was sent home.

Shortly thereafter, I went to see the ADA Coordinator at OSU, Scott Lissner. The agenda of our meeting was not my own accommodations; in fact, I didn’t even know, at that point, that he was the person in charge of faculty accommodations at OSU. All I knew was that I desperately needed help and was afraid to admit it. When Scott asked me how I was doing, I burst into tears and said something like, “I don’t know what to do, I am failing at my job.” It was a tremendous stroke of luck—and again, privilege—that Scott is not only such a kind person, but also happened to be the one responsible for assisting faculty with disabilities. He helped me figure out what accommodations I needed, and began putting them in place right then and there.

What’s most striking to me about this story is not that I fell through the cracks of the many services available at Ohio State. That happens all the time. What really strikes me is that a person could hardly have been better resourced, or more knowledgeable, about disability in higher education, than me. (I literally wrote the book on it.) Furthermore, I had already been teaching at colleges and universities for over twenty years; I am tenured, white, speak English as my first language, and am familiar with the landscape of academia; and at the time I went to see Scott, I had just been enthusiastically recruited into my job. And yet, there I was, trying to struggle through, and failing. The failure I was experiencing wasn’t any particular person’s “fault.” It emerged through the system I was in—and that I was part of.

Your book argues that the current system in place to achieve equal access in the academy – individual accommodations — doesn’t work. Can you describe what individual accommodations are, and why they don’t work?

An individual accommodation is designed to provide a fix for a problem. So this system imagines disability as the problem, with accommodation as the fix. For example, if a student processes information at a different speed than most of their peers, then the accommodation system imagines the student’s processing speed as a problem, with the “fix” as extra time to complete assignments or exams. While that can sometimes be effective, of course many issues arise with the problem / fix model. For example, it can be difficult or expensive to prove one’s disability exists; it can be difficult to actually arrange the accommodations; and so on.

However, Crip Spacetime argues that there’s a more fundamental issue at work, too. Accommodation implies (and, in everyday academic life, almost always requires) the ability to say, “I can tell you what I’m going to need—in an hour, in a week, next semester.” Thus, disabled people historically have tended to trade on whatever predictability we can muster—or masquerade—to gain access, often citing “rights” as we’ve done so. Unfortunately, identifying our needs and insisting on the “right” to have those needs met has also enabled the creation of a dividing line between those whose needs are stable enough, predictable enough, to benefit from the protections of institutionally sponsored accommodation—and those whose are not.

So in effect, no matter how well designed, well funded, and compassionate a system of accommodation might be, it will always create that two-tier effect. The more-privileged tier will be able to predict and articulate their needs well enough to implement accommodations. The less-privileged tier will not. And that less-privileged tier—those of us with disabilities that aren’t as predictable, or aren’t as (apparently) easily explained, or perhaps aren’t even regarded as disabilities at all—are much less likely to be able to survive in academe, either as students or as employees.

What would a better system for supporting access look like?

A better system for access would begin from the assumption that the community or group working toward access is working collectively, and is accountable to one another. Of course, that doesn’t always happen, especially in a competitive and productivity-driven world like academe. Thus, one of the big questions that Crip Spacetime left me with is, “What does collective accountability in academe—or in any institutional context look like?” I’m still working on that question.

In your book, you introduce the titular idea of “crip spacetime.” What is crip spacetime, and how does it manifest in academia?

Crip spacetime is a kind of reality that a person (or animal, or object) inhabits. When you are in, or a part of, crip spacetime, you have a visceral sense of the costs, geographies, temporalities, and relations that come with being disabled. It’s more all-encompassing than just having a particular point of view. It’s the actual reality you’re living in. A rough analogy might be putting on a VR headset and a full VR suit—it swallows up all other perception. But you can’t remove crip spacetime the way you can a VR suit.

You don’t have to be disabled to exist in—or be able to perceive and understand—crip spacetime. The close friends and family members of disabled people often have a strong, visceral understanding of this reality. Also, being disabled doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily perceive crip spacetime the way I describe it in the book. You may experience very little sense of difference from being disabled; in which case, your reality likely doesn’t include the sense of cost, time, space, and relationality that crip spacetime does.

One of the hallmarks of crip spacetime is that it can be very hard to understand from a different reality. For example, a person who has been living in crip spacetime may have very little patience left for conversations about why the elevator doesn’t work. They may shout or start to cry as soon as it happens. From a non-crip-spacetime reality, that reaction doesn’t make any sense. It seems to be coming out of nowhere. But that’s because the person in crip spacetime knows, both in terms of past experience and in terms of ability to predict the likely future, that a broken elevator means frustration, humiliation, wasted time, fruitless arguments, and a general sense that no one particularly cares. In this way, it’s similar to other kinds of minoritized realities: emotions or concerns that don’t seem “logical” or “warranted” from a more privileged reality.

How did you navigate weaving your personal experience with research and theoretical work when writing Crip Spacetime?

I’ve been a creative writer since I was a kid, and I earned an MFA before my PhD. Writing from my own experience—in poetry, fiction, and especially in nonfiction—has always felt more natural to me than pretty much any other medium, including talking out loud. So for me as an academic writer, the question has always been how to include enough markers of “academic” writing so that my work is recognizable to readers as research in addition to being recognizable as creative writing. The two have always seemed to go hand-in-hand to me.

Many of my fellow creative/academic writers have provided brilliant examples of how to weave together personal and academic writing. Some of my favorites include Jo Hsu, Moya Bailey, Ellen Samuels, and Jay Dolmage. I especially like to study the forms these writers use—how they weave in interludes or short chapters, how they write poetry as well as prose, and how they use online as well as print-based forms to express their experiences.

