A feminist coven in the university

Abstract

In theory, graduate school fosters intellectual and professional growth. However, it often feels personally and politically stunting. It is a place of competition, scarcity, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy.Our talk is rooted in our experiments with autonomous feminist spaces both inside and outside the university. Founded with our friends, these groups have different names and manifestations.

Staying with the trouble of collegiality, professionalism and care: Fertilities in academia

“…Hil Malatino (2020: n.p.) implores us to “grapple with questions of care—how we understand it, how we measure it, how we account for it,” because we have been shackled for too long by “heterocisnormative,” and “resistant cultural imaginaries of care.” Care has been widely theorized in a variety of disciplines, and feminist geographers have called for concrete caring practices such as slow scholarship (Mountz et al., 2015), feminist mentoring (Oberhauser and Caretta, 2019), and experiencing togetherness beyond collegiality in the form of collective anger, love, and joy (Smyth et al., 2019). Yet these theories and guidelines rarely enter formative academic discourse such as student/faculty orientations, training modules, department meetings, administrator emails, or university policy.…”

“…In addition to caring for the (in)fertile body and for dependents, “taking care of the academic family” detracts from research time, yet performance metrics don’t value it (Flaherty, 2017). At times the demand for care comes from critical feminists themselves; Smyth et al. (2019: 21) write, “Be there for each other because shit is hard enough in grad school,” and recommend a list of caring practices such as talking over tea and whiskey on the stoop.…”

“…(2019: 21) write, “Be there for each other because shit is hard enough in grad school,” and recommend a list of caring practices such as talking over tea and whiskey on the stoop. Yet many are also time-consuming, risky, inaccessible to some, and written in the imperative such as “abandon appropriate behavior,” “burn your student loan notices,” and “Gather a crew and drive out to a vacant field to watch the full moon fade at dawn” (Smyth et al., 2019). They clarify that their audience are those already-precarious and exhausted, yet their paper is an example of the many ways feminist geographers, myself included, can seem to demand yet more from this group.…”

“…These include the mandate to do more in less time while being constantly available (Mountz et al., 2015). Other key tenets of the neoliberal university are the presumption of a disembodied and disembedded neoliberal scholar (Bono et al., 2019), imperatives to publish, individualism and competition, and intersectionally uneven demands that make work-life balance impossible (Puāwai Collective, 2019; see also Lawson, 2007; Smyth et al., 2019). These uneven demands are compounded by “microagressions that cut across intersectional issues such as race, gender, class, seniority” (Lawson, 2007; Smyth et al., 2019: 33).…”

We, too: contending with the sexual politics of fieldwork in China

“…We want to contribute to conversations in the literature and in informal spaces (e.g. Huang et al 2018;Watt 2018;Williams 2017) that urge researchers to consider the possibility of unwanted sexual encounters in the field, to think through coping strategies (including some that we've suggested here), and to build systems of support with peers (Smyth, Linz, and Hudson 2020) and through relationships with mentors. For China fieldwork in particular, a crucial first step is for researchers and mentors to know the rules and expectations for guanxi-building banquets and post-banquet events, and to anticipate methods for navigating power relations and shifting positionalities when attending them.…”