Doing, Thinking, Writing, and Then, More Doing
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Lauren Shoemaker
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Dr. Lothian
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 ENGL 985
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 10 September 2013
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Doing, Thinking, Writing, and Then, More Doing
In the spring of 2005 I went to San Francisco on a service learning trip that I found out about because I had chosen to stay in a class meant for English majors that was not required for Secondary Education majors. I was in the wrong place at the right time. The professor had told me in the first week that I didn’t need to be there; I should get one of my science or math classes out of the way. I didn’t leave because I had the room for electives, and Writing about Literature seemed as good as any class to take. The announcement was made in this course that a special service learning course would be offered in the spring. I enrolled in the one credit course taught by the same professor that culminated in the spring break trip to San Francisco.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Leading up to the trip, we read novels that now seem to me to compose a social justice literary canon. Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, and others provided a background for the overall call to service learning. Our activities on the west coast included eradicating invasive species from beaches, cleaning “shiners” at the food bank, an alleyway clean-up in Chinatown, and working with students at 826 Valencia, a literacy center in a largely Hispanic neighborhood. Each night we reflected on the service in journal writing, attempting to tie in any of the previous readings we could. I had a lot more time to do this than any of the other students on the trip, being the only underage undergrad, though quantity of writing probably didn’t make up for the lackluster quality of grappling with institutional oppression sans the vocabulary and concepts.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 The point of bringing up this experience that is now almost ten years ago is to contrast it with what I ended up doing professionally following it, which was ultimately disappointing and unfulfilling. I followed the advice of my dad, who always has my best interests at heart and sincerely hopes for my happiness, but grips desperately to the belief systems of most first generation immigrants. He wanted me to have a job after four years of college, so I didn’t switch my major from teaching to strictly English. I taught middle school students, and while it was rewarding, I had a sense of guilt for having abandoned the agency I felt on that trip to San Francisco. I was handed curriculum and had such a micro-managing principal that I felt trapped, yet I prized the tiny subversive teaching moments that I had one year with a brilliant class of eighth graders. They definitely helped reenergize me, but the feeling that something was missing drew me back to graduate school.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 I realized there that academic work, while it doesn’t escape hegemonic knowledge production the way it superficially appears to, it at least pretends that it’s possible. Perhaps that’s more sinister, but my experience tells me nothing can be more academic soul-crushing than having to box up books that the PTA has decided you can’t even have available in your classroom, let alone teach them. I’ll take the illusion of academic freedom any day. In Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s article, “The University and the Undercommons,” they critique the kind of agency that I felt I had and can have in the future, though possibly the passivity in realizing the academy’s pretense is a symptom of entering the Undercommons. Moten and Harney describe the mindset of the Undercommons as
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. (103)
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 I want to think that I could reside in this radical community of scholar-thieves in the Undercommons, but my insistence on clinging to agency and probably futile attempts to instill agency in students bar my entrance. I’m just not pessimistic enough.
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 1 What am I doing here? Academic work, which for me includes dovetailing research, teaching, and personal social justice commitments, allows me to deceive myself into thinking I am making a difference. Such ignorance is bliss, and I would like to wallow in it for one more brief moment before calling into question what making a difference looks like. According to Roderick A. Ferguson, even structural changes that take on the appearance of being inclusive and correcting the wrongs of the past epistemology within the university prove disconcerting upon closer inspection. In the introduction to The Reorder of Things, Ferguson describes the institutionalization of minority insurgence that seemed to promise so much, yet gained very little. The introduction of African Studies, Women Studies, and other programs and departments across the U.S. served to tokenize minorities, and Ferguson’s book “analyzes how dominant institutions attempted to reduce the initiatives of oppositional movements to the terms of hegemony” (7). Even what seemed like social progress in establishing the departments of difference is subsumed in the narrative of the privatization of the university and its hegemonic culture of knowledge.
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 2 I refuse to end on such a depressing note. I keep returning to service learning in my academic career as an antidote, though I know it offers only a phantom of agency. Maybe I haven’t changed much from the undergrad who wrote about trying to sleep with sore muscles and a heavy heart from a day at the food bank. I might have a better understanding of the political, social, and historical structures that lead to the necessity of service and how its completion is a form of justice rather than charity, but I feel like I never lost that need to do something alongside thinking about it. The university offers the best space for doing, thinking, writing, and then, more doing. That’s what research and teaching looks like to me.
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Works Cited
¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Ferguson, Roderick A. “Affirmative Actions of Power.” The Reorder of Things: the University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 1-18.
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¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 1 Moten, Fred and Harney, Stefano. “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Social Text. 79.2 (July 2004): 101-115.
I am drawn to the “making a difference” as well. You may never know the significant “difference” you make in your students lives. But what if “making a difference” was somehow, in a non-selfish way, for us too. Reclaiming the notion of your own agency?