What should other academics reading this book take away in terms of how they can best support their disabled colleagues and students?

If we understand “disability” and “access” as relational and emergent, then we need to accept that enacting access in specific circumstances will require different moves in different circumstances. You may already know a great deal about universal design, or models of disability, or being disabled—and all of these are useful things to know. But bear in mind that there’s always more to learn.

At the same time, there are some general ideas that folks can educate themselves about. These are not rules; they’re more like conversation starters, or questions to explore. Here are a few places to look for those conversations: The National Center for College Students with Disabilities, including their resources for faculty and instructors; The Disability Visibility Project, including their podcast series; Disability, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology (DO-IT) at the University of Washington; The Composing Access Project from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Finally, I’d recommend that folks recognize that, while asking questions and participating in dialogues is a great way to learn, move forward with care. Don’t waylay a colleague and ask them about their disability when they’re not expecting it. And don’t assume you’re entitled to someone else’s story or expertise.

Instead, ask if they’re up for that conversation. And take opportunities to educate yourself. Attend a disability-studies talk online or at your own university / college / workplace. Browse the articles in disability-studies journals. Follow up with people who do offer to engage in conversation. There’s no checklist for the “right” way to support access. As I say when I give talks, “Access is all our work.”

Crip Spacetime is available in an open access edition, or you can save 30% on the paperback with coupon E24PRICE.

New Books in April

April showers bring plenty of opportunities to curl up inside with a new book. Check out the great new titles we have coming out this month!

Focusing on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine sexual excess—Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena in Puta Life.

Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortune-telling cafes where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals can navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life in Gendered Fortunes.

Bishnupriya Ghosh explores the media practices that inscribe and transmit data about infectious diseases and shape how we live with perpetual pandemics in The Virus Touch.

Claudia Calirman examines sixty years of visual art by prominent and emerging Brazilian women artists from the 1960s to the present who use gender politics to fight social inequalities, discrimination, structures of power, and state violence in Dissident Practices. If you’re in New York City, you can see artwork related to the book at a new show Calirman has curated at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery. It will be on display from April 19-June 16.

The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life, edited by René Dietrich and Kerstin Knopf, investigate biopolitics and geopolitics as two distinct yet entangled techniques of settler colonial states across the globe, contending that Indigenous life and practices cannot be contained and defined by the racialization and dispossession of settler colonialism.

In Mendings, Megan Sweeney tells an intimate story about family, selfhood, and love and loss, showing how her lifetime practice of sewing and mending clothes becomes a way of living.

In The Queer Art of History, Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity, showing how an analytic of kinship more fully illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference.

Lisa Mitchell explores the historical and contemporary methods of collective assembly that people in India use to hold elected officials and government administrators accountable in Hailing the State.

In The Autocratic Academy, Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn outlines the history of American higher education’s formal organization as an incorporated autocracy that is tied to capitalism, arguing that the academy must reconstitute itself in accordance with the principles of democratic republicanism in which members choose who govern and can hold them accountable.

Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the working composers, musicians, and engineers who create soundtracks for film, television, and video games in Working Musicians.

In A Vital Frontier, Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. 

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Peer Review Week: Excerpt from We Are Not Dreamers

It’s Peer Review Week, an annual event to celebrate the value of peer review that brings together scholarly communication stakeholders, including academic publishers, associations, institutions, and researchers. This year’s theme is “Research Integrity: Creating and supporting trust in research.” This week we will share excerpts on the topic of peer review and research integrity from some of our books. Today we present an excerpt from We are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States edited by Leisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales in which they discuss the ethics of doing research with undocumented students and scholars.

This is a unique volume. There is currently no other collection of empirical and theoretical work by undocumented or recently undocumented scholars. As editors of this volume, this was certainly an empirical and analytical matter, but also a methodological one. Each author details their own methodological approach in the chapters, but there are broader methodological interventions
that must also be named. These involve explicitly positioning undocumented scholars as theorists of the undocumented experience while being mindful of the ethics involved in doing this work.
At the outset of this project, we were clear that we did not want this to be a collection of testimonies, narrative reflections, or first-person essays; this is not to say that there is not value in such endeavors, but rather to be clear that such a project is politically, analytically, and methodologically distinct from  our aims here. This volume is an intentional effort to position this work as critical to the field in that it pushes our understanding of undocumented life in the United States at this time. Thus, the positioning of the undocumented immigrant as scholar is a direct departure from the treatment of the undocumented immigrant as subject or object. This positioning is not only pragmatic or practical, it is also methodological.

Part of our politic and analytic around this is that this process of undocumentation (Negrón-Gonzales 2018), while it is discussed in public discourse as a clear-cut matter, is a social, legal, and political construction. There is nothing inherent in people that makes them undocumented. There is nothing unchangeable in society that determines that undocumented people are criminals. On the contrary, people move in and out of undocumenteds status and legal, political, and social treatment of undocumented people changes across different historical moments (Ngai 2004). Methodologically, then, it made sense to us to capture these experiences by including people who have direct experience with being undocumented and scholars, whether they are currently undocumented, daca recipients, or formerly undocumented for a notable part of their lives as students. We feel strongly that the authors in this volume have an important role to play in shaping the field.

