Narrative, Identity, and Power: SU Humanities Center

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academia, humanities research, precarity

  Tonight I attended a wonderful event conceived and organized by Vivian May, the current Director SU Humanities Center, along with her capable staff. Committed to using the Center’s space and funding lines not only to create research space but also to provide opportunities for Humanities faculty dialogue and community-building, Vivian brought together the three, current HC faculty fellows to speak about their research: Steve Parks from the Writing Program, Dana Spiotta from English, and Dawn Dow from sociology.

Steve spoke with passion and conviction about the “Feds” or the federation of working class writing groups that have been active in England since the 1970s. Constituted under the loathsome class politics of the mid-1970s through Thatcherism, Steve depicts these writing collectives as material means for gathering as a class, for writing into an identity that can anchor political activism, and as a material archive of an immense and precious labor history represented in the specific writings, a labor history that spans the 1890s (when boat laborers used wooden oars on the Thames) to the Burger King clerks of the early 21st century.

Dawn’s passion was not dampened by her scholar’s use and depiction of sociological methods. Her research on middle class African American mothers in the San Francisco Bay area examines how these women express and navigate concern for the particular vulnerability of their sons. Finessing a dizzying array of variables, Dawn’s research hammered home the fact that economic stability can buy many many things, but it cannot buy a body out of our country’s toxic racial economy. She shared with us a slice of the options drawn upon by these mothers, including creating enclaves of safety, exposing their sons to a range of experiences of ‘blackness’ so that they can navigate different social spaces with ease, and role-playing scenarios with their sons in order to prompt them to think about predatory child molesters and police officers, both, as potential threats.

  Dana is a novelist who found herself drawn to the story of Glenn Ford, an African American man wrongly convicted of murder in 1984 and who thus spent 29 years in solitary confinement on death row. Dana spoke about the porosity between fiction and non-fiction, and yet how the two genres inhere different needs and different constraints. She spoke to the growing awareness of the anchoring power of ‘fact’ and the need to attend carefully to moments when she was imagining or feeling her way into Mr. Ford’s story. Though Dana typically considers fiction a matter of tapping into and expressing consciousness, she said she found herself honing what she could learn and verify about Ford’s physical body–what it endured, what it was exposed to, and how it reacted over the more than 10,000 days that it lived without human touch or companionship.

I probably harbor the most envy for Steve’s research, because I find it fascinating to track community formation and empowerment through the practice of writing physically alongside one another, and I find his dedication to trying to fund and build an archive of the Feds’ million-odd publications inspiring as both activism and the preservation of counter-history. That said, all three presentations–and perhaps the constellation of all three in this single evening–really has me thinking about the different scales and forms of precarity, from an externally imposed class prejudice that impacts how children are (not) educated, to the double-edged precarity of racism that is both fought off and yet also instilled in young men through stories of preparation and warning, and finally the precarity of a single body literally caged inside a state-run fortress that was indifferent to compassion and arrogant about its grasp of ‘justice.’

Thanks, Vivian–and the HC, and SU. That was grand.

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Managing Advisors (reprise)

   Last fall, I posted some thoughts subsequent to a Career Services panel, in which two colleagues and I conversed with graduate students about “how to manage your advisor.” Called “Enduring Abusive Advisors” the post received a few skeptical comments from folks who doubted the cogency of leaving a program or switching advisors just because of personality differences. I agree. Such decisions should not be made hastily. I can report, however, that I have heard through back-channels that some of the students in attendance actually did change their advisors, and that they are happier in their programs now. So: one small victory for vocalizing the need for quality of life over endless and fruitless sacrifice to unhappiness for the sake of an increasingly ambiguous academic credential.

Still, as yet another semester ignites, the question remains how to make the most of the advisor-advisee relationship that is, after all, a structured and unavoidable facet of one’s masters or doctoral program. I aim my comments at Humanities graduate students, since that is the ocean I swim in, and I write from the perspective of the over-committed advisor.

It seems to me that graduate students are caught in a bind familiar to many apprentice situations. On the one hand, they are mature and intelligent adults who can and should be proactive in securing their needs and clarifying their wants. On the other hand, the power dynamics of many departments work to signal a kind of infantilization of these selfsame mature adults. Before all else, then, you grad students need to remain imminently respectful but also resist infantilization. You need to clarify what you need and want from an advisor, and to ask (if it’s not clarified for you) what the advisor needs and wants from the advisee relationship. Here are some other thoughts:

(1) Advisors are not parents, best friends, police officers, or therapists. What you need and desire from this advisor-advisee relationship should be centered on intellectual content and intellectual process.

(2) Remember that you are responsible for setting agendas for meetings, asking questions, and meeting deadlines.

