PROCESSING
ENTRIES OF Things I am learning. Things I have learned.
Reflections. IdeaS. DREAMS.
Reflections. IdeaS. DREAMS.
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At the end of each year, I do a "by the numbers" as part of my reflection that I do through Year Compass (which I HIGHLY recommend). You're able to download a guidebook that helps you close our the previous year while also then thinking about how you want to intentionally dream the new year. One of their prompts is going through your calendar and writing down important events, etc. For me, since I use my calendar and Notion to track the books I read, concerts I attend, shows I watch, etc. I figured that this random round-up could be some highlights from my 2022 "by the numbers" categories and some other highlights too. Enjoy!
OTHER BY THE NUMBERS?
I traveled to 15 different cities in 2022, some of which were related to the 8 conferences I attended and the 8 weddings/unions I celebrated. Obviously the highlight across all the cities were the friends and families I got to see (and some GREAT food along the way: Baltimore crab cakes; LA omakase; San Diego tacos; Midwest apple fritters)— help, I'm drooling just thinking about them. Work-wise, some of these numbers included 4 peer-reviewed articles coming out, submitting 11 manuscripts where 6 were with students, getting 7 grants (I applied to wayyyyy more), with the largest work highlight being moving to a new city with a new job, Now, the only number I'm hoping I don't experience is the negative degrees, courtesy of Chicago winters!
I also love this piece because it reflects a shift in my work and engaging with care and how carework folds into labor, particularly within my larger research agenda of institutional accountability and what we able to describe and distill as institutional carewashing. While the gendering of education and teaching has been well-studied under the lens of feminism (and how related/resultant facets such as emotional labor are then valued as less important), I appreciated the space within this article (and particularly through the lit review) to reimagine and apply carework then to what it means to work with students and work with ourselves. As a result, we were able to draw the connections of institutional carewashing (or the ways institutions declare care without tangible efforts) and apply that to how activism can and has cause harm to the its own activists— a similar parallel to the ways scholars who try to rehumanize the academy (myself included) can recreate neoliberalism. Carework and community-centric responses like mutual aid (see Lydia X. Z. Brown's work) are the necessary ways to respond to the institutionalization of it all. I'll close with one of my favorite quotes from our article (though let's be honest, I loved every sentence haha!): While activism has & continues to be necessary to hold institutions accountable and push for political, societal, organizational change, our emphasis on care & carework grounds activism…beyond institutional transformation as we ourselves are more than the institutional identities, affiliations, and labor placed on us. |