The other methodological dimension worth illuminating concerns research ethics. Many theorists of undocumented migration have aimed to be thoughtful in how they approach research ethically (Hernández et al. 2013; Suárez-Orozco and Yoshikawa 2013). Some have written about the ethics of
cocreating theory with undocumented students who are the focus of analysis (Pérez Huber 2010), while others provide undocumented students with research training and writing support (Clark-Ibáñez 2015; Mena Robles and Gomberg-Muñoz 2016; Unzueta Carrasco and Seif 2014). There is, however,
a persistent disconnection in the field more broadly. Undocumented young people note that there is a pattern of researchers entering spaces of organizing—sometimes without permission—only to gather information for their studies, never to be seen again. Those researchers have failed to reciprocate with undocumented immigrant communities, rarely using their skills to support the advocacy work that they document. And in most of those cases, people who participated in the study were not informed of the findings. Authors in this volume have had conversations about how to address these concerns regarding immigration scholars who are not themselves undocumented. One response, in particular, thoughtfully details the problems and suggests best practices for scholars to follow when conducting research with undocumented communities.
Gabrielle Cabrera, one of the authors featured in this volume, along with Ines Garcia and an anonymous student at their undergraduate institution in California, got together shortly after the election of Donald Trump. In an attempt to be proactive in this new political context and rooted in what they saw as the nonreciprocal pattern of engagement described above, they developed a brief guide on research ethics for scholars and researchers who were turning to write about undocumented youth in the midst of heightened political threats.

November 30, 2016
Dear Researchers,
We’d like to emphasize that Undocumented students are not research subjects. We respectfully, but adamantly ask faculty members who are conducting research on and with Undocumented people to please conduct ethical research. By ethical research, we mean:
1. the questions asked to participants should not attempt to uplift the “progressive” efforts of the university;
2. sharing the research and findings with our community through relevant and accessible means; and
3. researchers should not treat Undocumented students as a “trendy” research topic.
We’d also like to take this moment to express the need for critical research on and with Undocumented students. We believe the efforts of faculty are grounded in good intentions and understand the importance of it. We also want to name that research causes harm to our community as it has been known to exploit and commodify our bodies and experiences. Researchers should not collect data about our lives and publish the knowledge solely for their own benefit. Researchers should intentionally disseminate findings into our communities in meaningful and relevant ways. “Policy Recommendations” at the end of articles are not enough. Researchers should not claim to give us “voice” when current research on Undocumented students perpetuate the violent “DREAMER” narrative.
A change in the ways in which Undocumented students are researched needs to occur. We are scholars. We are community members. We are collaborators in the research process. Researchers should not speak on our behalf. Rather, researchers should give us the platform to speak for ourselves. Faculty members have the ability to do this by conducting ethical research that engages our community throughout the process.

As is true of many scholars we have worked with, Cabrera, Garcia, and their peers highlight the need to push back on the dreamer narrative, not only identifying its limitations but also highlighting how it reifies and sanctifies a certain kind of “good” immigrant. This pushback is a persistent theme across the chapters in this book, and the analytical contributions of these young scholars remind us that a key part of decolonizing research methodologies involves disrupting the assumed unmovable distinction between the researcher and the researched. Part of that process involves marginalized people theorizing and producing scholarship about the experiences of their communities.

Leisy J. Abrego is Professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love across Borders. Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales is Associate Professor of Education at the University of San Francisco and coauthor of Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World. We Are Not Dreamers is available for 30% off on our site with coupon SAVE30.

Critical University Studies Syllabus

Today we are pleased to publish our Critical University Studies Syllabus, which evolved from a Duke University Press reader’s suggestion. The articles, special issues, and books collected in this syllabus provide insight into critical inquiries of the university system and its histories, and reflect on directions for future frameworks for higher education. Topics include structural racism, gender, the uneven distribution of resources, coloniality, academic labor, and the effects of university financialization.

All journal articles, sections, and issues in this syllabus are freely available through March 31, 2022. Book introductions are always free.

The Critical University Studies Syllabus is one of our many staff–curated syllabi, which cover topics ranging from queer studies to labor and precarity to election history. Check out our full syllabi series here.

Q&A with Sara Ahmed, author of Complaint!

Sara Ahmed is an independent scholar and author of What’s the Use?, Living a Feminist Life, and other books also published by Duke University Press. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, in her new book Complaint! she examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power.

In the introduction to Complaint! you write about how your resignation created the conditions that made this book possible. Was it essential for you to be outside the institution as you compiled these stories?

I decided to do this research on complaint before I resigned. I did not know I was going to resign until I did! Once I had resigned, it changed how I could do the research. I wouldn’t say it was essential that I was outside the institution to be able to collect the stories but it certainly shaped how I could do it.

That I was outside the institution had an impact on the kinds of stories that were shared with me. The complaints that I talk about in the book (I don’t talk about all complaints!), complaints about abuses of power, complaints that challenge hierarchies, can devastate lives as well as careers. Complaints can be hard to talk about – you can even be prevented from talking about them.  Many of the participants in my study got in touch with me because they heard about my resignation. It mattered to them that I had resigned. I had refused to be silent; I had said no. That I was outside the institution probably also meant I could provide a safer space: they were not speaking to someone who was in the same institution they were speaking about. 

From my point of view, I do not really feel outside the institution – even if I sometimes call myself post-institutional. The fact that I did the research shows in a way that I am still in it, still on it. Leaving my post and profession was a very painful, bumpy and difficult process – and doing this research helped me to come to terms with what happened and to feel more grounded where I am, doing what I am.  I am so grateful for that.