(3) If it’s clear that you think well with a certain advisor, but also that you will not get the feedback you need from them, consider switching advisors, or consider satisfying your need for feedback in other ways, such as a writing collective or hired writing coach. Put more bluntly: Feedback is essential. You should consider how much you need and how you best process and act on feedback. Knowing these aspects about yourself will help you ask for the counsel you need, better engage your advisor, or figure out how to get it elsewhere.

(3) You should meet with your advisor AT LEAST at or near the beginning of each semester. Be proactive. Walk in with an updated copy of your c.v. Use sentences that start with things like: (a) “My goals for this semester are…”, or (b) “I work best when…” or (c) “It really helps me when you…”, or (d) “how much lead time would you need if I wanted feedback on… [a conference paper, a grant submission, a chapter draft].” Don’t be afraid to pull out your calendar and mark in writing your advisor’s responses.

(4) If your advisor has given you a task (read this book), an agenda (practice networking at this upcoming conference), or a deadline (I need a full draft of chapter one by mid-August)–and you accept this advice–then you simply have to meet it. Doing so is the basic way to maintain good faith in any relationship.

(5) If your advisor gives you a task, agenda, or deadline that you do not wish to accept, then you need to say so. Opening up with your advisor is risky but important for two reasons. First, it reminds them that you are an adult, with fully formed ideas and agendas of your own. Second, negotiating expectations and demands is the best and honest way to approach difficulties with people in authority anywhere and in any job.

(6) Again, you need to be proactive in the mentoring relationship. If a graduate student tells me that they need regular meetings and feedback, that is fine. But my job is to be willing to do that, not to be chasing them down to make that happen.

(7) To say the obvious: How you craft and engage your advising relationship is part of how your advisor writes about your character and potential in their letters of recommendation. It behooves you to treat the relationship with care, respect and the utmost professionalism. Compose emails respectfully, comport yourself politely in meetings, respond to emails from your advisor promptly and honestly. Recognize that the work your advisor does for you–if it is indeed real mentoring and not a sham–really cannot be paid back, so the best way to acknowledge that gift is to be professionally grateful when the opportunity arises, and to pay it forward in your career. Because every job will have someone around who needs mentoring.

Endings and beginnings

My father died on New Year’s day. It was, as a friend put it, a cruelly sad way to start the new year, even though my father was quite old and had lived a long, successful and fruitful life. Despite our annual, glittery, champagne-infused fêtes of disavowal, the “devouring teeth of time” (Hume) devour all of us too, and it’s worse than a hangover to be reminded of this on January 1 and to be drop-kicked with whiplash speed from celebration to mourning.

  During the gathering of family, the food preparation, the stories and photographs, and the decision-making about the memorial service, a line from Jim Morrison’s American Prayer (music by the Doors) slid onto my head’s center stage and kept playing there like a stuck karaoke track: “Death makes angels of us all, and gives us wings where once were shoulders smooth as ravens’ claws.” I know: it’s not Bowie (that was the next weekend’s loss)*, but the line does succinctly encapsulate the human purposiveness of funeral services. ‘Eulogies’–from the Greek meaning praise or (more literally) good words [eu, good/proper, and logos, word]–really do abstract and reframe what a single, enfleshed life was and did to the good. We take the rough and heavy-laden marks of flesh, we take the cognitive and emotional limitations of finitude, the complexities of love and family and relationship, the robustness and ambivalence of the quotidian, the exhausting dash between work and hobby, between obligation and pleasure, and we transmute them by word and story and gesture into feathery translucence. Dad may be an angel now for all I know, but I also know we made him one and that that was what our gathering together was supposed to do.

We do this for the dead one, and we do this for each other, I think, as I consider the technical meaning of angel (‘messenger’). Funerals first gather family, and then friends, and then community, in widening and rippling arcs that from one perspective reflect a diffusion of intimacy into friendship and out to acquaintance. But from another perspective these more distant arcs of acquaintanceship deliver messages of intimacy. The nuggets of story and insight that came from men who worked with my father decades ago added to the tiny bubbles of solidarity and joy from neighbors and churchmen who went fishing with him on the weekends, and the secretaries who said my dad was always the sweetest of gentlemen to them. As all of these angels delivered their bottled messages to me in the funeral receiving line, I felt my father take on a three-dimensionality that was, sadly, lost to me while he was alive. The narrow, raven’s claw grip that he had on me released to flutterings, to a marvel at how a single body’s words and relations and gestures and thoughts and memories spin out, in superfine and superstrong spider’s silk, the sedimented ballast of social interconnection.

 

*My dad’s mother, for whom I was named and on whose 80th birthday I was born, died the same day John Lennon was shot. I prefer to think of this as empirical proof of a strong spirit-connection between the Hamners and powerful musicians.