Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy 9781138478787, 9781351067669

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Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education

This book features theorized narratives from academics who inhabit marginalized identity positions, including, among others, academics with non-normative genders, sexualities, and relationships; nontenured faculty; racial and ethnic minorities; scholars with HIV, depression and anxiety, and other disabilities; immigrants and international students; and poor and working-class faculty and students. The chapters in this volume explore the ways in which marginalized identities fundamentally shape and impact the academic experience; thus, the contributors in this collection demonstrate how academic outsiderism works both within the confines of their college or university systems, and a broader matrix of community, state, and international relations. With an emphasis on the inherent intersectionality of identity positions, this book addresses the broad matrix of ways academics navigate their particular locations as marginalized subjects. Santosh Khadka is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, USA. Joanna Davis-McElligatt is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA. Keith Dorwick is Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA.

Routledge Research in Higher Education

Professional Education at Historically Black Colleges and Universities Past Trends and Outcomes Edited by Tiffany Fontaine Boykin, Adriel A. Hilton, and Robert T. Palmer Articulating Asia in Japanese Higher Education Policy, Partnership and Mobility Jeremy Breaden Global Mobility and Higher Learning Anatoly V. Oleksiyenko Universities and the Occult Rituals of the Corporate World Higher Education and Metaphorical Parallels with Myth and Magic Felicity Wood Developing Transformative Spaces in Higher Education Learning to Transgress Sue Jackson Improving Opportunities to Engage in Learning A Study of the Access to Higher Education Diploma Nalita James and Hugh Busher Graduate Careers in Context Research, Policy and Practice Fiona Christie and Ciaran Burke Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education Inside and Outside the Academy Edited by Santosh Khadka, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Keith Dorwick For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Higher-Education/book-series/RRHE

Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education Inside and Outside the Academy Edited by Santosh Khadka, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Keith Dorwick

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Santosh Khadka, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Keith Dorwick to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-47878-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-06766-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

SANTOSH KHADKA, JOANNA DAVIS-MCELLIGATT, AND KEITH DORWICK

1 Out of Sight: Academic Otherness and the Paradox of Visibility

16

MICHAEL BORGSTROM

2 Notes From the Dark Side: Scholars in Administration

28

BRIDGETTE COBLE AND SANDRA MIZUMOTO POSEY

3 On Being the First Black Woman

42

JOANNA DAVIS-MCELLIGATT

4 Breaking the Silence and Removing the Garb: Revelations From a Working-Class Academic

54

KATELYNN DELUCA

5 Othered Moods and Muses: Reflections on Rhetoric, Research, and the Mind

65

LAUREN DIPAULA

6 Over It/Not Over It/Getting Over It: Checking White Male Privilege in the Midst of Otherness

76

KEITH DORWICK

7 The Racialised Knowledge Economy FATANEH FARAHANI AND SURUCHI THAPAR-BJÖRKERT

86

vi Contents 8 Strangers in a Strange Land

100

ELENA G. GARCIA AND BEN G. GOODWIN

9 To and for Whom Am I Speaking?: Reading and Teaching African-American Literature Outside of the United States

114

KIMIKO HIRANUMA

10 From the “Third World” to a Third World? Tales of a Nepalese Graduate Student in the USA

126

MADHAV KAFLE

11 Worlds Apart: A Third World Academic’s Navigation of US Higher Education and Citizenship

138

SANTOSH KHADKA

12 An Academic Imposter From the Working Class: Emotional Labor and First-Generation College Students

149

NANCY MACK

13 An Academic From Behind the Iron Curtain

162

LIGIA A. MIHUT

14 Living as the Other in Japan: A Joint Autoethnography of Two Expatriate Academics in the Academy

175

THERON MULLER AND JOHN ADAMSON

15 Unclassifiable Outsiders: Eastern European Women, Transnational Whiteness, and Solidarity

188

VOICHITA NACHESCU

16 (In)visible Dis/abilities, Teaching Writing, and Affective Whiteness: Or, What Literally Floored Me Today

201

JENN POLISH

17 A Mottled Minority: Asian-American in the Whitening Academy 214 JOHN STREAMAS

Afterword

226

ERIC ANTHONY GROLLMAN

Contributors’ Biographies Index

235 241

Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful to all our authors for their hard work and for our families’ and friends’ patience throughout this project. We also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who read this manuscript and helped both editors and authors make our work sharper and clearer through their suggestions. We hope Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy will be of great use to all the Others who are marginalized by the academy in ways too many to tell. Santosh would like to thank mentors in Nepal, Syracuse, and Northridge who directly or indirectly shaped his academic and personal life. He wants to give a special thanks to his spouse, Nitasha, and two young children, Grace and Riyan, who have been so patient with and forgiving of their book-and-screen addicted and often-missing-from-home family member. Joanna would like to thank Shelley Ingram, because without her extraordinary collegiality and friendship and support, this work would be a far more difficult thing. She would also like to thank her partner, Colin, without whom she would never have made it this far. Keith would like to add particular thanks and appreciation to his colleague and then head James C. McDonald of the Department of English, and to Dean Jordan Kellman of the College of Liberal Arts, both at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, for arranging a yearlong sabbatical, the second semester of which he used to work on the first stages of what is now this book. He would also like to thank his husband, John, and the other special people in his life for all their support. They know who they are. —Santosh Khadka, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Keith Dorwick

Introduction Santosh Khadka, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Keith Dorwick

When the three of us came together to plan this collection, it was out of a shared sense that there was a need for academic outsiders—those of us who, for any number of reasons, do not clearly fit within the scholarly mold— to share our stories. In our initial investigations, we found a number of studies about select groups, including queer faculty, disabled faculty, faculty of color, and international faculty, published by academic journals and organizations such as the Modern Language Association and Association of American University Professors, publications such as Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as countless governmentsponsored national and international studies. Yet with the exception of very few texts, such as Presumed Incompetent, edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Gabriella, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life by Sara Ahmed; articles such as Patience Elabor-Idemudia’s “Equity Issues in the Academy: An Afro-Canadian Woman’s perspective” and Eric Anthony Grollman’s Inside Higher Ed–affiliated blog Conditionally Accepted, the vast majority of the studies we encountered were more or less exclusively concerned with analyzing statistics: the numbers of minoritized populations on college campuses, their likelihood to earn tenure and promotion, their acceptance into graduate programs, their recruitment and retention. While those studies provide crucial information, we were struck by the lack of first-person explorations of what it means to be an outsider working within; around; and, at times; in spite of the system. We were eager to learn more about the actual experiences of minorities in higher education—to hear from the subjects themselves about the conditions of their work lives, their insecurities, the various oppressions they face in their places of work, their responses to and suggestions for working within institutions that were not built for them and often exclude them from full participation. The enthusiastic response we received from our call for papers confirmed our assumptions that academics were keen to discuss their experiences, not only for themselves but also for others like them. This collection is but a brief sampling of some of those experiences, written by people who comprise a significant portion of the higher education workforce. Our

2  Santosh Khadka et al. collection is by no means comprehensive—that would be impossible. But we hope that as much as is possible Narratives of the Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy offers critical insight into the difficulties, pain, triumphs, and subtle victories that greet minorities in colleges and universities around the world. In this collection, you will find 17 chapters by academics at every level—adjuncts, graduate students, tenure-track professors, and administrators—from locations around the world. Their experiences intersect and diverge in complex ways, as do their identities. We are hopeful that by providing a space for academics to discuss their personal experiences within theoretical frameworks, we might work toward devising better strategies for inclusion, recruitment, and retention, and, ultimately, the humanization of the Other.

The Academy and Its Relation to the World: From the Local to the Global Institutions of higher education are not distinct from social and political spaces, but are rather a complex part and extension of them. Academics work within complex local, national, and global frameworks, not only as individuals but also as producers of knowledge. The myth of the ivory tower, where scholars and academics examine ideas from a lofty remove and do not engage with public discourse, is an outmoded way of looking at the system of higher education. As an idealized model of academic engagement, the perception of academics as distant or removed from the worlds in which they function negatively and disproportionately impacts minority or outsider academics, whose work is often inextricably bound up with current affairs, and with the direct and immediate implications of their bodies in sociopolitical spaces and places. With the advent of social media, academics, students, and activists are increasingly turning to blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to share their work, engage with non-academics and academics alike, to protest injustices on their campuses and beyond, and to impress upon the public the relevancy of their work. Colleges and universities are complex parts of the local communities, towns or cities, states, regions, nations, and, of course, the world. Local economies and sociocultural traditions determine student enrollment on many levels, including, in many cases, the racial, class, gender, and political identities of students and faculty. Public or national colleges and universities are primarily dependent on the state or nation-state to determine their operating budget, leaving institutions vulnerable to the whims of state or national politics, which may be, depending on the moment, either in favor of or radically opposed to institutions of higher education. Elite private liberal arts colleges and universities often depend on maintaining impressive national and international reputations in order to attract students, and on generous endowments from wealthy donors. Yet as the Great Recession made clear, what might at first appear to be local concerns—the purchasing,

Introduction  3 say, of a family home in suburban Los Angeles with a subprime loan—can swiftly become global ones. As a result of risky investments by global banks, the funding of universities and colleges in countries with strong traditions of globally recognized excellence in higher education, such as Denmark, England, the United States, for example, have been forced to make drastic cuts to operating budgets, increase tuition fees, lay off faculty and staff, and close entire departments.1 A switch to more ostensibly practical subjects that might help students negotiate difficult job markets has led Japanese universities to close a number of social sciences and humanities departments.2 Across the world, austerity and the slow recovery from the recession has meant that universities and colleges are cutting faculty, budgets, and services for students, at the same time social services that serve student and adjunct populations are shrinking. In the United States, tenure-track positions are rapidly being replaced with inexpensive, temporary labor, and the unwillingness of state governments to pay into the system has meant that students are taking on great amounts of debt; professors and students in many states actively protested state governments for the slashing of funding. In the United Kingdom, students have repeatedly taken to the streets to protest tuition increases, demanding that tax dollars be reserved to subsidize their education. Adjunct faculty, who are routinely exploited, have become both a mainstay and a source of consternation for those universities and colleges that rely on their labor. In this hyperconnected world, faculty, administrators, students, and staff are subject to intricate socioeconomic and sociocultural forces, from the local to the global, which significantly impact budgets, course offerings, development of certain disciplines or fields at the expense of others, or, in some instances, the ability of students to afford their education. Yet institutions of higher education are directly impacted by other factors, such as threats of terrorism and terrorist attacks; negative responses to immigration and immigrant populations; systemic racism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, and transphobia; lack of adequate support for disabled populations; the general instability of global markets, made manifest most recently in the aftermath of Brexit; and the impacts of violence in the form of mass shootings, such as those at Virginia Tech, Isla Vista, Sandy Hook, Orlando, Charleston, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Students of color in the United States have been protesting on numerous college campuses for the retention and recruitment of faculty of color, and against the bigoted treatment by professors and campus police who target them unfairly. Students have actively protested the climate of rape culture on campuses, which means their attackers often go unpunished, while faculty have pushed for fair pay for women, paid leave, childcare, and breastfeeding facilities. Undocumented and refugee students have pushed for in-state fees and eligibility to attend universities and colleges. Transgender students, faculty, and staff have agitated for the right to use the restroom on college campuses, and for the expansion of the use of pronouns. Queer students and faculty

4  Santosh Khadka et al. who are now, in many places, able to marry are negotiating with institutions for the right to benefits for their spouses and partners.3 Colleges and universities, as the primary producers of knowledge in many locations, are political institutions; as such, faculty and administrators are from time to time at loggerheads with political parties, who may be openly hostile to certain fields, discourses, or approaches, to the very idea that higher education is a global necessity whose mission must be supported by funding at the state, federal, national, and international level. In spite of the necessary protections academic freedom provides some academics, as was recently made clear in the Steven Salaita tenure case at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, public officials and politicians can directly influence the retention of faculty and police their speech—both on campus and off.4 As higher education has over time become politicized, faculty may find themselves in a position to defend their right to teach certain topics, such as gender and sexuality, race, and ethnicity, or social problems; in the United States, for example, anxieties about the “liberal education” students receive may place them in direct conflict with students who are politically conservative. Beyond matters of academic freedom, which do apply in most instances to adjunct faculty but may not be recognized by other faculty members and administrators are personnel matters that are often deeply politicized by both colleges and universities, and the states and nations that support them. State, federal, and national law, whims of public officials, and public opinion impact the benefits that the employees of institutions of higher education are entitled to as members. In the United States, for example, health care, partner benefits, and spousal support for students, faculty, staff, and administrators are matters for the state and national government to regulate; this can easily impede access to vital services or medical support, such as hormones for transgender employees, certain forms of birth control, abortion, or mental health services. For those who work at or attend private institutions, the political whims of the college or university’s governing body determine the level of care, at times offering even fewer services than those offered at public institutions. Furthermore, in the United States, private religious institutions may or may not be willing to hire members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and those who are open about their sexuality may face dismissal. The hiring and promotion of non-White faculty remains scant in the United States and beyond. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that in the fall of 2013, among full-time professors, 84 percent were White (58 percent were White males and 26 percent were White females), 4 percent were Black, 3 percent were Hispanic, and 9 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander. Making up less than 1 percent each were professors who were American Indian/Alaska Native and of Two or more races.5

Introduction  5 We argue that forms of oppressions faced outside the academy by academic Others—women, minorities, the disabled, LGBTQIA+ students and faculty, international students and faculty, and the working class, among other populations—such as unequal pay, lack of equal benefits, and lack of representation are both mirrored in and often exacerbated by the academy. The perception that institutions of higher education are liberal bastions that offer safe haven to minoritized populations is not an accurate one. Because colleges and universities are constitutive parts of the multiple locations and forces that support and shape them, they often reflect the values, traditions, and mores of those locations and forces. The expectation that colleges and universities will be more progressive than the communities that sustain and form them is, as our contributors make clear, largely illusory. Academic institutions reproduce and are complicit in the very systems of oppression and the imbalances of power that much of the research produced at those institutions seeks to deconstruct; as academics work to analyze oppressive social, cultural, and economic conditions they are simultaneously subject to them. As individual academics identify and position themselves, they are also identified and positioned from without. As the contributors to this collection make plain, the systems of power without the academy enforce and dictate the often oppressive codes and regulations of academic institutions. Yet as students, faculty members, and administrators, they simultaneously impact the development of those codes and regulations, even if in uneven ways. Despite the fact that colleges and universities are often closed systems, available only to students who are enrolled and the faculty, staff, and administrators who work in them, we make the case that they are also systems that are wholly engaged with the complex of social, economic, and cultural systems that surround and comprise them. Though academics are focused on the deconstruction and systemic analysis of those systems and their concomitant values, the academy is not—and never could be—set apart from those systems and values. In our view, the academy is in itself a reflection of various social and economic systems, both feeding into and drawing from the subjects who comprise it and the world—from the local to the global— which surrounds it.