Complaint! is about grievances against institutions of higher education but discrimination is everywhere, as are HR roadblocks to disciplinary procedures. What can non-academic readers learn from the stories you’ve collected?

You could do the kind of research that I have done for this book in many other institutions – and in fact, I have been approached by people about their experiences in other sectors who have shared very similar stories. I spoke to someone in my own neighborhood recently. She asked me what I was working on and when I said I was working on complaint, she shared a story. She told me what happened when she tried to complain about being bullied by her manager at the supermarket where she worked. She said “I knew I was in trouble, when they shut the door.” The experience she had of ending up under scrutiny because she complained, her knowledge of what the closed door meant, how her complaint was going to be managed and contained, was very similar to many of the experiences shared by academics and students. 

We learn from what we share. 

The book is really about power, how power works to make it hard to challenge how power works. That complaint procedures become techniques for stopping complaints and complainers is telling us something about the mechanics of power. So, I hope the book reaches readers outside the university. I also am planning to write a shorter book, The Complainer’s Handbook, which will follow The Feminist Killjoy Handbook that I am currently drafting, so I can share the stories with less of a focus on the university as a specific site. 

You map how complaints can lay groundwork for future change, and can create communities of shared experience between people whom institutional processes would otherwise have kept apart. Complaint activism is not a guarantee of institutional change, but rather “a way of thinking about what we get from complaint even when we do not get through.” Is this hopeful, or exhausting? 

It is hopeful and exhausting! I call the hope of complaint, a “weary hope,” we have hope because of what we go through not despite it even when we don’t get very far. This kind of hope gives us a sense of the point, of there being a point, but it keeps us close to the ground. Complaints can take so much out of you. But most of the time, we also get something from them. I was really delighted that Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page and Alice Corble (with support from Heidi Hasbrouck and Chryssa Sdrolia and others) wrote one of the two conclusions of the book about their experience of making a collective complaint. They took on this work as PhD students – I joined the collective they had already formed. The last sentence of their conclusion is very simple and very powerful and very true. They write: “We moved something.” We have hope, they moved something, even if it took a huge amount of effort to get there. And that effort led us to each other.  A weary “we” is still a “we.” That matters.

What does it mean for complaint to be pedagogy? 

Complaint as feminist pedagogy became the Twitter hashtag for my project – this wasn’t an intentional decision; it was one of the formulations I was trying out to pull out the significance of complaint and it is the one that stuck! Other formulations in the book are “complaint as diversity work,” and “complaints as a queer method.” Each “as” brings out different aspects of what complaints are about. 

Why pedagogy? When we think of pedagogy, we might think of how we teach – the teacher is the subject who uses different methods of instruction (which are also different ways of thinking about learning). By saying complaint is pedagogy, I am putting complaint in the position of the subject/teacher. We learn from complaint about the world. If we hadn’t complained, there is so much we would not know (even could not know) about what goes on. By making complaint my teacher, I position myself as learning from those I have spoken to. In my conclusion I acknowledge that “learning,” is one of the most used words in the book.

Complaint is heavy work. What strategies have you learned for those engaged in complaint to persevere? 

Finding other people to support you in your institution is vital.  If you can’t find someone inside your institution, go outside. Complaint procedures are designed to keep us apart for a reason. We need to combine our resources and energies. We need our co-complainers. We often lose people when we make complaints. But we also find people. 

Working together is also about accepting the limits of what each of us can do. There is only so much we can do. I have in my “Killjoy Survival Kit” from Living a Feminist Life, permissions notes – sometimes, we need to give ourselves permission not to do something if it is too much. We are different and we need different things to keep going. I also think of tactics that might lighten the load – we might laugh, dance, eat, breathe, take walks, hang out with our companions, furry and non-furry. 

There are two sentences from my conclusion to Complaint! that are key to my thoughts about working on as well as at institutions. They are slightly modified versions of sentences that appeared in What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use, which also made use of data from my research into complaint.  

Transforming institutions can be necessary if we are to survive them. But we still need to survive the institutions we are trying to transform.

The heavier the task, and complaint is made heavy, it is no accident that you feel the weight of the institution coming down on you, the more you need to attend to what you need to survive.  I am, of course, learning from Audre Lorde here. 

Complaint! is learning from Lorde

Read the introduction to Complaint! free online and save 50% on it and all in-stock titles with coupon FALL21 through October 15, 2021. After October 15, save 30% on Complaint! with coupon E21AHMD.

Save on Great Academic Advice Titles

As the fall semester gets underway, you may be looking for advice on being more productive, or writing or teaching better. We invite you to check out some great books featuring advice for teachers, administrators, advisors, and graduate students and to save 40% on them using coupon ADVICE40.

For decades The Academic’s Handbook has been a trusted guide to navigating the academy. Now in a revised and expanded fourth edition, more than fifty contributors from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds offer practical advice for academics at every career stage, whether they are first entering the job market or negotiating the post-tenure challenges of leadership and administrative roles. The new edition is edited by Lori A. Flores and Jocelyn H. Olcott. 

Another book full of advice for everyone from graduate students to the faculty who supervise them is Katina L. Rogers’s Putting the Humanities PhD to Work. It grounds practical career advice in a nuanced consideration of how graduate training can lead to meaningful and significant careers beyond the academy. Writing in the LSE Review of Books, Kristen Vogt Veggeberg says, “this book does something special—it empowers, if not emboldens, the humanities doctorate, and encourages them to see the world in a way that is deserving of their time and hard work.”

