Blog

The readings we have done for this course provide several ways to think about ‘publics’ and how academics can engage them as part of our work.

I am here because I believe that girls and women  are agents of social transformation, producers of knowledge, and what hip-hop scholar Ruth Brown calls “creative genius” (Brown 2013, 2014). As a working-class, first generation college student, I strongly believe in the need to center the voices of working class girls of color in knowledge production about music, art, feminism, and film. Centering their voices, means questioning the way we conduct, analyze, present, and write about them.

Since I was young, I intended to go into academics. Several members of my family were involved in academia, and I found the idea of perusing knowledge in order to educate a wide audience to be a very compelling career path. I was surprised, however, to find that the more involved with my research in graduate school I became, the group of people I was speaking to shrank. At first, I thought that I was doing something incorrectly, but quickly realized I was, in fact, doing exactly what was expected of me.

I’m here because I want a place to think about what it means to do publicly engaged scholarship. Because in the competitive, individualist context of academia the Public Scholars program creates a community of peers with whom to think deeply and collaboratively about these issues. Because I want to stay in the university and I’m committed to doing that in the most ethical way possible. Because academia is very good at theorizing politics on an abstract scale, and very bad at addressing the politics of its own institutions.

I’m in Mellon Public Scholars because of an unrelenting curiosity on the possibilities of connecting humanistic research with the initiatives of community organizations. I’ve attempted to negotiate the boundaries between academic and public life since I entered the university, and this program is an opportunity to meet colleagues who share similar goals.

As graduate students, we are deeply committed to our individual research projects, but often our topics are very specific inquiries and those without a background in our area have difficulty understanding the implications of our studies. We spend countless hours inside labs, libraries, and specialty archives, but do our findings make it past academic journals and presentations? How do they impact real lives in our communities?

I originally went to graduate school to study rural economic development through the arts and humanities. The plan, however, was immediately derailed by bugs. Or rather, a study on the controversies around killing bugs. Six years later, I somehow seem to be bending the two back toward each other: learning how to tell the histories of insect eradication to support those looking to transform California’s ag land.

1. Berkeley High School – When I graduated from Berkeley High School in the 1990s, it—like the other Berkeley public schools I attended—was still very much under the influence of 1960s and 70s activism around a whole host of issues, from ethnic and gender equity in curricula to environmental conservation. My education in ethnic studies classes in Black Studies and Chicano Studies Departments—established for me not only the unquestioned fact of such disciplines but also their power and the complexity of their existence: I would come to find that elsewhere this was

Why am I here? It’s the ever-present, utterly perplexing question, and it underlies many of the decisions I make, whether they’re day-to-day, or big-picture. I’ve been asking myself this question for years, and am forever hopeful that, overall, life has at least some sort of meaning, and that mine in particular has a purpose. I contemplate life’s complexities and its possibilities in my compositions, and in art generally, and I find meaning through learning and my spirituality (although each propagates more questions and further doubt).

In 2009, I entered graduate school in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara, seemingly when the budget crisis was at its worst. The departmental mood was grim, due largely to financial anxiety, but also to the perception that the world had forgotten about us. My colleagues and I felt overlooked and undervalued, not only at an administrative level, but also within our classrooms.