Intersectionality and the Construction of Identities As people who live lives separate from the academy, students, faculty, and administrators interact both individually and communally within the broader matrix of relations that shape their engagement with their particular locations—for example, the arrests of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ersula Ore, and Imani Perry make clear that being an academic does not erase the fact of one’s blackness. Students, faculty, and administrators routinely cross social, cultural, economic, state, national, and international borders in the pursuit

6  Santosh Khadka et al. of their own individual learning, and for research and teaching opportunities. In doing so, they bring with them unique perspectives, problems, and ideas. We see these border crossings as vibrant indicators of the entanglement of the academy with the myriad positionalities of the people who create it; as the academy makes room in the form of the creation of new departments and divisions of learning and the accommodation of new peoples, and at other times it violently resists new models and modes of being and learning. Originally defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1993 article “Mapping the Margins: Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color,” the theory of intersectionality asks us to examine “difference within groups” in order to better understand and avoid contributing to “tension among groups” (1242). Indeed, as we see in the contributor’s chapters, there are multiple forces at play in the construction of their personal and academic identities, and numerous factors that work together to impact them to function and thrive within the system. We make the case that academics are inherently intersectional subjects, who possess multiple identity markers, such as race, class, ability, location, gender, sexuality orientation, language, and social values, religious affiliations, and nationality. For this reason, we privilege the ways in which these identity markers constitute both our own unique positionalities, as well as the ways in which our identities intersect with those of other outsiders in surprising and insightful ways. The academics in the collection find themselves at odds both within their broader communities outside of the academy and at odds with the academic institutions themselves. To that end, our contributors articulate the ways in which they are Othered outside, within, and by the academy. Though many college and university systems claim to strive to include people of color, members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) community, diaspora groups, the working poor, first-generation academics, the disabled, racial minorities, and the mentally ill, these populations are consistently underrepresented and made invisible by and in the academy. Scholars who find themselves Othered within the academic system must simultaneously confront, struggle with, and endure many of the same oppressions, slights, and microaggressions they experience outside it. For these scholars, as our contributors make plain, the academy can be an unfriendly—even hostile—place to work. In this collection, we hoped to offer scholars an opportunity to speak to their own personal experiences in the form of anecdotes or narratives, while also speaking to the ways in which these concerns work within the context of pre-existing theoretical and discursive constructs—or, as the case may be, in contradistinction to those constructs. Each chapter in this collection is focused on the task of speaking both for and beyond itself, as the authors dissect the ways in which their own personal marginalization or outsider status within the academy, and the particular ways in which they are or have been Othered, functions with a broader matrix of structures, systems, and/or social values. As scholars formulate and situate their particular experiences

Introduction  7 within critical and theoretical contexts, we are hopeful that adjuncts, graduate students, tenure-track professors, and administrators may recognize aspects of themselves and find themselves comforted and encouraged. As we become more and more aware of the problems that face marginalized subjects in the college and university, we believe these narratives might help in the development of more thoughtful praxis. How can a system that welcomes and fosters the study of marginalization simultaneously ostracize the very subjects of that research? How is it possible that the academy still suffers from a lack of representation of diversity in the community? For the few nontraditional faculty who have entered the putative ivory tower, what have their experiences been like? What are their strategies for coping? How would they theorize their positions? This collection is borne out of a desire to do this work and to begin to explore these and other important questions about those who find themselves Othered in the academy.

Marginalized Identities in Higher Education Each of our contributors has identified themselves as an outsider, an Other in the academy. We have a broad definition for what it means to be an outsider, but in this collection, our contributors are from minoritized populations both within and without the academy—yet in radically different ways. Our contributors are at various levels within the system—from graduate students to administrators. They are from countries around the world—we quickly discovered that the problems academics face in the academy differ from yet overlap in compelling ways at locations all across the globe. Most importantly, however, our contributors have complex identities. Various complicated identity markers make them Other, depending on their unique locations. As editors, we take seriously the multitude of intersections that constitute the identities of our contributors and in considering how those intersections contribute to their status as academic outsiders. A quick review of scholarship produced by the Othered scholars in the United States reveals that they have primarily focused on the experiences and recruitment of women, international, and minority faculty; less work has been done on the treatment and accommodations for adjunct and disabled faculty. The vast majority of this work has been grounded in the social sciences, with a particular emphasis on the statistics of hiring and promotion, and on representation of marginalized groups among tenure-track faculty. By far, the research on other forms of marginalization, such as the experiences of working-class and mentally ill subjects, has been exclusively focused on the experiences of students and faculty’s reception or perception of their students. C. L. Dews’s, 2010 collection, This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, is a notable exception, though the text does not situate the experiences of faculty within a critical or theoretical framework; the chapters that make up the collection are singularly narrative, emphasizing the personal to the exclusion of the critical.

8  Santosh Khadka et al. Most notably absent is critical scholarship that takes an intersectional approach to the experiences of marginalized academics; rather, the work tends to isolate particular aspects of a subject’s identity or experience, such as her race, gender, or faculty position, from other aspects of her identity and experience. There is also a dearth of scholarly work that pays close attention to the ways in which Othering in the American academy is linked to oppressions outside of it. Furthermore, though a number of articles and books make use of personal interviews, critical discussions of the experience of being marginalized in the workplace from the perspective of academics themselves is nearly non-existent; almost all first-person perspectives are placed within broader frameworks, often used as evidence to support more overarching arguments about the experiences of academics. Even though “Othering” is manifest and experienced across academic institutions around the world, the published accounts come primarily from scholars in developed countries, who nonetheless bring to light how minority groups are marginalized and oppressed in the academy globally. For instance, Lindsey N. Johnson and Kecia M. Thomas (2012) observe that Black women academics in South Africa are dominated, as they are in the United States, by a particular set of norms, behaviors, and attitudes. These academics often “confront hostile work climates, isolation, and in most cases, underrepresentation at every level of their institutions” (p. 160). The authors specifically argue that the challenges of status, power, and voice that Black women professionals encounter in the USA and South Africa resonate with challenges encountered by women of color globally. For Black women in Africa and women of color globally, “there appears to be a dual disadvantage of race and gender in leadership” (p. 163). Projecting a similarly disheartening picture, Calanit Tsalach (2013) writes of what he calls “epistemic wound” located at the heart of academia in Israel. Using autoethnography as a theoretical framework, he speaks of his “Othered” identity and presents the Israeli academy as a site where his Mizrahi identity and Israeliness encounter. His community, which consists of Jews who immigrated to Israel from West Asian and North African countries in the late ’40s and ’60s, is Othered in Israeli society because “these immigrants from Muslim countries were perceived, in an Orientalist manner, as blocking the Zionist ethos of Israel as a White, Western nation” (p. 71). In the similar vein, speaking of Canadian academy, Patience Elabor-Idemudia (2001) argues that the majority of their teaching and administrative positions are staffed by White males whereas minorities, Black women in particular, are “Othered” and marginalized. Even as a tenured university faculty, she has experienced social relation and practice of power in the academy—those of domination, marginalization, and exclusion. The situation of minority groups in the United Kingdom is not any better. Through in-depth interviews with their research participants, Mustafa Bilgehan Ozturk and Nick Rumens (2014) find that gay male academics actually struggle to construct their subject positions in UK business and management schools. According to them, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or

Introduction  9 questioning, and intersex (LGBTQI) academics in United Kingdom experience “employment discrimination and persecution on the grounds of sexual orientation from students and colleagues in a variety of settings including lecture halls, classrooms, and corridors, and in organizational procedures” (p. 503–504). The discourse of heteronormativity underlies university structure so much so that LGBTQI research is devalued by some universities as insubstantial, and academics are often discouraged from undertaking research and scholarship in LGBTQI areas. It’s not just the academy; British society in general is characterized by gendered and sexual inequalities. This widespread “Othering” in the United Kingdom is partly fueled by the government policy, such as the New Public Management provision, which intensified long-standing gender and sexual imbalances in British academia. These cases demonstrate how “Othering” is so entrenched in community and academy. However, the “Othering” works not only within one particular community or country but also between communities across different nations as well. For instance, Susan Meriläinen, Janne Tienari, Robyn Thomas, and Annette Davies (2008) contend that academic publishing practices, which are so integral to university life, maintain and reproduce coreperiphery relations between the Anglophone core and peripheral countries. Through its definition of academic excellence and journal ranking, the larger academia perpetuates hegemonic practices, and, consequently, academic researchers from the periphery are “Othered” in the process. While they speak primarily from their experience as Finnish scholars trying to publish in UK-based journals, they warn that “UK researchers may find themselves in similar ‘othered’ positions in different research settings, for example, in relation to the US. Critical and non-mainstream US scholars, in turn, may find themselves ‘othered’ within the US academy” (p. 585).

Our Intervention Though we do not make any claims to have covered all possible permutations of the experience of being Othered in the academy, we argue that our collection makes an intervention into this critical void by addressing a wide range of human experience, by taking an intersectional approach to the articulation of the experience of being marginalized, by addressing a wider range of experiences than those typically analyzed in academic work, and by emphasizing the politics of location as a fundamental aspect of the academic experience. As our table of contents reflects, our contributors speak from a range of intersecting locations, positions, and Othering experiences: disabilities, races, classes, cultures, and nationalities, among others. The chapter summaries that follow provide a quick preview of the broad range of perspectives and experiences our contributors present to us and the world, and they also shed light on the kind of scholarly intervention this collection makes in the ongoing conversation about the Othered in the academy.

10  Santosh Khadka et al.

Chapter Summaries John Adamson and Theron Muller, in their joint autoethnography explore the Othered experiences of two academics, originally from the United States and the United Kingdom, who have spent more than ten years living and working in Japanese higher education. They position themselves on the periphery of academia geographically, working in the marginalized field of language education within the academy and in Japan are in the linguistic and ethnic minority. In this co-constructed narrative, they share reflections on critical incidents from their careers using conversational narrative, which offers a reflective and developmental space for exploring their teacher landscapes, highlighting aspects of their stories important to understanding their experiences. Jenn Polish, in “(In)visible Dis/abilities, Teaching Writing, and Affective Whiteness: Or, What Literally Floored Me Today,” plays on the words “composition” and “sensible” to explore how these concepts invoke particular forms of communication while also pressuring students and professors to constantly contort our bodies and expressions into poses that conform with dominant power structures. She explores her own relationship with mental dis/abilities and race in classroom interactions in an attempt to bring some bodily force to the argument that the emotional hold of fragile whiteness dominates classroom spaces. In so doing, affective Whiteness comes to define who is considered dis/abled and who is considered effectively composed. John Streamas, in “A Mottled Minority: Asian-American in the Whitening Academy,” argues that in the second decade of the twenty-first century universities are, at the same time, claiming to support diversity while practicing a flattening of differences that merely sustains color-blind racism. He contextualizes this development against similar situations in literary culture, environmental movements, even stand-up comedy. His own story, as an Asian-American who fits none of the “model minority” stereotypes and who has fumbled his way through university bureaucracies, weaves through the argument. He concludes that administrative flattening is indifferent to the differences that define faculty of color—differences that alone promise a better future. Kimiko Hiranuma’s chapter, “To and for Whom Am I Speaking?: Reading and Teaching African-American Literature Outside of the United States” attempts to delineate the relationship between American literature and its students outside of the United States in terms of Otherness. In order to offer a comprehensive overview of scholarship of American literature outside the United States, it discusses how critical race theory is important and indeed attractive to students outside of the United States. It also discusses how this concept of Otherness, as it is expressed in African-American literature and literary criticism, could also fail non-American students and scholars, who themselves may feel Othered in the process. Situating her research and

Introduction  11 herself within the worldwide academic context, this chapter unearths the problems at the root of Otherness in academia, as well as the possibility of a new narrative for non-American scholars studying American literature. Michael Borgstrom’s chapter “Out of Sight: Academic Otherness and the Paradox of Visibility” considers how “Otherness” in the academy might rest not only in visible traits but also in identities and affiliations less commonly observed. By drawing on his own experiences from the vantage point of mid-career, the chapter examines how class and sexual difference inherently positions non-normative persons outside the scholarly mainstream. In exploring the ways that Otherness has informed his teaching, research, and administrative experiences, this chapter thus highlights the permeability of the tidy partitions that structure our professional lives. Ultimately, it argues that attention to such permeability offers an important counter-discourse to normative understandings of academic work itself. Sandra Mizumoto Posey and Bridgette Coble in “Notes From the Dark Side: Scholars in Administration” maintain that the contributions of administrators in higher education has historically been devalued. It is not uncommon to hear expressions of disdain for non-faculty, and there is even an assumption that scholars who work as administrators have “gone to the Dark Side.” This attitude is so pervasive in university culture that it largely goes unchallenged when conversations about campus divisiveness occur. But perhaps it is this very divide that is part of the dysfunctionality endemic in institutions of higher education today. Dialog between administrators and faculty is long overdue, and necessary to support a culture of intellectual vigor and mutual respect. The first part of Nancy Mack’s “An Academic Imposter from the Working Class: Emotional Labor and First-Generation College Students” is a critical memoir, tracing a growing awareness of social class from experiences in elementary, high school, and college as a working-class student. The second part explains how feelings of being an imposter manifest in emotional labor for marginalized students who pursue higher education. This chapter advocates that working-class students need to generate a hybrid academic identity that is not based on having to reject their other identities and forwards strategies for developing emotional agency in identity formation from a Vygotskian notion of self-regulation. Critically analyzing emotion is essential for those who are marginalized within the academy. Lauren DiPaula, in “Othered Moods and Muses: Reflections on Rhetoric, Research, and the Mind,” focuses on the power of the stigma, shame, and silencing of mental illness in a profession that values the “life of the mind.” She meditates on how she wrote her dissertation on bipolar disorder without disclosing her own bipolar diagnosis and then on her subsequent disclosure. She discusses how that power affected her crafting her dissertation, her coming of age as an academic, and her finding her place and fit as someone with a disordered mind. Ultimately, she reflects on whether one with such a diagnosis could ever write past stigma and really be heard.