If you’re looking to improve your academic writing, you won’t have a better guide than Amitava Kumar in his recent book Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style. Kumar is an award-winning novelist as well as a professor of English. Alongside his interviews with an array of scholars whose distinct writing offers inspiring examples for students and academics alike, the book’s pages are full of practical advice about everything from how to write criticism to making use of a kitchen timer. John Francisconi says, “Kumar’s writing guide/commonplace book is a salve. Reading his newest is like having office hours—no, better; a drink and bookish conversation, in a bar—with your smartest, kindest teacher, or friend.” 

If you’re just starting out teaching history, or if you’re an experienced teacher hoping to reinvigorate your courses, check out the Design Principles for Teaching History series. Edited by Antoinette Burton, the series offers primers each featuring ten principles for designing a course in a variety of historical disciplines, including world history, African history, Pacific histories, environmental history, and gender history. A forthcoming volume will address digital history.

We hope these titles will help you be a more successful student, professor, or administrator. They’d also make great gifts for your students or advisees. Save 40% on any of them with coupon ADVICE40. 

Tyler Denmead, Author of The Creative Underclass, Announces Online Tour

Tyler Denmead is author of The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race, and the Gentrifying City (2019). He teaches in the Faculty of Education and Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge. As the pandemic cut short his planned travel to discuss the book with audiences in both the UK and US, Denmead is now planning an online tour. Below he discusses how the book came to be and announces the tour dates.

The Creative Underclass is not the book I planned to write when I returned to New Urban Arts in 2012 as an educational ethnographer. It had been 5 years since I left the studio in Providence, Rhode Island as its founding director. I wanted to return to the studio, however, because I was still puzzled by the studio’s pedagogic conditions, or “the magic” as so many youth participants and artists put it. It was still unclear to me what this magic was, why this magic mattered, or how this magic might be useful to community arts programs elsewhere.

The Center for Public Humanities at Brown University provided me the opportunity to return to New Urban Arts as a post-doctoral fellow to study this magic. Rather than raising money and facilitating committee meetings, I had the the privilege of hanging out with teenagers and the artists that supported them. I could participate in their collective artmaking and the studio’s vibrant social life. I could talk to them about why their artmaking mattered to them and how they interpreted the studio’s pedagogic conditions.

Several unexpected events happened that prevented me from writing that familiar book. First, in my ethnographic encounters, I confronted a double bind reported by some former youth participants. Some noted the transformational power of New Urban Arts in their own lives, while also expressing their concern that the studio functioned as a gentrifying force in their neighborhood. This insight forced me to consider what role educational institutions (and therefore my educational leadership) play in white gentrification.

As I turned my attention to this analysis, anti-gentrification protests erupted across the United States as a prominent feature of Black Lives Matter protests. These protests targeted the threats that whiteness pose to Black life through policing, mass incarceration, neighborhood displacement, and state-led urban renewal projects.

With these protests, as well as constructive criticism of readers and friends, I started to write a reflexive book that begins from my position as the urban problem. I thus situated the magic of New Urban Arts in relation to racializing discourses that positioned me as a good white creative and youth of color as urban problems in need of transformation through creativity. I formulated the concept of the creative underclass to not only illuminate this problematic discourse and its role in mobilising white gentrification, but also how young people contested it through their creative disobedience, through the magic of New Urban Arts.

The concept of the creative underclass is clearly in conversation with Richard Florida’s creative class. Florida’s influential ideas were discussed and critiqued exhaustively in and beyond the academy in the 1990s and 2000s. Not surprisingly, the perspectives, experiences, and practices of young people of color were largely absent from those debates. Since then, attention on this topic have ebbed. After the 2007 financial crisis and Ferguson, vague commitments to creativity as a panacea for social and economic problems can no longer succeed like it used to in mobilizing a political bloc with diverging ideological interests.

Nonetheless, the troubling nexus of urban property development, arts and culture, and educational institutions was not new in the 1990s and it continues today. In the United States, this nexus is central to the expansive and possessive logics of whiteness itself. I hope The Creative Underclass accounts for the creative and critical practices of young people at New Urban Arts in ways that make us better equipped to engage directly with, and potentially transform, ongoing racial and economic injustices in the city.

Read the introduction to The Creative Underclass and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E19DENMD. Denmead has launched a virtual book tour beginning in March 2021, presenting ethnographic snapshots from The Creative Underclass in public lectures and student seminars. If you are interested in hosting a private class talk or public lecture, please contact the author at td287@cam.ac.uk.

Upcoming public events:

24 March 2021, 5pm EDT
Hosted by the Centre for Study of Learning and Performance at Concordia University
Register in advance: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-creative-underclass-youth-race-and-the-gentrifying-city-tickets-145093591839 

25th March 2021, 12:30 pm GMT
Hosted by the Critical Childhood Studies Research Group at University College London
Register in advance for this talk: https://ucl.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYlcOCsqDkrEtxjyOwn3Tlyd_qzHW1SVsRg

16 April 2021, 11 am EDT
Hosted by the Barnett Symposium Virtual Speaker Series at the Department of Arts Education, Administration, and Policy at Ohio State University
See www.tylerdenmead.org for registration details.

April 21, 2021 12:30 pm EDT
Hosted by Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia
Register in advance for this talk: https://art.uga.edu/events/tyler-denmead-book-talk-creative-underclass-youth-race-and-gentrifying-city

Q&A with Theodore D. Segal, Author of Point of Reckoning

 

Photo by Eli Turner

Theodore D. Segal is a lawyer and member of the board of directors for the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He received his undergraduate degree from Duke in 1977. His new book is Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice at Duke University which narrates the fraught and contested fight for racial justice at Duke University—which accepted its first black undergraduates in 1963—to tell both a local and national story about the challenges that historically white colleges and universities throughout the country continue to face.