12  Santosh Khadka et al. Katelynn DeLuca’s chapter, “Breaking the Silence and Removing the Garb: Revelations from a Working-Class Academic,” examines the significant impact socioeconomic and cultural class has on students and working-class academics. Though many believe class is primarily a reflection of financial means, there is more to consider when defining class: job description, level of autonomy, affect, cultural values, the role of education, communities, family structure, and work—each of which are important factors and spaces that shape the ways class is read. It is essential to increase the frequency and depth of discussions about class, opportunities, and expectations so that what is considered “for” working-class individuals by mainstream society does not limit their abilities, goals, dreams, and successes when negotiating academic and community spaces. Voichita Nachescu, in “Unclassifiable Outsiders: Eastern European Women, Transnational Whiteness, and Solidarity,” narrates her experiences as an Eastern European feminist and immigrant living in the United States, situating this experience in the context of transnational feminist theory and American immigration history. She points out the limitations of contemporary transnational feminism, which concerns itself with the relationship between the First and Third World, while completely neglecting the former Second World. Nachescu argues in favor of an Eastern European feminist identity shaped by common experiences such as poverty and exploitation in Eastern Europe, being perceived as White in the United States, and the erasure of alterity and the experience of marginalization as new immigrants. Instead of accepting Whiteness uncritically, Nachescu argues for solidarity with other marginalized groups. Madhav Kafle narrates academic challenges of a first-generation international graduate student studying English as a Second Language (ESL) and Applied Linguistics in the USA, thus of someone who moved from a periphery country, Nepal, to a center country. Specifically, using positioning theory in conjunction with insights from studies dealing with issues of nativeness, tacit English-only policy, and perceptions, he analyzes his conflicting subject-positions while studying and working in the USA. After the critical discussion of his personal narrative, he outlines essential steps to be taken to resolve common tensions successfully in mobility and Othering such as disconnects between ascribed and negotiated identities. The central aim of Fataneh Farahani and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert’s “The Racialised Knowledge Economy” is to examine the impact of racialization processes within the Swedish academic community in order to understand what kinds of knowledge productions and knowing subject positions are rendered (im)possible in everyday academic interactions. They explore these ideas through a) the presence of racialized hierarchies of political and social entitlements; b) how the physical, social, intellectual, and emotional spaces that we inhabit create comfort zones for some and discomfort zones for others; and c) the silences within academic fields and its subsequent impact on knowledge production. Ligia A. Mihut’s “An Academic From Behind the Iron Curtain” maintains that although at the center of writing instruction and practice, the

Introduction  13 category of class has been marginally explored (Lindquist, 2004). When class has been discussed, it has been generally framed in US-centric terms. Her chapter aims to emphasize the multifaceted nature of class across national, educational, and geopolitical spheres. Through an overview of literacy experiences of a scholar in transition from Romania to the United States, her chapter expands on contexts of censorship and materiality across national borders. It seeks to demonstrate that the category of class is fluid and flexible, and through these features, class is organically tied to religious and political discourses shaped by national, international, and institutional frames. Thusly, literacy from “behind the iron curtain” becomes a means of survival and flexible adaptation. Elena G. Garcia and Ben G. Goodwin describe their experiences being Othered in their first higher-education jobs in the Utah Valley, which is dominated by the Latter-day Saint (LDS) culture. They offer advice for institutions to closely examine their own cultural climate to then develop safe houses for Othered employees to meet and safe contact zones for them to engage with employees of the dominant LDS culture. Their primary arguments center on the importance for institutions of higher education to provide opportunities for Othered employees to feel connected to their campus communities if those institutions hope to retain the diverse employees they hire. Santosh Khadka, in his chapter titled “Worlds Apart: A Third World Academic’s Navigation of US Higher Education and Citizenship,” recounts his arduous journey of academic and professional pursuits in the US higher education as a citizen of a Third World country. He particularly reflects on what it took for him to persevere and make headway as a foreign ESL graduate student of color in a top-tier US university, then secure and maintain a tenure-line faculty position in the largest public university system in the United States, and, more importantly, earn, and retain the US residency and citizenship. In “On Being the First Black Woman,” Joanna Davis-McElligatt explores the ways in which black women academics are perpetually read as “the outsider within,” as Patricia Hill Collins has framed it. Through a careful consideration of black feminist and womanist academic positionalities and theoretics, Davis-McElligatt considers her passage from the child of an academic living on college campuses to the first black woman ever to be tenured in her department as a site of potential creativity and intellectual growth. Yet this position of being permanently an “outsider within,” and the act of, following bell hooks, looking from the outside to the center and from the inside out to the margins can also stymie personal expression and ingenuity. Keith Dorwick’s chapter “Over It/Not Over It/Getting Over It: Checking White Male Privilege in the Midst of Otherness” notes the ways in which he increasingly finds himself at a number of radical intersectionalities. Though White, and seemingly male, he is often Othered by others and Othered by himself as he sees the world while identifying as bi, not gay, and non-binary genderqueer. This chapter uses past scholarship to illuminate how his White and seemingly and visibly male status allows him a position of privilege

14  Santosh Khadka et al. that undercuts his own Othered status and therefore also his activism and scholarship as he struggles through becoming aware of White supremacy.

Notes 1 For more about cuts to higher education in Denmark, England, and the United States following the Great Recession see Coughlan, Sean. 4 November  2015. “Students Protest against Tuition Fees.” www.bbc.com/news/education34721681; Espinoza, Javier. 24 November 2015. “University Students in England ‘Pay the Highest Tuition Fees in the World.’ ” The Telegraph. Retrieved from www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/12013303/Universitystudents-in-England-pay-the-highest-tuition-fees-in-the-world.html; Grove, Jack. 11 February 2016. “University of Copenhagen to Cut More than 500 Jobs.” The Times Higher Education. Retrieved from www.timeshighereducation.com/ news/university-copenhagen-cut-more-500-jobs; The Lincoln Project: Excellence and Access in Public Higher Education. 2009. Public Research Universities: Changes in State Funding. Retrieved from www.amacad.org/multimedia/ pdfs/publications/researchpapersmonographs/PublicResearchUniv_ChangesInStateFunding.pdf; Mitchell, Michael, and Michael Leachman. 13 May 2015. “Years of Cuts Threaten to Put College Out of Reach for More Students.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Retrieved from www.cbpp.org/research/ state-budget-and-tax/years-of-cuts-threaten-to-put-college-out-of-reach-formore-students; Myklebust, Jan Petter. 03 February 2016. “Copenhagen University announces drastic cuts.” University World News 399. Retrieved from www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20160203182208163; Staff. 18 May 2016 “Here’s Why University Tuition Fees Will Probably Go up in 2017.” www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36322654/heres-why-university-tuitionfees-will-probably-go-up-in-2017. 2 See Grove, Jack. 14 September 2015. “Social Sciences and Humanities Faculties ‘to Close’ in Japan after Ministerial Intervention.” The Times Higher Education. Retrieved from www.timeshighereducation.com/news/social-sciencesand-humanities-faculties-close-japan-after-ministerial-intervention; 23 July 2015. “Statement of the Executive Board of Science Council of Japan: On the Future Direction of the University: In Relation to the Departments/Graduate Schools of Teacher Training and Humanities and Social Sciences.” Retrieved from www.scj. go.jp/en/pdf/kohyo-23-kanji-1e.pdf. 3 In the United States, where marriage equality is now achieved, the battle becomes for lack of job protections that might protect one against harm merely because of one’s minority sexuality or gender status. 4 See Reichman, Henry, Joan Wallach Scott, and Hans-Joerg Tiede. April 2015. “Academic Freedom and Tenure: The University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.” Retrieved from www.aaup.org/report/UIUC. 5 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61).

References Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Diversity and inclusion in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dews, C. L. (2010). This fine place so far from home: Voices of academics from the working class. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Elabor-Idemudia, P. (2001). Equity issues in the academy: An Afro-Canadian woman’s perspective. The Journal of Negro Education, 70(3), 192–203.

Introduction  15 Gutiérrez y Muhs, G., Flores Niemann, Y., González, C. G., & Harris, A. P. (2012). Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class in academia. Boulder, CO: University of Utah. Johnson, L. N., & Thomas, K. M. (2012). A similar, marginal place in the academy: Contextualizing the leadership strategies of Black women in the United States and South Africa. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 14(2), 156–171. Kim, D., Twombly, S., & Wolf-Wendel, L. (2012). International faculty in American universities: Experiences of academic life, productivity, and career mobility. New Directions for Institutional Research, 155, 27–46. Lindquist, J. (2004). Class affects, classroom affectations: Working through the paradoxes of strategic empathy. College English, 67(2), 187–209. Meriläinen, S., Tienari, J., Thomas, R., & Davies, A. (2008). Hegemonic academic practices: Experiences of publishing from the periphery. Organization Connections, 15(4), 584–597. Ozturk, M. B., & Rumens, N. (2014). Gay male academics in UK business and management schools: Negotiating heteronormativities in everyday work life. British Journal of Management, 25, 503–517. Thomas, J. M., & Johnson, B. J. (2004). Perspectives of international faculty members: Their experiences and stories. Education and Society, 22(3), 47–64. Trice, A. G. (2003). Faculty perceptions of graduate international students: The benefits and challenges. Journal of Studies in International Education, 7(4), 379–403. Tsalach, C. (2013). Between silence and speech: Autoethnography as an othernessresisting practice. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(2), 71–80.

1 Out of Sight Academic Otherness and the Paradox of Visibility Michael Borgstrom

Over the past few years, I have received in my campus mailbox a regular stream of information targeting those in the academy that occupy the somewhat inelegantly named position of “mid-career scholar.” These materials stretch across the professional and the personal, often combining both in unexpected ways: requests to serve on various evaluative committees for other universities and invitations to participate in professional working groups appear alongside opportunities to take advantage of resources that will help me develop a “coherent strategy to manage my estate.” Such exhortations (to work, to plan, to prepare, to serve) now seem commonplace to me, especially since they complement more local urgings to become centrally involved, post-tenure, in the administrative work of my university and the larger campus system of which it is a part. While I have demurred at calls to manage my “estate,” I have attempted to respond, sensibly, to enhanced expectations for service work by agreeing to coordinate new initiatives focused on LGBTQ studies on my campus, by sitting on my university’s faculty senate, and, more recently, by serving as chair of my home department. This latter appointment occurred unexpectedly, and for a variety of reasons, I was unsure whether to assume such a position at this point in my career. Indeed, when a top-level administrator asked me, right around the point of tenure, where I saw myself in the profession five years down the line, I envisioned a sustained commitment to teaching, a continued focus on scholarship, and only a kind of loose engagement with university service (a few committees here and there). I did not see any sort of serious administrative work as even a glimmer on my professional horizon. Indeed, I believed such positions should be filled by those with more experience—or at least a different kind of experience—than I yet possessed. One’s personal understanding of self, however, does not always match up neatly with the exigencies of the profession, and I soon found myself trying to navigate the multiple, often competing, demands of a large and deeply interesting department. In the whirlwind of those first weeks in this new position, one of my tasks was to write a welcome letter to all incoming majors—an easy enough assignment, to be sure, and also an enjoyable one.

Out of Sight  17 The note I constructed generally followed the stylistic pattern of similar letters written by previous chairs: welcoming students to the department, providing an overview of the kind of work performed in the discipline of literary study, and offering assurance of the intrinsic value of a degree in the humanities. It was a thoroughly standard greeting—nothing controversial, nothing out of the ordinary. And yet the response it generated among some students was immediate and affecting. While many wrote back to express their excitement about beginning their studies, a number of incoming majors reacted to just one sentence (an aside, really) that I had decided to incorporate into the note: “As the first person in my family to go to college, I didn’t have many academic role models.” In truth, I deliberated a good while on whether I should include this piece of personal information. Given the note’s intent to welcome a wide and diverse student body, I did not want to skew the letter’s focus on its undergraduate audience by having its emphasis boomerang back to its author. Yet I felt that sharing that small biographical detail was important, not only because it had the potential of reminding undergraduates that some faculty once occupied a role similar to the one many of them now inhabited, but also because I remembered very well the disorientation I experienced as a first-generation college student on a campus full of undergraduates with seemingly much more knowledge than I possessed about the expectations (and unspoken rules and hierarchies) that constitute university life. Indeed, in writing this welcome letter to new students, I felt not only a sense of responsibility and obligation but also, unexpectedly, a kind of personal and professional vertigo—one that rested on an awareness that the administrator writing in that moment was simultaneously far removed from yet intimately tied to a younger version of myself. This is not an original realization of course.1 Many academics have written about the sense of dislocation they have felt when their backgrounds did not align neatly with the realities of the profession. But here, during a moment of ostensibly innocuous duty, such disorientation came as something of a surprise. I had not realized the extent to which the mid-career scholar who was neglecting to manage his estate was also, still, the young student looking in on the academy from the outside. In this respect, that one line—casually embedded in an exhortation to our incoming student body to engage and celebrate their academic potential—functioned as more than an invitation to identification or personal connection. It also marked a moment of individual revelation, a kind of class-based coming out (to students, to myself) that operated as an analog to more familiar notions of coming out as sexually non-normative that had become routine over many years. Many students were aware of my involvement with LGBTQ issues on campus, but none, apparently, had realized that in important ways, I was as new to academia as many of them. As one student commented during a quick trip to my office, “I had no idea you were a first-gen, too. That changes everything.” Did it? In what ways? It was only at this moment that I began

18  Michael Borgstrom seriously to consider the impact of my class background on my experiences within academia. Eventually, I came to realize that my understanding of personal “otherness” as routed primarily through sexuality helped to explain why “class,” as an operative category, had never appeared to exert much influence in my academic life. Moreover, I began to recognize that such inattention was not only about self-recognition but also about the ways that various forms of difference operate in relation to the personal over time. An awareness of difference in terms of sexuality, for example, frequently arises in the immediate present, as public revelations of non-heterosexuality are repeatedly required by culture in a number of personal ways (e.g., health insurance and, now, marriage licenses). An awareness of difference in terms of class, by contrast, often occurs retrospectively, as recognition of such distinctions typically requires distance (sometimes geographic, but also temporal) from one’s community of origin. As I wrote my memo to the department’s incoming majors, that gap—the intervening space of years between my position as mid-career scholar and as first-generation college student—collapsed. I realized that the sense of dislocation I had experienced at various stages in my academic career, a distancing to which I had solely attributed non-normative sexuality, was in fact also underwritten by class-based difference. The queer adult academic was the working-class student, just as the working-class student was the queer adult academic. This realization highlighted for me the permeability of the partitions that typically structure a professional life. It clarified, in a flash, the ways that who I am and what I do are inextricably linked to where I have been and likely will be. From the vantage point of mid-career, I was struck by how such intersections might offer an important counter-discourse to normative understandings of academic work itself, for they helped to contextualize key moments in my career at which I have felt particularly at odds with the profession’s expectations, conventions, and protocols: as a graduate student, as a candidate on the academic job market, and as a faculty member. To be sure, the missteps (and revelations) I describe in the remaining sections of this chapter continue, as well, in more recent phases of my career. But one of the luxuries of the genre of memoir is its suitability to personal-theoretical explorations as they are revealed through history, since to highlight an “othered” approach to history (including personal history) is to highlight, as well, the ways that experiences of time are often messy, complex, and discontinuous.

Straight Talk Nearly all of my experiences of otherness in academia have been structured by an underlying mismatch between my working-class background and the established (and time-honored) protocols of the academy. For many years, I understood the steep learning curves I faced as indications of my own

Out of Sight  19 intellectual and cultural deficiencies. I would look around a classroom (or a meeting, or an interview) and recognize, fundamentally, that I wasn’t quite catching social cues, wasn’t quite anticipating, accurately, the next moves I should make. It is an unsettling feeling to be aware of your own lack of awareness—and while I have never been completely incapable of “learning my stuff off-the-cuff,” as my mom would say, there certainly have been moments in my career in which I have wished that this learning went a bit more smoothly or was accompanied by a bit less anxiety. Such experiences—rarely shared for fear of embarrassed exposure—are, of course, much more common than one’s personal experience of them would suggest. And they are particularly typical of first-generation college students from working-class backgrounds. As Virginia Yans explains, “[I]f a student comes from a well-off or middle-class white family and graduates from an Ivy, they are already on fast-forward” (in Patton, 2015, p. A17)— and, indeed, that sense of being just a few steps behind those students whizzing along at top speed resonates with my own experience. Surprisingly, though, when I entered graduate school, I felt as though some of those distinctions in class difference had evaporated. Because my entering cohort was entering as, well, a cohort, it seemed as though the proverbial slate had been wiped clean—a kind of academic tabula rasa. My focus shifted away from an anxiousness about all the material I did not know and coalesced, instead, around the tremendous intellectual possibilities offered by a scholarly understanding of difference with which I was already intimately familiar— namely, sexual non-normativity. I felt, finally, that the possibility of an alignment between the experiential and the theoretical was available to me—that I could participate in those sorts of heady, scholarly conversations that felt overwhelmingly alien to me during my undergraduate years, wherein my (white, straight, male) professors regularly attempted to remake me in their own image by compelling me to participate in their own heady, scholarly conversations. As a “good,” working-class kid who was taught, fundamentally, to respect authority figures, to remain resolutely aware of my own privilege, and to focus on my work, I was perplexed by my own sense in college that what many of these academics wanted me to be (a scholar of Milton?) never meshed comfortably with my burgeoning sense of intellectual identity as it connected with my own life and background. Although it was not clear to me at the time, I now see that many of these feelings of discomfort emerged from my own sense of a specifically class-based difference, since coming to recognize and name my sexuality was, luckily, neither as tortuous nor as terrifying as it has been for countless others. As an undergraduate, though, I could not figure out why I did not want to become a scholar of Milton, especially if those whom I respected thought that was the best path for me. It is this sense of disjunction, I think—one in which external direction of an academic self chafes against a reluctance to accede to such management— that marks a particularly poignant intersection for class- and sexuality-based

20  Michael Borgstrom otherness. At key moments in my academic career, I have felt as though I had little control over my scholarly trajectory and its accompanying intellectual goals in the face of class-based standards that I consistently fell shy of meeting, even while I simultaneously rationalized certain aspects of such “failures” as my own deliberate rejection of heteronormative expectations themselves. As Elizabeth Freeman (2010) explains this intersection in theoretical terms: We might think of class as an embodied synchronic and diachronic organization. In its dominant forms, class enables its bearers what looks like “natural” control over their body and its effects, or the diachronic means of sexual and social reproduction. In turn, failures or refusals to inhabit middle- and upper-middle-class habitus appear as, precisely, asynchrony, or time out of joint. And as denizens of times out of joint, queers are a subjugated class . . . even as many of us occupy other positions of power including the economic. (p. 19)2 The dynamic Freeman describes—as class- and sexuality-based differences interrupt expected sequences of personal development—is one that speaks to my own sense of otherness within the academy. Unable to understand why I felt different, I knew only that I was. Because I was bound up in the immediate necessity of trying to get myself up to speed in the confusing world of the professoriate, I had little time (or space) to consider the possible sources of my dislocation. It is not surprising, then, that I attributed feelings of alienation to a comparatively more visible cultural site: queerness. And it is perhaps even less surprising, then, that the intellectual energy of queer critique that I encountered in graduate school would appear so invigorating to me, particularly since many aspects of its theoretical underpinnings rested on notions of un-belonging, of disorder, of outsiderness. I luxuriated in the ideas (and the prose!) of critics such as Michael Warner, José Esteban Muñoz, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and pored over the insights of John D’Emilio and Estelle Freeman, David Halperin, Cathy Cohen, and many others. I was eager to join in conversations that would later inform the critical work that built on such queer energy and queer thought—to explore the possibilities of anachronism (Valerie Rohy, 2009), to consider what it meant to grow sideways (Kathryn Bond Stockton, 2009), and to think about how the university itself might be reordered (Roderick Ferguson, 2012). I was captivated by the multiple possibilities of queer methodologies, fascinated by the ways that they could generate new readings of familiar texts and in so doing help readers identify dynamics that had previously gone unremarked. And I was particularly interested in how contemporary culture might reorient its own privileging of specific social values in light of these intellectual insights. To me, such inquiry was both important work and a necessarily collective endeavor: academia offered

Out of Sight  21 one giant conversation in which all its members might participate and learn from one another. I did not know, though, that there existed several unwritten conventions that underwrote such contributions, ones that embodied forms of social privilege that my class background had taught me to resist. As a kid, my mom and dad advised me to be polite but also to be direct. To them, a facility with words and an expansive vocabulary were assets to be cherished but employed with caution: plain, straightforward talk was preferred, always, over ornate expression, particularly if such language muddied discussion or masked intentions. Over the years, my parents’ admonition in this regard had served me reasonably well, even as I entered college and encountered a scholarly world far removed from my own upbringing. And in nonacademic contexts, especially, a certain directness seemed culturally necessary in terms of sexual difference: “out and proud,” after all, were the watchwords of the social moment. The queer critique I encountered in graduate school thus seemed to me an ideal blend of both the urgent and the direct. My initial attempts to participate in and contribute to these academic conversations, however, were less than successful—even disastrous. I had been trained in the governing conventions of academic presentations: speak no longer than the allotted time, make a strong argument, and prepare for thoughtful questions. These were rules that made good sense to me, and thus I constructed comments for one of my first academic conferences accordingly. I concentrated on making a clear argument, diligently timed my talk, and deliberated on how I might respond to queries from the audience. My comments focused on what “counted” as humor within sentimental literature: I analyzed why some literary figures functioned as caricatures rather than as topics for serious attention in academic criticism, and I drew some tentative connections between such inattention and these characters’ non-normative gender identities. Aware of the potentially sensitive nature of these issues, I framed my talk not as a critique of specific scholarship (or specific scholars), but rather as an analysis of larger social dynamics. Still, I was not prepared for the audience’s reaction. There was much sighing as I delivered my paper. There were many angry glares. And in the subsequent question-and-answer session, several senior scholars accused me of accusing them of being homophobic. Others informed me that my analysis was hopelessly compromised by my whiteness (a critique that stung, since the paper’s argument ironically centered on resisting such privilege). Many told me that I did not belong on the panel. The most personally unsettling moment of the conference, however, came several hours later at a reception for the attendees. One of the senior scholars who had been present for the earlier discussion took me aside to tell me that my comments were “repellent” and asked me, point blank, why “gay guys always have to ruin everything.” I had no idea how to respond. I thought I had made a forceful but by no means aggressive claim—namely, that readers’ own heteronormative (but not necessarily homophobic) impulses can prevent us from seeing texts

22  Michael Borgstrom in alternative ways. This was not an unusual insight; indeed, it was even somewhat quaint within more radical subsets of queer critique. But I had clearly touched a nerve. The distinguished scholar started to walk away and then turned around abruptly and declared, “I hope you never get a job. In fact, I’ll see to it.” In retrospect, I see this as a defining moment in my career, perhaps less for the anxiety it provoked than for its ability to clarify, in a split second, that this reaction and attendant threat stemmed from my own unwitting violation of a set of conventions I did not know existed. I had made a mistake. I likely did seem an upstart, and there was no way that the senior scholar who was offended by my paper could know that my comments did not stem from a slash-and-burn critical mind-set but rather from a social error grounded in social class. I had conceptualized the straightforwardness of my argument as an extension of the training my family (and community) background had given me, and I had not yet learned that another sort of training was necessary for participation in the academic world. The discomfort my paper caused showed me that I should have moved with more grace through the contours of a sensitive argument. Indeed, the reaction of the audience helped me to understand that academia required diplomatic, restrained ways of identifying troubling critical dynamics, even if such requirements seemed, at best, like sugar coating and, at worst, like passive aggression. The bottom line, however, was that I had been too blunt, and the senior scholar displeased by my comments forced me to recognize that fact. Consequently, I found this tense exchange as edifying as it was awful. For while I see, now, the inappropriateness of the scholar’s threat to my career (and the casual homophobia that accompanied it), I learned a great deal from this interaction: about the workings of academia, about social position, and about the limits my own background might place on my ability to negotiate successfully between the two.

Humble Pie Ultimately, the hard but valuable lesson I learned through this formative moment provided me with new insight into both my lack of preparedness vis-à-vis scholarly conventions and my own unacknowledged apprehensions about the ability to circulate within a comparatively rarefied world. Although I was learning “my stuff off-the-cuff,” it was difficult to shake the sense that I operated as an interloper within the academy, feelings that still recur from time to time. Such reactions, I now understand, are not uncommon among first-generation college students, particularly those from working-class backgrounds. As Dwight Lang (2015) describes this dynamic, unlike the continuing-gens for whom college represents part of a seamless connection between middle-class pasts and secure futures, first-gens experience four years on campus as a portal to middle- or

Out of Sight  23 upper-middle-class lives. They may learn new middle-class beliefs and ways, but deep inside they’re never entirely middle-class. They’re inbetween and often uncomfortable. Many experience performance fatigue and are unable to publicly project the more-familiar, morecomfortable expressions and behaviors of their veiled selves. (p. A19) The performance anxiety that Lang describes has characterized several other moments in my professional development. Although it would be an understatement to say that the early threat to my future career caused no small amount of anxiety, I nevertheless managed to place portions of my work for publication as I finished my graduate studies. Professionally and intellectually, I was as prepared as I could possibly be for the next phase of my career: the job market. Yet despite the lessons I had learned in the intervening years since that uncomfortable exchange at the conference, and despite my concerted efforts to develop a professional, scholarly persona, specific aspects of my familial training percolated up at this crucial moment of academic self-marketing. For along with encouraging their children to engage in straightforward, plain dealing with the world, my mom and dad also cautioned strongly against any form of self-promotion. Such aversion was directly tied to class-based difference; to them, “tooting one’s own horn” gestured toward vulgar entitlement. To share one’s accomplishments was uncouth to the degree that such celebration privileged individual achievement over a sense of collective endeavor. And this was a problem, according to my parents, since one should never get too big for one’s proverbial britches. These lessons about privilege and responsibility, however, did not mesh well with the expectations for self-promotion that are central to the job search itself. And as I found myself torn between competing narratives, I made a series of odd decisions during the search process: sidestepping accomplishments, trivializing my research, and, most concerning, downplaying the queer issues that were central to my work. It was as though I had entered into a different kind of (academic) closet. I did not attribute the challenges I encountered during this phase of my career in any way to my working-class background; instead, I chastised myself for what I presumed was some sort of internalized homophobia that needed to be rooted out. Once I secured a job, however, I resolved to be more vigilant about such acts of self-sabotage. This determination was stimulated, in part, by challenges I faced on the job market itself, wherein I found myself unable to accept a position that did not offer health benefits to my domestic partner.3 Ultimately, my decision to decline what was otherwise a very fine position was motivated, even at that time, by an awareness that my class background (and its accompanying fears of potential financial insolvency) pushed against many of the cultural realities of academia. This, too, struck me as deeply ironic: jobs were in short supply, of course, but a promise of

24  Michael Borgstrom employment without the structural means to support my own family was a difficult bargain to strike. With this experience, I began to see how my feelings of outsiderness were shaped simultaneously by both sexuality- and class-based difference: here I was experiencing queerness as a form of class and class as a form of queerness. This realization was oddly galvanizing, opening up unexpected insights into the ways that multiple areas of my life, past and present, informed each other.4 It also put me on high alert for comparable intersections, sometimes with uncomfortable results. During my second year on the tenure track, for example, a senior colleague advised me to check my gross salary against those of other non-tenured faculty (all of which was public information) and then to compare those figures to my paycheck deductions and net salary. The suggestion was meant to be encouraging, to help me confirm that my salary was in line with others at my rank. Because I was so relieved to have a job that extended benefits to my domestic partner, however, I was not particularly concerned about minor idiosyncrasies in salary among the university’s non-tenured faculty. I was well aware that multiple negotiations within the hiring process could lead to discrepancies in pay, and I was comfortable with the offer I had received the previous year. Still, my colleague pushed a bit harder, and I dutifully consulted the public record for salaries at my university. My eyes widened a bit at the information I retrieved. Curious, I then broadened my search to compare such figures to faculty members at other campuses within my state system. Although I had been hired at a rate commensurate with those at the same rank, I discovered that my take-home salary was significantly lower than many others precisely because of the health benefits extended to my domestic partner. Unlike colleagues who were able to cover married spouses under the university’s health insurance plan, I was taxed heavily on benefits for my partner because they were calculated as extra income to me. To me, this seemed a clear instance in which the comparatively progressive intent of the state in which I lived (and the public university at which I worked) chafed against a federal unwillingness to support couples that fell outside of normative frameworks. The situation infuriated me—partly because of the structural homophobia it represented, but mostly because I had not recognized this problem sooner. I had been so glad to secure a job that extended health insurance to my partner that it never occurred to me to think through any of the potential difficulties associated with that benefit itself. I had not done my homework. I felt duped and embarrassed. With the hope of finding some sort of remedy, I contacted my labor union representative. Fundamentally, I felt a strong affiliation with the goals and ideologies of my bargaining unit, particularly since my family (and surrounding community) championed labor unions as exemplars of social and economic progress in their support of working-class concerns. In the face of what I understood to be a straightforward example of labor inequity (since I was receiving less pay for equal work), I was certain that my union representative would provide good counsel on the ways that sexuality-based

Out of Sight  25 discrimination might be buffeted by class-based understandings of social difference. I had done more research by this point, learning that some universities had instituted a “grossing up” strategy to supplement the salaries of non-heterosexual employees in domestic partnerships who also faced the dilemma I was encountering in my new job. By adding a bit more to the base salary of such faculty members, discrepancies in pay between these couples and their legally married counterparts could be minimized. When I explained this situation to my labor union representative and inquired about whether the union might pursue similar ameliorations for faculty within my university system, my concerns were met only with derisive laughter. The problems I mentioned, I was told, were not really about labor, per se, so much as they were mere indicators of social preferences and their effects. To augment this line of reasoning, the representative went on to say that instituting any sort of “grossing up” plan would, in fact, create labor inequities, since married faculty actually needed (and thus merited) higher salaries because the majority of such couples had children to support. I was flabbergasted. Not only was I being told that there existed no solution to the dilemma I confronted but also that an ongoing commitment to such discrepancies was, in this view, socially necessary. I felt, in that moment, that my class difference had betrayed my queerness—that my status as outsider within the academy was as unavoidable as it was permanent.

Seeing Otherwise Of course, much has changed in the intervening years, and such social inequities are no longer as institutionally prevalent as they once were. And in the few years since I received tenure, my own relationship to outsiderness has shifted as well. Where once I felt bewilderment or anxiety at the meeting point of sexuality and class, I now recognize such intersections as occasions for personal reflection and, perhaps, advocacy. That is, I now understand outsiderness as providing an angle of vision that might otherwise be unavailable. Class- and sexuality-based difference still regularly structures many of my interactions within academia, but I attempt to see such difference less as liability than as opportunity. As Lang (2015) notes in his comments on what he calls “first-gen blues”: “Class is ever present for first gens, whether in the classroom, hanging out with friends, or back at home,” but such differences can also be a source of strength as students take risks, persist, meet others from different social-class backgrounds, and cross boundaries to new places where they can realize dreams and accomplishments. Their considerable insights prepare them to live with purpose. (p. A19) Like many others, I wonder how the experiences of those who feel “outside” the academy (even while they are within it) might help to reshape some of the contours of academic life itself. It is an ambitious question. But

26  Michael Borgstrom the possibility that “outsiderness” might be emphasized less as a passive noun and more as an active verb strikes me as coterminous with other intellectual and social transformations that have productively altered business as usual within the university. Whether (and how) such an understanding might resonate with diverse experiences of otherness within the academy is, of course, both subjective and personal. But giving voice to the experiences that underwrite such possibilities—even through as basic a gesture as revealing as writing about difference itself—seems, at the very least, a useful first step.