You were a corporate lawyer for many years and then turned to writing. Why did you write this book in particular?

I wanted to understand how we ended up here. How is it possible that 50 years after the end of the tumultuous Sixties, our schools, workplaces, and society continue to grapple with so many of the same issues of race and racism that were the focus of activism years ago. I believed that by looking closely at the years immediately following desegregation at Duke, I could expose the entrenched attitudes and narrow, reflexive responses to desegregation that sparked protest and served to stifle racial change at the university. 

This was happening at universities across the country, why Duke?

I was a student at Duke in the 1970s and had the opportunity to study Black and white student activism at the school in the Sixties. More broadly, Duke is an ideal setting to study the racial issues that are the focus of my book. Called “the plantation” by many Black workers, members of the Durham Black community, and students, Duke has a long history of segregation and racial exclusion. The school is among a group of prominent southern historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs) that desegregated only when forced to do so in the early Sixties. In the late Sixties, Duke had significant white and Black student protests only ten months apart. This juxtaposition provides a unique opportunity to examine how racial attitudes informed the ways that white trustees, administrators, and faculty perceived, and responded to, white and Black student protest.  

Why do you consider the arrival of Black students at Duke a “historic encounter”?

The arrival of Black students marked a profound change for Duke and other HWCUs. For decades, Jim Crow and segregation had defined the organization and daily operations of these schools. Desegregation created immense challenges for all parties. White administrators, faculty, and students, most of whom had never interacted with a Black person other than in a service capacity, were forced to learn—for the first time—how to relate to Black students. Likewise, Black students, the vast majority of whom had never interacted with white individuals as equals, faced their own challenge: how to deal with white administrators and faculty, and white students as peers. How would they live and work together at Duke? Under Jim Crow, the academic and social opportunities offered by Duke were for whites only. The “Duke Experience” was a training ground for advancement in white America. Theoretically at least, desegregation meant that Black students now would have the chance to share in these opportunities. But how that worked depended on whether Duke was prepared to invest the political capital, as well as the economic and human resources, necessary for Black students to realize their full potential. How Duke administrators and professors and the Black students responded to one another in this initial encounter set the pattern for race relations at the university for decades to come. 

How did the University prepare for the arrival of Black students?

Duke did little to prepare itself for the challenges desegregation would present. The university did not study the experience of other schools that had recently desegregated. Duke made no changes to anticipate or address Black students’ distinctive cultural, academic, and social needs. It did not monitor how the new Black students were managing and what challenges they were facing. Administrators and faculty made only modest attempts to get to know the Black students personally once on campus. As one administrator described, Duke looked at desegregation “from a white perspective.” The chance to attend Duke was seen as a great opportunity for the new Black students, and school leaders believed that the Black students would adjust to campus life through what one described as a natural kind of “amalgamation.” The Duke president in the Sixties commented later that, in essence, the university said to these students, “come in, be white.” This is not what these students wanted or needed.

How did Black students experience Duke during the early years of desegregation?

Duke’s first classes of Black students grew up, for the most part, in protective, segregated Black communities in the South where family, school, and church worked in concert to foster achievement and self-respect. Arriving in the midst of Duke’s “sea of white” was, according to one Black student, “almost as complete a shock as you can encounter.” Highly accomplished and initially “grateful” for the chance to attend Duke, almost all of the school’s Black students encountered racism: academic deans who assumed the students were weak academically; discriminatory grading (especially in writing courses); physical and verbal intimidation; hostility from campus security; racist symbols such as display of the Confederate Flag and the singing of Dixie at athletic events; exclusionary fraternity and sorority admissions policies; and offensive comments in the dorm. In addition, some Jim Crow policies and practices remained in place at Duke even after desegregation. These experiences, coupled with the small number of Black students on campus, led to profound feelings of loneliness and isolation.

 You write that the Black students who came to Duke in the early years following desegregation were the “good kids” in their communities whose families, churches, and schools raised them to be high-achieving “rule followers.” How did these young people become so deeply engaged in campus activism and direct protest?

Multiple factors converged to make this transformation possible. Loneliness and isolation prompted students to form the Afro American Society (AAS)—at first a social outlet that allowed Black students to get to know one another and remain in contact.  As AAS meetings were held, feelings of isolation ebbed and Black students became a very close—and very separate—community within Duke. Black students came to see that the university had failed totally to provide them with the academic, social and cultural resources necessary for them to thrive at Duke. With Black Power and Black campus activism emerging throughout the country, the students found a political and cultural framework for understanding their situation at Duke, as well as a protest strategy for addressing common concerns.

Duke had a large white student protest in April 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., followed by a takeover of Duke’s administration building by Black students in February 1969. How did the response of trustees, administrators, and faculty to these two protests differ?   

In April 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., over 250 predominantly white students marched in the rain to the home of the Duke president to present him with a list of four demands. The president invited them inside out of the weather and called them “guests” when they refused to leave. After 36 hours, the group moved to Duke’s main quadrangle. Over a four-day protest that came to be known as the “Silent Vigil,” over 1,500 protestors joined the sit-in. A simultaneous dining hall and class boycott, as well as a worker strike, effectively shut down the school. Still, trustees and administrators treated protestors with deference. After four days, the chairman of the board of trustees addressed the Silent Vigil (offering minimal concessions) and joined the group in singing “We Shall Overcome.”    