Notes 1 For important examples, see hooks (2000), Tea (2003), Lubrano (2004), Jensen (2012), and Collins, Ladd, Seider, and Yeskel (2014). 2 Freeman links this understanding of middle- and upper-middle-class habitus to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, noting that for Bourdieu, “habitus organizes a form of belonging that subtends and supersedes kinship—and that is class. Where physical appearance and name fail to secure likeness, the hidden rhythms of gestures, giving and withholding, play and humor, courtship, and etiquette, among other things, establish similarities between strangers that seem to be inborn” (p. 18). 3 The details of this situation are documented in a series of articles I wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education under the pseudonym “Steve Pink” (see Pink, 2003a, 2003b, 2004a, 2004b). 4 As Freeman (2007) writes, in reference to the work of Walter Benjamin, our prevailing understanding of time might be usefully critiqued for its assumption that time itself works on “a flat plane on which events march forward in sequence. [Benjamin’s work] suggests a potentially queer vision of how time wrinkles and folds as some minor feature of our own sexually impoverished present suddenly meets up with a richer past, or as the materials of a failed and forgotten project of the past find their uses now, in a future unimaginable in their time” (p. 163).

References Benjamin, W. (1968). Theses on the philosophy of history. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 253–264). New York, NY: Schocken Books. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, C., Ladd, J., Seider, M., & Yeskel, F. (Eds.). (2014). Class lives: Stories from across our economic divide. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ferguson, R. (2012). The reorder of things: The University and its pedagogies of minority difference. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Freeman, E. (2007). Introduction. In E. Freeman (Ed.), GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13(2–3), 159–176. Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds: Queer temporalities, queer histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. hooks, B. (2000). Where we stand: Class matters. New York, NY: Routledge. Jensen, B. (2012). Reading classes: On culture and classism in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lang, D. (2015, May 15). Singing the first-generation blues. The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A19.

Out of Sight  27 Lindquist, J. (2004). Class affects, classroom affectations: Working through the paradoxes of strategic empathy. College English, 67(2), 187–209. Lubrano, A. (2004). Limbo: Blue collar roots, White collar dreams. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Patton, S. (2015, May 15). How a White historian nurtures diverse Ph.D.’s. The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A17. Pink, S. (2003a, October 3). When good searches go bad. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com.libproxy.sdsu.edu/article/ When-Good-Searches-Go- Bad/28507 Pink, S. (2003b, December 18). Making lists. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com.libproxy.sdsu.edu/article/Making-Lists/45293 Pink, S. (2004a, April 9). Being myself, only better. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com.libproxy.sdsu.edu/article/ Being-Myself-Only- Better/44560 Pink, S. (2004b, June 3). A good search. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com.libproxy.sdsu.edu/article/A-Good-Search/44659 Rohy, V. (2009). Anachronism and its others: Sexuality, race, temporality. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Stockton, K. B. (2009). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tea, M. (2003). Without a net: The female experience of growing up working class. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.

2 Notes From the Dark Side Scholars in Administration Bridgette Coble and Sandra Mizumoto Posey

The Fable Once upon a time in an ivory tower not so far away lived a community of wise scholars whose only desires were to seek new knowledge. To ensure this pursuit would continue long after they were gone, they invited younger individuals from the larger community to study with them. These young scholars would be trained to carry on a legacy of moral integrity, civic involvement, and intellectual progression. While pursuing this noble calling, the community of intellects were approached by a serpent. The serpent was very crafty and deceptive, and enjoyed the chaos that ensued from tempting the egos of humans. The serpent began to question why intellectual beings would lower themselves by tending to the development of youth rather than focusing solely on the advancement of knowledge. The scholars, flattered, agreed immediately. The next day, they invited others from the community into the ivory tower to take on the duties of guiding youth while the scholars intensified their focus on research and the dissemination of the knowledge. As the scholars established themselves into their new roles, they realized they needed more space and more flexibility in order to produce the level of scholarly work necessary. As they took up more of the tower space, the community caregivers were relocated to dimly lit and rarely used sections of the tower further away. This became known by all as the “dark side.” As the years went by, the intellectuals and the community caregivers continued to educate and support the young scholars, each attending to their assigned realms, but the gap between them widened. Space continued to be an issue: some from the dark side moved out of the tower proper, collecting student fees in order to build a facility more to their liking. The dimly lit areas became less crowded and those who worked most directly with the students remained there—solely so they could be more accessible to the students they served. Those who went to the newer building continued to be referred to as residents of “the dark side,” even though the new structure had an abundance of gleaming glass windows that shone natural light sparkling into its corridors. Over time, the two communities became more and more estranged. The traditional scholars continued to rise in status and

Notes From the Dark Side  29 power, while the community caregivers were regarded as less valuable and expendable (or, in the case of those with offices in the newer, shinier “dark” side, all this and far too expensive as well). Or so the story goes. Our fable provides the backdrop in our effort to discuss the wedges and chasms that have developed between different factions of the professionals who dedicate themselves to what has become higher education in the United States. These groups whose identities, unlike the others discussed in this book, are determined by organizational position as opposed to individual identity or culture demonstrate the inherent tendency of groups to define themselves by emphasizing the difference between themselves and others— often dismissing or demeaning the others in the process. This chapter frames othering in a very different way, and while it does not assert a need to compare role identity tensions to the experiences of identity-based groups, it does contribute to the examination of marginalization in higher education.

Academic Affairs and Student Affairs During the 1920s, the role of American higher education changed from that of creating thinkers, politicians, and educated socialites to an institution that served to educate a larger, more diverse student population (Thelin, 2004). As a result, student affairs administrators (referred to as community caregivers in the earlier fable) were introduced to campuses. Initially, their primary responsibility was to manage the enforcement of regulations and student conduct (Thelin, 2004), but over time, the responsibility of faculty, trustees, and even university presidents (community of intellectuals) to provide social, physical, moral, and spiritual support to college students was offloaded to them (Fenske, 1989). Emergent societal priorities redirected faculty toward in-depth disciplinary knowledge and the production of research very much like the German higher education model (Fenske, 1989). A hierarchy of values emerged in higher education, and while the work of student affairs was considered necessary, it was not considered a valued component of the university. Two units eventually emerged, academic affairs and student affairs. As part of academic affairs, faculty became responsible for curriculum development and delivery, as well as conducting ongoing research. They became the valued insider group, while the student affairs professionals were pushed to the margins and became the higher education outsider group. Over the years, the tension has grown as student affairs obtained more status as a profession with credentialing curriculum, professional standards, and associations. The outsider status of the student affairs professional has proven to be problematic given the increased responsibility for this group to design retention strategies, teach necessary skills sought by employers of college graduates, and provide a variety of holistic supportive services. In addition, it has been shown that the separation between academic and student affairs has had a negative impact on the ability of higher education institutions to adequately serve students. Higher education research

30  Bridgette Coble and Sandra Mizumoto Posey indicates the need for integration and collaboration of these two very necessary groups (AAC&U, 2002; Kezar, 2003; Philpott & Strange, 2003). Institutions that have been successful in creating more seamless environments show evidence of increased opportunity for student learning (Kezar, 2003) and increased faculty/staff awareness (Pace, Blumreich, & Merkle, 2006).

The Tension Within Clearly, the tension that exists between these two divisions is complicated, but it is further complicated by the categorization of roles within the divisions. The emergence of these two units created a unique form of segregation in higher education that also spread beyond the confines of unit categorization to a division between roles. Historically, the student affairs professional has been considered an administrator, but over time, that title has evolved. There are now some administrators who hold joint faculty/administrator appointments, while others of the same rank with similar educational backgrounds are at-will administrators because their primary position is that of student affairs. Lower-level administrators may teach as affiliate faculty at their employing institution or others, or provide consulting services in the community since they often have advanced degrees at the master’s and sometimes the PhD level. When it comes to the faculty perspective, the administrator is, at best, not central to higher education; they are simply necessary managers to handle the bureaucratic details. Those who lead academic affairs and student affairs units, regardless of their previous appointments or credentials, automatically transmogrify into beastly bodies with a single mind. They make little distinction between the two divisions, other than vaguely understanding that individual administrators technically fall under one rather than the other division—a distinction they care little about, because in their minds, the individual academic department is the true heart of the university that drives its operations according to its most noble goals. The faculty are wary of administration in large degree because of their proliferation. Articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education pop up periodically, confirming the reality of this phenomenon, fanning the flames of faculty worry (Zamudio-Suaréz, 2017; Rogers, 2013; Masterson, 2011; Fischman, 2010; Fain, 2009). “In the beginning,” as Genesis tells us, universities were about scholarship. With the balance in numbers tipping toward administrators, faculty fear the sacred core of higher education is being lost. This too is documented in the Chronicle: Currently our universities are suffocated by the growth of bureaucracy with too many overpaid and underperforming administrators. A better structure would be one in which presidents and deans are rotated from among the faculties for a limited term of no more than four years. (Chai, 2016)

Notes From the Dark Side  31 The perceived loss of scholarly integrity and purpose further reinforces the divide between the two groups, something the Chronicle also confirms: That breach is so well known that it seems to require no explication or explanation, and can just be referred to in quick throwaway stereotypes: Administrators are soulless robots, faculty are entitled divas. Each side blames the other for being too pushy, too obstructionist, and too damned expensive. (Matos, 2015) Despite the recommendation that “administrators should be part of the faculty,” should a faculty member cross the divide and join the ranks of the other side, they can be subject to immediate scrutiny despite any and all of the defector’s previous achievements or respectability: As a faculty member, I had earned a reputation as a hard-working idealist and a person of intelligence and integrity. As soon as I assumed an administrative position, however, my reputation crumbled. I was simply one of Them. (Tryon, 2005) Faculty are threatened by the simultaneous reduction of tenure-track positions, and the increase in more and more scholars reduced to adjunct work, while administrative hiring continues to rise. They whisper to each other that tenure will soon be dead and universities run like corporations. The bitterness wrought by this rather drastic change in the academic landscape can lead to anger and even public (published!) insult and criticism. Larry Hubbel and Hector Hammerly provide us with a host of derogatory language they find appropriate to characterize this group, calling them “bureaucrats,” who rather than pursuing a noble calling, settle for a life dominated by meetings, regulations, and administrative trivia (Hubbel, 2012) or failed academics, who being largely bereft of ideas are incapable of being adequate researchers or thoughtful teachers (Hubbel, 2012) and further describing how they listen to professors attentively and graciously, like a cat listens to a canary (Westhues, 2017) while also being power-addicted, fairness-innocent, apology-challenged, and freedom-averse (Westhues, 2017). One common misconception among many faculty is that all administrators are of one class. This is a perception that stands in stark contrast to the reality, even beyond the academic affairs/student affairs divide. There are three types of administrators at most institutions. These categories tend to be consistent across both academic and student affairs: 1 The Troops on the Grounds: These are administrators who have a considerable amount of direct contact with students during any given

32  Bridgette Coble and Sandra Mizumoto Posey working day. Examples include academic advisors, career counselors, orientation leaders, etc. It is very likely they have at least a master’s degree. Yet it is also likely that at least some of them do not make enough money to consistently keep up with their student loan payments. 2 The Middle Managers: These are the folks who largely fall under the title “director of . . .” Just what it is they direct may be a large campuswide program with substantial staff under their supervision or an abstract concept such as “assessment” or “retention,” which they may work on without the help of any staff in a cubicle buried somewhere on a labyrinthian floor where no one will ever find them. 3 The Power Brokers: Titles include associate vice president of (fill in the blank with an overly long yet specific indicator of jurisdiction), provost, president, and chancellor. Quite a few in this category work as if demons were after them, and indeed they are (we did mention the faculty didn’t we?). But often the reason they work such long hours (and on 12-month contracts—heaven forbid!) is that, at least at ostensibly “public” institutions, the money from the state is drying up while the folks at the very top are attempting to rally both human resources and shrinking budgets so that they might leave a legacy that the university can be proud of before they depart. The at-will nature of their employment might also be a factor that keeps them balanced on agitated toes. And this is where things can get a little sticky, if not downright tricky. In order to leave a legacy, they must set goals. Given the distance of the top executive administrator from the actual day-to-day operations of the university, at times, these goals can be so lofty that they are a bit unrealistic, or at least require achievement in a span of time that is so short it undermines its own fundamental purpose. The population that generally has most faculty up in arms are the power brokers, but they either lump all administrative personnel into one monolithic category of evil or they may separate out the troops on the ground, who are not considered evil so much as they are peons that are extraneous to the true mission of the university. The historic divisions of academic and student affairs—and the simultaneous and oddly overlapping divide between faculty and administrators— impact other elements of the organization. Discussion on diversity change initiatives often centers on individual differences such as gender, race, and sexual orientation, but these are not the only differentiating factors to consider. The literature also provides a framework for understanding role and status differentiation within organizational structures, particularly from the lens of oppression and privilege. Oppressive practice is less visible to members of privileged groups, making it difficult for them to recognize and support more inclusive practices. Complicating this further is the possibility that a collective identity group orientation may emerge as a result of structural separation—an outcome

Notes From the Dark Side  33 cited in social identity literature (Brickson & Brewer, 2001). Membership then becomes strengthened and self-preserving. Each group works to ensure its own survival, possibly at the expense of the organization. This is evident in negative comments from faculty regarding any administrative rather than purely academic realm as the “dark side.” It is also embedded in assumptions that administrators are non-scholarly and expendable. To those who hold privileged status in academia— faculty—professional organizations such as those for student affairs professionals are baffling. They cannot conceive of student affairs as a profession in the truest sense. The further reality that many institutions provide degrees at the master’s and PhD levels in the theories and applications of professions such as this is perceived to make a mockery of the authentic PhD bearer. Almost universally, faculty members seem to wonder, how could one possibly immerse oneself in theoretical musings about higher education administration or student affairs? There has been movement at some institutions to merge student affairs and academic affairs. Structural changes such as these are a step toward inclusivity, but typically not enough to create a truly inclusive environment. Recommended interventions point to the application of strategies that support relational interventions (Brickson & Brewer, 2001). These types of interventions introduce group members to the interdependency that exists among them and helps to build trust. This should be a primary goal of higher education leadership. . . . . . For we two authors, it has been our experience that almost all of who we are places us in the margins. We are both the product of working-class backgrounds, the first generation to attend and complete college. We are both women of color (one identifies as mixed heritage, the other as AfricanAmerican). Numerous roadblocks, both personal and systemic, stood in the way of the likelihood that we would have any real future: a teenaged suicide attempt, one of us a high school dropout, both of us single mothers. We represent the population of those who statistically were not supposed to make it this far and certainly not in the rarified world of academia. Ironically, neither of us planned on careers in academia. From our upbringing, it was never considered a possibility, and as such, it never entered our ambitions. Not knowing this world existed at all, when we stumbled upon it, we found a place where our core values matched the opportunities that were available. It was in academia that we found a place where we believed (and still believe) that we can make a difference. Appropriately enough perhaps, the roles we occupy or occupied in the academy are ones that themselves are as marginalized as our cultural and economic positionality. Our roles, because they are either administrative or allied with student affairs, are ones that are even disdained by those who are also oppressed and marginalized, such as adjunct faculty. This attitude of disdain is so pervasive and normalized in

34  Bridgette Coble and Sandra Mizumoto Posey university culture that it largely goes unremarked upon when conversations about marginalization or campus divisiveness occur. This type of disdain is well documented in patronizing tones in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All Administrative University and Why It Matters (2013), in which Benjamin Ginsberg describes administrative professionals as, essentially, failed academics who have wheedled their way into a place at a table where they have already proven they don’t belong: Many administrators, however, are individuals who earned advanced degrees and, perhaps, intended to pursue academic careers, but failed to secure faculty posts or progress along the academic track. Many others began their careers as staffers, earned degrees in applied fields, and were promoted to positions of academic responsibility despite having no academic background. In the world of university administration, lack of academic credentials or actual experience in the realms of teaching and research is no disqualification for a career as a professional manager. (17) This attitude is hardly new or unfamiliar to administrative professionals who often recount stories to one another about how they were treated as less than second-class citizens by faculty. One anonymous faculty member at our institution was quoted as saying, “Why do I not interact more with administrative staff? Because I believe that 90% of their functions are unnecessary” (Butnor, Posey, Baron, & Lindsay-Carpenter, 2013). In addition, our contributions to the scholarly life of the community are ironically first dismissed and then appropriated. A recent faculty senate debate over intellectual property rights made certain to grant faculty proprietary rights to their creations, even those created as part of official university duties, but stipulated, “The University will own the copyright to works created by administrative/professional or classified staff members of the University in the course of their assigned duties or employment” (Faculty Senate, 2014). Thus while many administrative/professional staff members hold advanced degrees, including doctorates (and not only in the “applied fields” Ginsberg so disdains), and continue to pursue research agendas, their intellectual property is, according to wording drafted by faculty, not their own. Such distinctions continue to position faculty and administrators as members of two separate classes—one that upholds the intellectual rigor and mission of the institution and the other which, according to Ginsberg, “[does] not understand the character of the university or its purposes”—a remark he makes shortly before declaring administrators in university leadership to be akin to “event planners” (Ginsberg, 2013). Implementation of proven interventions to build cohesion and collaboration between academic and student affairs members are necessary to

Notes From the Dark Side  35 better support student learning and create more inclusive organizations. Without it, we end up with situations described in the narratives that follow. Example 1: Sandra “I’m like a department chair,” I said to my boss. “You’re not a department chair,” he responded. “You’re a director.” “I schedule classes. I design curriculum. I directly supervise more full-time faculty than the department I have retreat rights in, and I plan budgets. How am I not like a department chair?” “You’re not a department chair,” he repeated. “And don’t let them hear you call yourself one. Directors are administrators.” Granted, my motives for arguing over titles was personal: I didn’t really care what they called me, but I needed flex time so I could pick up my daughter from school in the afternoons. She had been struggling in my absence: the day she asked me when I was going to retire, I knew I had to spend more time with her. Unfortunately, the director position, as with all administrative positions, required that I be in the office—a sleek, new LEED-certified building that was student-fee funded and referred to students in its name, but housed higher administration on the uppermost half of its floors—for the usual five days a week, morning to evening shift. Department chairs, on the other hand, were officially faculty and therefore had the liberty to work from home on occasion. The “them” my supervisor was referring to were the department chairs themselves, who had their own council and were very protective of their terrain. They were very worried that a university-wide initiative like the one I directed would somehow subvert control of curriculum away from the academics, even though it too was an academic program, home to five full-time faculty, housed in academic affairs, and directed by me, a PhDwielding academic who had come up through the ranks of tenure-track faculty (though granted at another institution). At least 12 months after that initial conversation, and over four years into my tenure in the position, when negotiations to flex my schedule had come to naught, I stepped down from being a director and retreated to my faculty role where I believed I could flex my schedule. The decision caused me to lose the equivalent of two full months of salary, though it would have been an even more substantial loss in income had I not negotiated that proviso upon my initial hire. In Chliwniak’s overview of scholarship studying female and male career trajectories in academia, it is noted, Historically, women have been expected to prioritize their goals based upon a primary role as nurturer in the family. Yet, a successful professional career requires timing based on the male pattern—that is, early

36  Bridgette Coble and Sandra Mizumoto Posey achievements and uninterrupted competition. A common stereotype is that women are less motivated than men, but research has shown that in actuality women face traditional perceptions of sex roles; pressures to balance family and career needs; and financial, emotional, and time constraints related to child care. In turn, women express concern with resultant sexist attitudes which negatively affect their ability to obtain or succeed in faculty or leadership positions. (Chliwniak, 1997) Like many professional mothers, I had to make a decision that put me behind professionally and financially but was ultimately best for my child. Several months after that, my supervisor was mysteriously dismissed, his office cleared out in a single day—according to gossip, the only explanation offered by upper administration was that it was the result of another restructuring of the organization. Life was scary like that for administrators who didn’t, as I did, have the luxury of faculty retreat rights to fall back on. It wasn’t the only instance we’d seen of people being summarily dismissed in a single day while other administrators who had dozens of complaints against them were allowed to “retire” gracefully or find other jobs, even honoring their time at the institution with catered farewell parties. These unpredictable changes and varying practices tend to make administrators nervous. Departures are often hush-hush, causing speculation to abound, and without real information to base interpretations on, administrators often feel edgy about the security of their positions, even when they believe they are doing a good job. Even with all the ways I was marginalized, whether by gender, race, or administrative role, I realized that I had privilege other administrators didn’t. If they didn’t like me, I had somewhere to retreat to. While I lost salary doing so, I had not lost my entire livelihood without warning. Nonetheless, there were forces at work undermining me in ways I still don’t understand. Ironically and seemingly arbitrarily, the director that took my place, also a mother, was granted flexible scheduling on an informal basis. Of course she—after my former supervisor’s sudden departure—had a different supervisor who clearly had a different point of view, but it still felt like adding insult to injury after spending more than four years proving myself. I then learned that flex scheduling was actually practiced at the very highest levels of our institution but that no official policy supported it or forbade it. Essentially, it was up to individual supervisors to approve and arrange as they saw fit. According to Jo (2008), midlevel administrators at universities are usually the largest population of administrators at any given university. They are also the demographic that experiences higher employee turnover rates than other categories and within the number of those who leave their positions, women do so more frequently than men, often for family reasons. While

Notes From the Dark Side  37 lack of advancement opportunities or a disagreeable supervisory relationship could also impact the decision to leave, one of the frequently mentioned complaints was that flexible work/ life policies were not uniformly applied. [emphasis mine] The midlevel administrators report to the respective senior manager in their area (i.e., deans, department heads and other positions which require faculty rank). Whether a midlevel administrator could take work flexible work hours is up to their senior manager, who could refuse to grant access to such a workplace benefit. (Jo, 2008) What was made clear to me through this experience, and what I learned from being told directly, was that even when an administrator held a faculty title, they were considered by other administrators and faculty alike to be a different kind of animal—one that would not necessarily be given access to the same rights and privileges as other faculty, even when they held the same position or performed the same duties. Upon returning to faculty, I quickly found I needed to prove myself to this side of the divide all over again, starting at square one. I have been cautioned against going up for promotion to full professor on the date I am eligible to because I have not yet demonstrated cross-campus leadership that is expected of someone achieving that rank. Apparently, the fourand-half years I spent overseeing a presidential initiative that enrolled, by the time I left, almost 2,000 students per year, taught by 115 faculty from 26 disciplines—a program that raised first-year retention 15% over the comparison group—did not count as cross-campus leadership because it was done through an administrative role (even though by the fourth year, I was officially on a faculty contract). The faculty can be deeply suspicious of contributions by anyone in an administrative position, even if they do it while on a tenured faculty contract. My response to these directives, which I often cannot make sense of no matter how many times I lie awake at night trying to wrap my brain around them, is simply to attempt to do what I am told. What choice do I have? But there are many instances when, if you listen closely enough, you can catch me sighing wearily to my closest friends, “Longest associate professor ever.” (At the time of this writing, I have been an associate professor for almost ten years.) Example 2: Bridgette I am a proud graduate of a master’s program in student affairs. As a student, I recall that we were instructed very early in our graduate education that the role of student affairs in higher education was undervalued. It was

38  Bridgette Coble and Sandra Mizumoto Posey a topic of discussion in almost every course where we discussed organizational structure, administrative decision making, or change necessary to improve higher education. Every idea we shared in class was always met with a response that either praised our work in spite of perceived faculty disdain or creatively argued the importance and value of student affairs. We were trained to prepare ourselves to be misunderstood, undervalued, and unscholarly. There were those of us who accepted this status and made no waves, and there were those who sought more advanced credentials in an effort to prove their worthiness. We all had to figure out how we would embrace our new profession as we entered the ivory towers. Preparation for me was minimal. My first generation, working-class, Black, female identity had done a fine job of teaching me that society did not assume me worthy or valuable. While my experiences varied at different institutions, I found that every institution of higher education that employed me shared a similar oppressive culture. Faculty were clearly the valued commodity, and administrators were typically viewed as support services. This proved true for the range of institutions I worked for, including a community college, a traditional public four-year institution, and a leading research university. Interestingly enough, the marginalization was often embedded within the structure of the institution. Separate and unequal divisions of academic affairs and student affairs could be uncovered by reviewing any organizational chart. Non-academic departments were often completely separated from academic departments. As a student affairs administrator, I often only interacted with others in student affairs. These were my people. The few interactions I had with faculty were limited and usually a result of us attending the same program. As my career advanced, I found myself sharing more spaces with faculty. University task forces and committees became more reflective of the campus community and supported more diverse interaction. The marginalization, however, continued to play out in these spaces. While the individuals in attendance were friendly, I often found myself on the perimeter of most conversations. Faculty members seemed more comfortable talking with other faculty and clearly valued their input. Administrators responded either in silence or by attempts at assertive commentary to prove that they had something valuable to say. Sometimes faculty offered a supportive head nod toward administrators, but rarely did the observations of the administrator influence decision making. I remember one particular situation where I had been selected by our vice president for student affairs to serve on a decision-making committee of a former university. We were charged with developing a proposal to enhance new employee orientation for the university. During one meeting, I managed to share some insight about my experience as a new employee. I offered several ideas for improving communication and welcoming new employees to the university. Committee members listened patiently as I shared my

Notes From the Dark Side  39 ideas and then moved on to hear from others in the group. A few minutes later, I listened as a faculty member offered up an idea very similar to the one I had shared earlier. The group embraced the suggestion and included it in the notes. I imagine that my student affairs role combined with my gender and race contributed to the frequency of these types of interactions throughout my career. The difficulty is that student affairs professionals are responsible for many key university initiatives. The strategic plans of most universities often contain goals directly related to the work of a student affairs department. In fact, at one university I worked for, there were several objectives outlined in the strategic plan that reflected the mission of my office, yet the committees charged with developing the specific goals for the plan did not include anyone from our department. The resulting document left out critical information, alluded to inaccurate assumptions, and failed to consider necessary resources to achieve the stated goals. Within the student affairs community, I’ve found that there exists yet another hierarchy. When I worked for a community college, it was more difficult to garner the interest and support of administrators than at fouryear institutions. When I returned to the four-year institution, I became a member of a professional association of higher education administrators that was considering whether or not to allow administrators from two-year colleges to have access to membership. The discussion around this topic involved administrators from four-year schools expressing misperceptions, judgments, and exclusionary comments about the community colleges. This is yet another example where one group of marginalized student affairs professionals disturbingly, yet creatively, justified practices that would exclude another group of professionals with similar educational backgrounds and job functions just because of the type of institution that employed them. The assumption that administrators are not scholarly really limits a university’s ability to use the full breadth of knowledge available within its employee base. In my experience, I have found that the sheer presence of administrators on committees or task forces is not enough to change this mind-set. But the opportunity for administrators to demonstrate how our knowledge contributes to solving academic problems or explaining phenomena beyond anecdotal examples can begin to open up a dialog that may raise the status of the administrator role. I have been fortunate in that I have been involved on several university committees where the knowledge I obtained through my doctoral studies and my life as a scholar have helped inform the discussion and eventual outcome.

Conclusion If the university is to continue as an institution where learning and knowledge production are valued, where knowledge is then applied and used to help create a better society, we must first heal the hypocrisies that occur within our own divided community. Dialog between administrators and

40  Bridgette Coble and Sandra Mizumoto Posey faculty about our work sets the stage for mutual respect and a culture of intellectual vigor and exploration. Those of us who are already at the margins must not further marginalize each other. We are not the dark side. We are on the same side.

References Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). (2002). Greater expectations. Washington, DC: Author. Brickson, S., & Brewer, M. (2001). Identity orientation and intergroup relations in organizations. In M. A. Hogg & D. J. Terry (Eds.), Social identity processes in organizational contexts (pp. 49–65). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Butnor, A., Posey, S., Baron, C., & Lindsay-Carpenter, H. (2013, June). Bridging the faculty staff divide. Presented at the 26th International Conference on the First Year Experience. Waikoloa, Hawaii: National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience & Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina. Chai, W. (2016, February 7). Inequality on campus. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from www.chronicle.com/article/Inequality-on-Campus/235168 Chliwniak, L. (1997). Higher education leadership: Analyzing the gender gap. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report, 25(4), 1–97. Faculty Senate. (2014, November 11). Request for consideration of amendment to the handbook for professional personnel. Metropolitan State University of Denver. Fain, P. (2009, August 17). Administrative ranks grow faster than faculty at University of North Carolina System. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/administrative-ranks-grow-faster-than-faculty-at-u-of-north-carolina-system/7714 Fenske, R. H. (1989). Historical foundations of student services. In U. Delworth, G. R. Hanson, & Associates (Eds.), Student services: A handbook for the profession (pp. 5–24). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Fischman, J. (2010, August 17). Growth in administrators outstrips growth in faculty members. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from www. chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/growth-in-administrators-outstrips-growth-in-facultymembers/26283 Ginsberg, B. (2013). The fall of the faculty: The rise of the all administrative university and why it matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hubbell, L. (2012). Understanding faculty and administrator conflict in the university. International Journal of Education Research, 7(1), 16–27. Jo, V. H. (2008). Voluntary turnover and women administrators in higher education. Higher Education, 56(5), 565–582. Kezar, Adrianna (2003). Enhancing innovative partnerships: Creating a change model for academic and student affairs collaboration. Innovative Higher Education, 28(2), 137–156. Masterson, K. (2011, March 4). Connecticut lawmakers criticize number of college administrators. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/connecticut-lawmakers-criticize-numberof-college-administrators/31046 Matos, N. (2015, September 2). The administration vacation. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from www.chronicle.com/article/The-AdministrationVacation/232801

Notes From the Dark Side  41 Pace, D., Blumreich, K., & Merkle, H. (2006). Increasing collaboration between student and academic affairs: Application of the intergroup dialogue model. NASPA Journal, 43(2), 301–315. Philpott, J., & Strange, C. (2003). On the road to Cambridge: A case study of faculty and student affairs collaboration. The Journal of Higher Education, 74(1), 77–95. Rogers, J. (2013, January 7). How many administrators are too many? The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from www.chronicle.com/interactives/ administrative_bloat Thelin, J. (2004). A history of American higher education. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Tryon, B. (2005, October 21). The divide. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from www.chronicle.com/article/The-Divide/44948 Westhues, K. (2017). Lessons from Hector Hammerly: 1935–2006. Writings and Teachings: Kenneth Westhues. Retrieved from www.kwesthues.com/hhammerly. htm Zamudio-Suaréz, F. (2017, April 20). Cal state’s growth in hiring of managers exceeds other staff, audit finds. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/cal-state-hires-more-managersthan-faculty-or-support-staff-audit-finds/117886

3 On Being the First Black Woman Joanna Davis-McElligatt

We looked both from the outside in and . . . from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. —bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From the Margin to the Center