Ten months later, approximately 50 members of the Duke AAS occupied the registrar’s and bursar’s office on the first floor of Duke’s main administration building, presenting the university with a list of 10 demands. Within an hour, senior leaders decided that the protestors would be given one hour to vacate. If they failed to do so, they would be declared “trespassers” and the police would be summoned to campus to eject them, using force if necessary. Durham County and State Police assembled in Duke Gardens and were brought on to campus around 5:30 p.m. Although the Black students subsequently departed the administration building voluntarily, the police could not be withdrawn and a police riot on the main quadrangle ensued.

 How did university administrators resist change, even while claiming to support many of the issues and demands raised by the students?

Most fundamental was the belief that Black students should be grateful for the chance to attend Duke and that they should simply aspire to “fit in.” Among the arguments “progressive” administrators used to resist change was “gradualism” (change takes time),  pragmatism (donors will stop donating), and “reverse discrimination” (accommodations to address the distinctive needs of Black students represent discrimination against white people). Once activism emerged, students were seen as controlled by outside forces. Throughout, administrators insisted that change could only come through the “proper channels.” This meant dealing with a layered committee process unable to cut through red tape.

 What lessons are there today for students, faculty and others seeking racial change at HWCUs, and what lessons are there for administrators, trustees and faculty who profess support for these anti-racism efforts?     

Because of the persistence of historic racial attitudes, a multi-layered and decentralized decision-making process, reflexive deference to alumni and donors, and limited resources, it is exceedingly difficult for HWCUs to change from within. Systemic racial change is possible only where there is sustained external pressure and when leaders possess a moral commitment to racial justice and a willingness to reallocate resources to support new priorities. While each institution will need to find its own pathway to racial change, all will need to expend the same amount of time, energy, money and other finite resources that they currently deployed to address other “existential” objectives. Duke, like other schools, reinvented itself in a matter of weeks to face the Covid crisis. A similar level of focus and investment over a substantial period of time is needed to dismantle systemic racism at the school.

Read the introduction to Point of Reckoning for free and save 30% on the book using coupon code E21SEGAL.

In Conversation: We Are Not Dreamers

Our newest In Conversation video is up now. Watch the editors of We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States, Leisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, discuss the book with contributors Katy Joseline Maldonado Dominguez, Maria Liliana Ramirez, and Carolina Valdivia. Duke University Press Editorial Associate Alejandra Mejía moderates the panel. They talk about the ethics of producing a book by and about Undocumented and formerly-Undocumented people, and the importance of community.

During our Fall Sale, you can save 50% on We Are Not Dreamers (and all in-stock titles) with coupon FALL2020.

Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Anastasia Kārkliņa in Conversation with Katina L. Rogers

Today’s post is a conversation between graduate student Anastasia Kārkliņa, who has worked for several years in our Books Marketing department, and Katina L. Rogers, author of the new book Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and Beyond the Classroom.

For years, scholars of late capitalism have warned against the impending crisis of the gig economy and its inevitably devastating effects on the lives of millions of workers. The coronavirus pandemic has not only changed the way we work, teach, and interact but has exposed deep and persisting forms of labor exploitation that easily discard those who have long ago been rendered disposable. In higher education, too, the pandemic has triggered hiring freezes and layoffs, eliminating already highly competitive faculty and postdoc positions. Many doctoral students and recent Ph.D. graduates feel they have only two options: join the precarious adjunct labor force or abandon the intellectual vocation and leave the academy altogether. For many, this choice is devastating.

In her new book Putting Humanities PhD to Work, Katina Rogers, however, argues that, while leaving the traditional academic path can be unnerving, it can certainly lead to equally fulfilling and meaningful careers in other sectors. Rogers suggests that “the key is rethinking the way we understand intellectual labor” and seeing that the “intellectual and interpretive skills acquired in graduate programs span many careers.” Over the years doctoral programs have failed to provide graduate students with a sound and realistic understanding of the state of the academic job landscape and necessary skills to navigate professional life outside of academe. Nevertheless, broadening the meaning of scholarly success, Rogers argues, has the potential to empower students to make a meaningful impact within and beyond the academy. 

Anastasia Kārkliņa (AK):  As more PhDs look for employment outside of the classroom, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work feels ever so urgent and exceptionally timely. What initially compelled you to work on this book? And, what does it mean for you to see Putting Humanities to Work published at this time, in light of recent domestic and global events? 

Katina Rogers (KR): Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about this! I began working on the book years ago, partly because I was inspired by the many creative approaches to graduate education that I was seeing across the country—but also because I found that my research on career preparation among PhDs working outside the professoriate was often surprising to people in ways that made it clear that the conversation needed to be happening more broadly. Meanwhile, I had begun moving through my own unusual career path and wanted an opportunity to reflect on the ways that my work combines the intellectual, pedagogical, and often transformative work that happens in the classroom but in a completely different context.

So much has changed since I started working on the book. The negatives are glaring: even before the COVID-19 pandemic, public universities were losing much of their state funding, and the increasing reliance on adjunct labor was growing worse by the year. The pandemic has heightened many existing vulnerabilities and inequalities, while also throwing institutions into disarray. The effects fall disproportionately on minoritized and marginalized groups within the academy, exacerbating the racism and gender bias of academic structures and causing real harm to individuals. I tend to resist the language of crisis, but higher education is absolutely in a moment of crisis right now. While COVID-19 was the catalyst, what we are seeing now has been brought on by decades of disinvestment.

It feels too soon to look for a silver lining; we are still in the midst of this trauma. I do hope that when colleges and universities are ready to pick up the pieces and move forward, they will do so with integrity and intention. We have seen that many structures that seemed immutable can actually change quite rapidly when there is enough collective will. So far, those changes have been reactive. My hope is that leaders, administrators, and faculty will see this as a moment of potential transformation, and will really dig in to build institutional structures that foster inclusion and wellbeing, and that promote an expansive understanding of the value of scholarship to society. From that perspective, it is an exciting moment to see this book released; with so many structures in flux, I hope that the book offers fresh ideas at a moment they can really take effect.

Anastasia, I wonder if you’d be willing to talk a little bit about your own experience? You’re navigating these institutional structures as a doctoral student while also working in publishing and exploring other possible pathways. What are your thoughts on the importance of humanities education in this moment? Why are you doing the work that you do, and where do you hope that it takes you? 

AK: Thanks for sharing that! Indeed, as doctoral students, we’ve been having the conversation about the crisis of higher education that you mention for years, often behind closed doors out of fear that our advisers may “disown” us if we dare to consider other options. I began actively working towards a professional pivot into fields such as communications and strategy a year ago, when I decided that I wanted more for my life, and my career, than poverty wages and unpredictable contracts. And, I arrived at this decision precisely because I believe in the importance of the humanities, especially in this political moment.

As a scholar of culture, I study how social power has historically operated in our society, and I’ve been trained in the tradition of thought that sees the “how” of this moment to be immensely important for understanding the past and imagining the future. And, so now in light of the national and global uprisings, we’re seeing that more companies, organizations, and agencies are asking this exact question: where are we, and how do we move forward, differently? Yet, most are not posing the most important question, and that is the question of power. Often, while well-intentioned, these conversions end up being watered down, simply because, say, marketing directors or consultants haven’t been trained to talk and think about these issues on a deep level. Within this context, I see the immense potential of critical thought to shift cultural narratives and push the discourse beyond the academe. In fact, agencies and organizations who want to be on the frontlines of innovative, actionable conversations about social change should be seeking out and recruiting humanities PhDs who are trained to think critically about these issues, which are ultimately rooted in social history.

I also fiercely believe in the value of intellectual thought as such, and I pride myself on the rigor of critical thinking that I developed thanks to my graduate training. I think more doctoral students should internalize that sense of value. To offer a quick anecdote, earlier this year I wrote an Instagram post that I titled, “How to Ask 21 Questions of a Pen.” And, I did exactly that—I posed with a pen in a photo and then used my training as a cultural theorist to pose twenty one questions about this one seemingly ordinary object: where was it made, and how? How is it implicated in global circuits of production? What does literacy signify in our society, and what conditions even made the pen’s invention possible? And so on, and so forth. That post got more traction than any other! People were genuinely intrigued, and surprised. While it may seem silly, you may ask others to do this exercise, and most feel at loss, at first. After all, it’s just a pen! For me, as a cultural theorist, a pen, as anything else, can be taken seriously as an object of study and put under close scrutiny. Having now worked in marketing and participated in branding hackathons with industry professionals, I can absolutely say that humanists bring to the table a level of intellectual sophistication that can oftentimes be only developed through years and years of rigorous study.

KR: I love this. It is such a clear example of the ways that people can apply scholarly methods to so many things that are outside their formal field. In many ways, I think that is one of the most valuable traits that people with advanced training in the humanities and social sciences share—a deep curiosity that leads to new lines of inquiry and therefore new insights. 

I’m also so glad that you bring up the issue of power. In my work with graduate students, mentorship and care are extremely important, and often bring up questions around emotional labor, which is complicated in itself. But often the conversation stops there, without going deeper to examine the power dynamics that can make those ecologies of care either supportive or problematic. Graduate education trades on prestige—not only tacitly, but explicitly in terms of institutional rankings, tenure and promotion policies, and more. Prestige is the lens through which so much scholarly work is viewed, which makes it extremely difficult to work toward other values, such as the public good. My book considers how we might start to loosen the grip of prestige in order to make space for other kinds of scholarly success.

AK: I couldn’t agree more. In centering individual academic success, which, for many, is structurally unattainable, we divert our attention from the ways in which our labor is implicated in the larger structure of the gig economy. As academics, we often think of ourselves as different from other workers, like fast food workers and delivery drivers, who, too, struggle to access living wages, health insurance, and so on, much like many PhDs who are funnelled into the adjunct labor force. I think your book speaks to our lived realities, while being critical of the corporatization of higher education, and all the issues that come with that. Understanding the erosion of stable academic employment as a structural issue, rather than a failure on the part of graduate students, is precisely what we need, if we are to move the needle within our own institutions and in higher education more broadly. 

KR: These structural questions are essential. Putting the Humanities PhD to Work is more than a career guide. More than anything, I hope that it shifts the conversation about career preparation away from being a matter of individual actions, and instead helps to contextualize it in systemic issues such as disinvestment in public higher education at the city, state, and federal levels; academic labor structures and the adjunct crisis; racism and gender bias; and student debt and material support of graduate students. I hope the book has an impact on these conversations and drives some real structural change at a moment when so much is in flux.

Katina L. Rogers is Co-Director of the Futures Initiative and Director of Programs and Administration of HASTAC at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Anastasia Kārkliņa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University, specializing in American cultural studies and black cultural theory.  

Save 30% on Putting the Humanities PhD to Work with coupon E20ROGRS.