For the entirety of my childhood and well into my early adulthood, I believed myself to be something of an academic insider. I was born just a few blocks away from Wichita State University (WSU), where my mother and her mother had attended college, up the road from my father’s childhood home. When I was 4 years old, my father decided to finish his college degree, attend theological seminary, and become ordained. My parents, who’d been working as inner-city missionaries, packed us up and left for Illinois, where my father attended Wheaton College and the College of DuPage. In the dead of winter, our family of five moved into a tiny twobedroom apartment in the university’s complex for international families, where we would stay for the next five years. Though I now understand that this was a time of great hardship for my parents as they struggled to acclimate and survive in an elitist academic and social environment, many of my happiest childhood memories are of sharing a room with my two brothers and playing with children whose families had come from Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, China, Brazil, Jamaica, and Trinidad. When I was 9 years old, my father decided to pursue a doctoral degree in religious studies at the University of Iowa, and so we moved once again, this time to a rental duplex on the edge of a quaint, entirely white, upper-middle-class neighborhood. Once my father was designated all-but-dissertation (ABD), we moved back to Wichita into a single-family home in the community where I’d been born 15 years earlier, where my father had been born, in the shadow of the campus of WSU. In 2000, two years after I’d moved out to attend the University of Kansas, my father completed his PhD; I was unable to attend the ceremony because I had to take my own final exams—and of course my father understood. After I graduated from college, I left for the University of Iowa, my father’s alma mater, where I’d accepted a six-year fellowship. In 2010, ten years after my father’s graduation, I received my

On Being the First Black Woman  43 PhD in literary and cultural studies. At the peak of the recession, I was one of the fortunate ones. In August of that year, my partner and I packed up our own belongings, our cats, and drove straight down south to the Gulf where I’d found a job. . . . . . My father was 31 years old, a nontraditional student with two young children and an infant, when he began his first semester in 1984. My parents were married nine years after Loving v. Virginia, the civil rights decision that made their union legal in all 50 states. Their marriage and three brownskinned children invited confusion and, at times, harassment. My mother, who had an immense and richly sustaining interracial network of extended family, co-missionaries, and friends in Kansas, made a tremendous sacrifice in agreeing to uproot our family and live in cities supported by predominantly white institutions. While my father studied, taught, and attended classes, my mother ran an in-home daycare, worked as a telephone operator, and as a cashier at a drugstore in order to help make ends meet—it did not become apparent to me until I was much older, but my parents struggled to make ends meet. As a black man, my father navigated his educational and intellectual identity in spite of racist condescension and microaggressions, both in the classroom and outside it. I have more than one distinct memory of a police officer pulling my father over and letting him go with a warning. We always knew he’d been stopped for driving while black in an all-white neighborhood with a white woman sitting next to him. It is an undeniable fact that my father’s studies demanded that he be separated from his family more often than he or we wished. I now understand, having done it myself, that among the crueler aspects of academic life is the way it can rob you of time. I struggle to comprehend how I could possibly calculate the value of my father forging for me an idea of how it might be to be an academic and black, to say nothing of his kindness and encouragement. How can I articulate the power that comes from sharing a kinship with someone who has experienced what you are yourself experiencing? It is more than sharing institutional knowledge and memory, though, of course, that was and continues to be tremendously beneficial. It is the feeling of being seen, of having my experiences and existence validated, of following in footsteps. My father and my other most cherished professor-mentors taught me that the value of good mentorship extends far beyond the academic into the realm of the personal and political. . . . . . I learned to read early and have since that time been a voracious reader. My appetite was indulged with Saturday trips to whichever gorgeous and well-funded library was close by to where we lived. My life has been fundamentally defined by the fine and liberal arts, but most specifically by words and stories. My childhood was shaped by my being read to and watching

44  Joanna Davis-McElligatt others read, by a fascination with semantics and hermeneutics, by the way a particular way of writing or speaking could make you feel some kind of way, by the way my mother when reading would disappear into a world we could not access, by the comforting sight of my father shaping the world with and being shaped by language as I stepped into the living room blearyeyed, looking for a glass of water in the middle of the night. My mother read aloud to us every night. It was from her that I learned the pleasure of the novel, of the delight to be found in deciphering the symbols on the page, of the satisfaction that comes from building a picture of another world in your mind and holding it there. She made time for herself away from her partner and children by reading. I always knew that my mother was her own person, belonging to herself, and that I should expect the same. In those moments when my mother would return to us by setting aside the pleasure of her book for the realities of life, I learned about the importance of consistent, unconditional love in the mundane. My father was busily studying dense logophilic fields of thought: religious studies, ethics, philosophy, systematic theology. Ideas were bursting at the seams of his mind, and he would share what he learned with us over the dinner table in terms we could understand, asking us questions about simulacra and our habit of taking our perceptions as proof of reality or offering an exegesis on the gap between the signifier and the signified. A master storyteller in his own right, when we were children, my father wove exciting tales about mischievous twins named Timmy and Barry right off the top of his head. It was through language that I discovered the core of myself—my sense of empathy, my understanding of my place in the world, my political core. I have always been attracted to James Baldwin’s definition of the power of literature to provide a shape and order to one’s life, to provide comfort: You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. (Howard, 1964, p. 89) My pain and heartbreak is not unprecedented, and that is the core of my political praxis. . . . . . Even though our family was poor, my brothers and I attended well-funded public schools. I benefited from our local public school system’s entanglements with the university in ways too innumerable to list here, though I had unusual advantages such as early access to language learning (I could speak and read German and Spanish by age 17), technology (our public schools

On Being the First Black Woman  45 were always equipped with computer labs and up-to-date educational resources), and access to musicians, writers, and artists (Keith Haring, for example, spent a week at my elementary school painting a mural). My parents valued music and music lessons, and were willing and able to pay for me to study classical piano for several years from a well-respected pianist. I can still feel the complex combination of bitterness and disappointment that flooded through me when my mother told me they could no longer afford to pay for my lessons. I was practicing hours every week, had been training to attend the Juilliard School of Music, and my teacher believed I had the potential. At 14, I was old enough to learn that some things were not going to be attainable. If I wanted to go to any school, I would only get there with luck, hard work, and the help of external funding, because my parents would not be able to afford to help me. . . . . . My mother recently recalled how on our annual trips to Kansas she would watch her three children press their small faces against the car windows, delighted to see black people wherever they looked. It made her worry that we might never feel full, that we might always starve for what we could not have. Perhaps she was coming to understand that to be black in America is to hunger. . . . . . For the first half of my childhood, I was surrounded by an interracial, international community of poor families. I assumed that we and our studentparents were the norm. But when we moved to Iowa City when I was nine, suddenly everyone in our neighborhood was a wealthy, white professional: professors, medical doctors, writers, lawyers, and scientific researchers. As I matured and began to develop a keener sense of the world around me and my place within it, I began to notice that I was not only the only black person in school, but often the only black person wherever I happened to be. I began to look for the first time from the outside and from the inside out. When we were old enough to go downtown by ourselves to the comic shop and record store, our parents reminded us of the rules for black children in public: no wearing backpacks, no loitering anywhere, and keeping our hands fully visible at all times. As a teenage shrinking violet, when I did not wish to be seen by anyone, I had to become aware of both my hypervisiblity and invisibility in order to survive. My parents praised my stick-to-itiveness, my ability to stand up to my brothers, and my stubbornness. But outside of my home in school, those qualities were read as signs of my innate anger and aggression. I began to become afraid of myself. . . . . .

46  Joanna Davis-McElligatt I have spent my life navigating majority-white environments. It feels as perilous, frightening, and dangerous now as it ever has. . . . . . One afternoon, when I was in graduate school, my partner and I visited the African American Museum of Iowa in Cedar Rapids. I was struggling to write my dissertation. I was on my fellowship year and exempted from teaching, which meant I spent the vast majority of my time at home by myself writing. I was the only black ABD graduate student in my program at that time. I was weary of looking in from the outside, which began to feel like an increasingly permanent position. I went to the museum longing to find some remembrance of black people, some evidence that we had been and were still living there. Perhaps I was looking for proof that I belonged where I was. In one room, positioned somewhat awkwardly on the wall, I found a framed piece of paper. It was a certificate for the first black dentist in Cedar Rapids. “They’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel for exhibition material,” I told my partner. “I didn’t come here to be reminded how rare we are here.” I wanted to be at the place where firsts were behind us. Let me clarify: of course, I understood that there would be more black firsts. A few months earlier, I’d stood on an expansive campus green watching Barack Obama stump for the election. I too was swept up by the representational power inherent in the idea of his being the first black president. Surrounded as I was at his speech by white people on a predominantly white campus in a predominantly white state, it felt meaningful. But I had no interest in being president. I didn’t want to be a symbol for anything or anyone. I knew there would be black firsts somewhere—elsewhere—becoming the first dentist, president, professor. It never once entered my mind that the first black woman would be me. . . . . . “I am the first black woman ever to be granted tenure and promotion at this institution,” I tell the students in my #blacklivesmatter course one day. My students, who are almost entirely black, erupt into applause and cheers. I’d been trying to use my experience as a negative example, to make the case that we were not living in a post-racial utopia at the end of the Obama era. I was trying to say I’m too young to be the first, born too late after civil rights. One day after class, one of my students, a young black trans activist, came up to me. I am heavily tattooed, bespectacled, with wild curls, clad in bright colors. He’d seen me around the building, he said, and after someone told him I was an ethnic studies professor, he’d read as much of my work as he could. He made a head-exploding motion to signify how he felt about our learning together. I’m the first black professor he’s ever had or ever seen. I’m the first professor he’d ever had who looks like him, who knew who Alton Sterling is and what it meant that he was in the thick of that protest.

On Being the First Black Woman  47 I am reminded that being the first can mean showing another person that they are not alone. . . . . . Lafayette is a mid-sized Louisiana city, as segregated as any majority-white city is likely to be in the United States. During the first two years of my professorship, my partner and I and our infant son lived unhappily in a gated apartment complex appending River Ranch, the wealthiest and whitest section of the city. It was the only place we’d found that was willing to rent to us sight unseen from Iowa and that required no deposit. We couldn’t afford to fly to Louisiana to look for an apartment and could not afford a deposit of first and last month’s rent. One afternoon while waiting to purchase cheese at the local organic grocery, a white woman cheerily asked me what I charged per hour. She pointed to my child and admired that I was dedicated enough to wear my charge in a sling. “This is my son,” I told her, hugging his small body closer to my own. “This is my child.” That evening I began to search Craigslist for another place to live—one where my dark skin would not be read as an inherent sign of my servitude to white strangers, where my child would be more likely to be read as my own, and where my interracial family could find a community where we would be left in peace if not accepted. We settled on the small majority black and Creole town of Opelousas, approximately 20 miles north of Lafayette, and shortly moved into a lovely rental home in a quiet, quaint neighborhood. I understood that majority-black spaces are always-already constructed as dangerous, but looking as I was from the inside out, I saw myself reflected in them. In the early years of the Obama administration, when anti-black racism was increasingly rearing its ugly head in public spheres, I wanted and needed to feel safe, which would mean feeling less conspicuous. Thus I was not surprised to discover that my colleagues and students were shocked when I told them where we were moving—but I was disheartened. Over lunch one afternoon, a colleague expressed genuine concern that our child would never be accepted because he was too fair skinned, that our interracial family would be met with violence, our home beset by repeated robberies if we moved. I picked at my salad, coming to the slow realization that as a 30-year-old assistant professor on the tenure track, I was being read as financially secure and upwardly mobile. I could not be read as white—but my education and social status made me respectably black in ways my fellow black Louisianans were always-already not. I didn’t know how to correct these misperceptions. I couldn’t find the words to explain that my partner and I arrived in Louisiana with a zero balance in our banking account and nearly maxed-out credit cards, that we barely survived until I received my first paycheck. At my on-campus interview, I was given tours of neighborhoods and handed real estate brochures, which I took to be positive signs that the department was eager for me to commit. Yet the gesture tacitly implied that I was in a solvent enough financial position to

48  Joanna Davis-McElligatt purchase property. In my final year of graduate school, I taught fewer courses so that I could focus on finishing my dissertation and finding a job; my partner had been making decent money as a chef de cuisine in Iowa, and I was under the mistaken impression that any job I accepted would provide either start-up funds or moving expenses. To our dismay, we discovered that Louisiana state law prohibits institutions from paying public employees moving fees, and my partner and I were forced to use the last of our savings to relocate. Once in Louisiana, my partner could only find work as a sous chef, which paid significantly less than his former position, and after taxes, insurance, and payments to my pension, I discovered that I would be taking home very little money. Extreme financial hardship was nothing new for me. I’d paid for myself to attend college and graduate school with a mixture of loans, grants, scholarships, and fellowships. But in my experience, one’s level of education and annual income were often inversely correlated—no one had ever mistaken me for someone wealthy before. My professorship was a position of great power and privilege, and I knew that choosing our own community the way we did was an immense luxury. Yet I could not escape the fact that our choice to move to Opelousas was in our best sociopolitical, sociocultural, and sociofinancial interest. How do you say I am a well-educated college professor and also poor and black and woman? . . . . . The average family of Opelousians makes less than $16,000 a year, and three-quarters of the population identifies as black. The streets and public infrastructure are crumbling, and most of the industrial center and downtown have been shuttered. After the 1980s oil bust, the town’s population dropped by 10,000, and it hasn’t recovered. Consequently, Wal-Mart is now the largest employer. Yet in spite of the lack that attends deep poverty, we found a vibrant community surviving and thriving. Our son attends the public elementary school three houses away, which boasts an all-day universal pre-kindergarten program, a French-language immersion program from kindergarten through sixth grade, and an international faculty. Our neighbors, who are predominantly black and/or Creole, indigenous, Lebanese, Saudi, and Vietnamese, are out and about walking dogs, teaching children to ride bikes, exercising, and mowing their lawns. Every summer evening, the ice cream truck plays its merry melody just as the mosquitoes come out at dusk, when children begin to congregate at the school’s playground to play or walk to one another’s homes for sleepovers. Here we are understood to be a family, and I am recognized as a community leader. No one mistakes me for my child’s nanny. When I browse through stores, no one follows me because everyone looks like me. . . . . . As a child growing up on college campuses, watching my black father navigate various educational systems, I believed that even if I was one of the few

On Being the First Black Woman  49 black people in the classroom, I’d find an empty seat. But my matriculation through each educational stage—from preschool to graduate school and then to a professorship—has resulted in my becoming increasingly alone. I’d had a genuinely engaging and exciting college experience, where I felt that my being the only black woman in any of my courses was not necessarily a problem if I had the freedom to speak my mind. I grew adept at recognizing racist and sexist microaggressions. My professors and mentors believed that I had valuable perspectives on literature and culture, and encouraged me to keep pursuing my education. As I progressed through graduate school, however, my being the only black woman began to wear thin. I was losing stamina for fielding microaggressions and losing patience with my position as a vulnerable student, fellow, and teaching assistant. I was diagnosed with pure-obsessional obsessive compulsive disorder in graduate school, after rumination, agoraphobia, and intense anxiety began to interfere with my schoolwork. Yet even when I was feeling most inward, I was nevertheless consistently read as the aggressive black woman for bringing issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality to bear both in and outside the classroom. After the handful of other black women in my program and I discovered that our fellowship, designed for people of color and the only award for which we were considered, paid significantly less a year than the more prestigious fellowship for white students, we began to despair. As I worked toward a specialization in ethnic studies, it became clear that many of the problems I was facing were systemic. I began to struggle with what it meant that the qualities of looking from the outside and from the inside out were ongoing structural and institutional facets of my experience. There were no empty seats. If I wished to sit down, I would have to build my own chair. I would have to alternately ask and demand that space be made for it in such a way that would be read as non-threatening to the established predominantly white order. Let me get to my point: now that I am a permanent member of a faculty and university body, precisely the moment one might expect I would be most included, I have paradoxically never been more isolated. . . . . . In Feminist Theory: From the Margin to the Center (1984), bell hooks explains that black women living as we did—on the edge—we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and . . . from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. (p. vii, my italics)

50  Joanna Davis-McElligatt Balancing between the perspective of looking from the outside to the centers of power and looking from the inside out to the margins has been instructive. Over time, I have embraced some of the ways in which my own personal marginality is a position from which I both resist and theorize. For hooks, the “particular way of seeing reality” central to the marginalized black woman is powerful precisely because in our narratives, we become “a necessary, vital part of that whole,” straddling, negotiating, and transgressing margin and center as we do. It is this reckoning with hooks’s formulation of black women and their particular way of seeing reality that leads Patricia Hill Collins to argue that black women intellectuals are “outsiders within” (p. S15, my italics). Outsiders within look both from the outside and from the inside out—and it is from these unique vantage points which springs “the emerging, crossdisciplinary literature that I label Black feminist thought, precisely because, for many Afro-American female intellectuals, ‘marginality’ has been an excitement to creativity” (1986, p. S15). Collins explains that many black women intellectuals—and others who occupy positions of social difference— turn what are positions of powerlessness into valuable loci where necessary creative intellectual and political work is done. Let me be clear: marginalized is not a position where black women wish to remain permanently. Indeed, as Collins notes, “By stressing the potentially positive features of outsider within status, I in no way want to deny the very real problem this social status has for large numbers of Black women” (p. S15). As its broad goal, however, black feminist thought aims to explode binarisms, advance intersectional approaches to our locations within sociopolitical and sociocultural systems, and reconstitute those systems of power by shifting us away from margin/center models of group organization. It is through a consideration of black women looking in from the outside, working within the system from the inside out, and operating as outsiders within that we understand the origins and impetus of and for black feminist thought. But it is also at these junctures where we see the particular ways in which black women academics “may encounter much less of a fit between their personal and cultural experiences and both elements of sociological paradigms than that facing other [academics]” (p. S26). Unwilling to entirely give up their connections to the world beyond and outside the boundaries of the academy, for black women, “their outsider allegiances may militate against their choosing full insider status, and they may be more apt to remain outsiders within” (p. S26). For in order to become . . . insiders, Black women must assimilate a standpoint that is quite different than their own. White males have long been the dominant group . . . and the sociological worldview understandably reflects the concerns of this group of practitioners. [. . .] In contrast, a good deal of the Black female experience has been spent coping with, avoiding, subverting, and challenging the workings of this same male white

On Being the First Black Woman  51 insiderism. It should come as no surprise that Black women’s efforts in dealing with the effects of interlocking systems of oppression might produce a standpoint quite distinct from, and in many ways opposed to, that of white male insiders. Seen from this perspective, . . . Black women become . . . penultimate “strangers.” (p. S26) It is true that for me being from the outside, from the inside out, and an outsider within has generated intense resourcefulness, an ability to navigate political obstacles, fostered in myself a commitment radical empathy, and a desire to discover how much I can do when given very little. Without core curriculum on the books in any of my primary fields, I have over time had to develop new courses, build and refine undergraduate programs, and developed a strong record of mentoring undergraduate and graduate students. My own feelings of isolation, loneliness, and anxiety about lacking a network of support while on the tenure track has prompted me to provide intellectual, emotional, and professional support for my students, and helped me to develop pedagogical practices that are humane and holistic. I have come to see the ways in which my unique perspectives and positionality within the academy has, as hooks and Collins argue, helped me to survive. . . . . . Unfortunately, there are limits to how productive alienation and isolation can be: “For a time this marginality can be a most stimulating, albeit often a painful, experience. For some, it is debilitating” (as cited in Collins, 1986). At times, my being positioned from the outside and from the inside out has be productive and enriching. Yet I have also struggled immensely with what it means to be an outsider within. How could I feel otherwise, being human? After years of isolated study in graduate school, I discovered that I was the first black woman ever to be hired to the tenure track and the first professor of ethnic studies. I became the first black woman ever to be awarded tenure in the Department of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. As such, I have repeatedly been put in a position where I must convince my colleagues that my primary fields of study are thriving outside the boundaries of our institution. “The nice thing about Afro-American literature,” I was told by a departmental administrator, “is that you only have primary sources and no theory, which makes it so much more simple.” To this end, though my marginal position has pushed me to be clever in my course designs and to take advantage of every opportunity to advocate for the work that I do, as the only one in the department working in my primary field, I have repeatedly had to make the case that my minoritarian fields are intellectually rigorous, that my ways of reading and teaching reading are not anathema to the work of our discipline, and that my focus on representations of identity is not more properly the work of intellectuals in other departments. When I have been in a position to advocate forcefully for

52  Joanna Davis-McElligatt my work from the outside of the primary systems of power or any broader network of support, I have been told to watch my tone, to appear less angry, to make others feel comfortable without regard for myself and my own feelings. It is this burden that I find hardest to bear: being an outsider within has meant finding ways to make certain that none of my colleagues feel put out, threatened, or endangered by my presence in the department. As often as I have advocated for myself, my students, and our work, I have just as often swallowed my tongue. This is because no matter how angry and depressed I have felt at the ways my intellectual and departmental labor have been systematically disregarded, I have felt no emotion stronger than fear. For me, fear has meant a quieting of my rage, or, more precisely sublimation of my anger in order to keep the peace—an acceptance that my position looking from the inside out means never being fully centered. “These people will vote for your tenure and promotions,” a mentor told me in a Facebook thread where I’d asked for help coping with feelings of despair attending my utter invisibility, “so you need to remember that even your facial expressions will be counted against you.” I know my sister-scholar meant to tell me the truth of my situation, but in doing so, she confirmed my worst suspicion: fear was a more powerful agent on the tenure track than anger and self-empowerment. Even as it took its psychological and emotional toll, as living with constant fear can do, fear of retribution and my own powerlessness kept me silent and compliant at precisely the moments when I should have stood up for myself and my work. As a form of self-discipline, my fear prevented me from allowing my anger at deep injustice and my near total isolation to alienate my white colleagues—but it also meant that for years I suffered in silence. Earning tenure has meant for me a slow (de-)re-programming of myself, allowing me to for the first time in my academic life attempt a close analysis of the origins of my fear. It has also allowed me to endeavor a selfconscious taking upon my mantel the position as an outsider within. This is also important: without tenure, I would never be able to be this forthright. . . . . . Warrior poet Audre Lorde asks of the oppressed the following: What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? (1984, p. 41) I do not have the words to fully express the depth of my isolation, and I swallow the tyranny and violence of racial prejudice, of having to be the first in the twenty-first century, of feeling unsafe in my body, of the rankness of daily injustice, of having to assert over and over again to hostile and disinterested parties that my life matters. I do not yet have the words to address

On Being the First Black Woman  53 the depths of my rage. But I believe Lorde, who explains, “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us” 1984, p. 41). I have been more afraid of my fear than of the consequences of my choosing not to speak. But I am even more afraid of the powerlessness that attends languagelessness. This chapter is made of up of the words I do have. I believed that my proximity to educational systems meant I was an insider, and I was wrong. No matter how involved in the educational system I’ve become, I have remained an outsider within. From that position, and over time, I have built a strong network of brown, black, indigenous, queer, trans, and disabled scholar-friend-mentors, who daily remind me that it is from the outside and from the inside out that we make meaning, that we do our work—and that I am not alone. I did not choose to be the first black woman. But I am surviving it.

References Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of Black feminist thought. Social Problems, 33(6), S14–S32. hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From the margin to the center. Boston, MA: South End Press. Howard, J. (1964, May). Doom and glory of knowing who you are. TIME, p. 89. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.

4 Breaking the Silence and Removing the Garb Revelations From a Working-Class Academic Katelynn DeLuca As we approached St. John’s University’s (SJU) cobblestone entryway, lined with iron gates, my mother stumbled over her words, finally bursting at the seams: “Wow, this is incredible, Katie.” I beamed. Looking back at what my mother’s response stems from; however, I’m not sure pride describes how I feel now. On that day, as my tires rumbled from stone to stone, I wasn’t even sure I was supposed to be driving there; it seemed an entranceway for someone else to a place that is foreign, private, other. Walking across the sprawling green lawn, past beautiful old buildings, the bewilderment on my mother’s face grew. She turned to me worriedly, “Wait, Kate, am I dressed for this? Should I wait in the car?” Up crept the sickening feeling that has followed me since leaving my diverse and relatively low-income high school. As I write this, recalling that day, I am at a crossroad: I have an opportunity either to hide behind this page as it creates distance between you, the reader, and me, the writer, or I can break down the classed barriers that have been constructed, no longer masking myself behind various façades. The distance between us, while literal, is also practical; it allows me to keep parts of my identity hidden and make other parts visible based on what I say, how I say it, and what I reveal. Similarly, I select my middle-class attire and step into the classrooms in which I teach in order to hide the me that I know and that my family once knew very well—a version of myself that no longer feels at ease within academia or entirely at home. It is not without some fear that I embrace this opportunity to uncover an aspect of myself that continues to go unacknowledged but also to uncover something for students and others. I am a first-generation college student and a working-class individual. Though class is primarily perceived as a reflection of financial means, job description, level of autonomy, affect, and cultural values help define and determine class status. Also at stake are exposure to different language varieties outside of the standard, awareness of available job opportunities, lifestyles and cultural experiences, financial and career insecurity, etc. While reference is often made to class and its potential impacts, it remains elusive and undervalued by many. Rhetoric and composition scholar Irvin Peckham (2010), focusing on social class theory and writing instruction, identifies “some of the problems of referring to social class in the United

Breaking the Silence and Removing the Garb  55 States. The major issues are the un-naming of class, its empirical status, what markers we use to distinguish the different classes, and what we call them” (16). These issues obfuscate the ability to recognize value in multiple class positions rather than solely in the middle and upper classes. Definitions of class and class divisions rest primarily on the following criteria: income and material objects; power dynamics and wealth creation (Zweig, 2000); the process, the system of ownership, other people at work and in society, and to “the content and process of one’s own productive activity” (Anyon, 1980); and those who “do” [labor] and “those who think,” “those who earn a living and take care of yourself and those who just talk” (Lindquist, 2002). Such definitions are complicated by the role of education, communities, family structure, and work, each of which are important spaces and factors within the lives of all people and shape the ways class is read. As noted by Sherry Lee Linkon (1999), a leader in working-class studies—among others, including poverty reporter Alfred Lubrano, psychologist Barbara Jensen, economist Michael Zweig, and composition scholar Gary Tate—there is a significant lack of attention given to class studies: In spite of the growing interest in working-class studies, the principles of inclusion and recognition that have been so important in creating spaces for gender studies, black studies, queer studies, and ethnic studies in colleges and universities have not generally been extended to class. (Linkon, 1999, p. 3) Both Peckham and Linkon speak to the need to increase inclusion of the study and teaching of class studies in classrooms and the value in doing so for all students, as it expands knowledge, understanding, and recognition of diversity within higher education. Though some may label another individual as uneducated, loud, or too outspoken, this only reveals a lack of familiarity with varying class cultures. Class is a constant structuring element that controls society and our interpretation of class ideology, which has been created and reinforced by the middle and upper classes (Jensen, 2012). Alfred Lubrano in Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams (2004) introduces the perspectives of numerous working-class individuals who identify as “straddlers,” who begin their lives in the working-class and later enter middle- and upper-class spaces but struggle to live between worlds or commit to one or the other (p. 2). For many working-class academics, straddling continues even after earning tenure and gaining financial security. The language I use and the clothes I wear in academia, as well as the mannerisms I hide, represent a different me than when I am at home, as I work to fit into the societal expectations of an individual working within an academic institution. Though code-switching advocates support the use of certain languages or dialects within specific spaces, such as an individual’s home language at home and Standard English in other spaces, this requires

56  Katelynn DeLuca suppression and denial of one’s language. Code-switching leads to a dismissing of self and the value of one’s history, familial/community associations, and class culture as it’s pushed out of academic and professional spaces that society has deemed more important. Carolyn Leste Law in This Fine Place So Far From Home (1995) reveals her losses: In my trajectory from a working-class family of origin to the threshold of middle-class professional status, I have suffered a loss my present context doesn’t even recognize as a loss; my education has destroyed something even while it has been re-creating me in its own image. (p. 1) While students are trained to think of education as betterment, academia fails to recognize the loss that is also suffered, which can include estrangement from family as well as denial of origins, cleansing of language, rejection of familial values, and questions about belonging. Although a number of working-class academics reveal the lack of support they received from family and community members because of the fear that once they walk through the threshold of academia, they will not return, I’ve had a different experience, as my parents feared failing to outfit me with what’s necessary to reach my full potential. My parents have always been supportive, which I recognize as a privilege many don’t enjoy. My mother worked two and three jobs, sometimes more: secretary at a funeral home and at a chiropractor, lunch lady, school bus monitor, school bus driver, and, finally, school bus transportation assistant. She worked hard to support my brother and me, while my father was forced to retire from his postal worker position in his 30s due to multiple sclerosis. As I list my mother’s working-class positions, echoes of people who have gasped or whispered when they learned this weigh on my mind. However, I also know well that my mother’s job description does not define her, yet societal norms say something different. Education scholar and social justice activist Jean Anyon (1980) writes that an individual’s work is one way that he or she relates to the system of ownership, people at work and in society, and “the content and process of one’s own productive activity” (p. 68). All of these relations to production, in Anyon’s view, determine a person’s social class. She points to capital (both personal ownership and physical capital) as another way to identify different classes. As people are positioned farther from the role of capitalist, their social status moves from upper to middle to lower class. The closer an individual is to having direct control of an enterprise, the higher their class. Such control allows for increased creative opportunities, decision-making abilities, and level of autonomy, while in the lower classes, there is little, if any, creativity required, and the work is routine and mechanical (Anyon, 1980). It’s clear my mother is far from the role of capitalist, and so societal expectations,

Breaking the Silence and Removing the Garb  57 which impose ideological understandings of her worth and value, shape others’ views of her and her view of herself. My mother’s work connects to the circumstances that landed her in those positions. Raised by a single mother without a high school diploma, my mother raised her four siblings and tried to find a way to break the cycle and become upwardly mobile. She graduated high school and found jobs that could support her; college was deemed too expensive. She met my father, gave birth to my brother and me, and together they bought what they could afford: a mobile home. It wasn’t the dream she envisioned, but she had a new vision of raising her children to get more out of life than she had: longterm careers rather than jobs, a sense of living for oneself rather than for an employer, financial security, and upward mobility. Eventually, through a housing lottery, my parents could afford a home in a controlled-cost neighborhood and leave behind the stigma of a mobile home park—or so I thought. From then on, I denied that I ever lived in a mobile home, even to my friends and their parents, people who’d known my family when we lived there and were quick to contest my false claims. I recognized the shame that came with that, and although I knew I shouldn’t feel ashamed, it clung to me like a heavy cloak. Yet my mother taught us to move beyond the material objects and harness our inner strengths. Every week, I was told that I was meant to go to college. It wasn’t a command; it was my mother’s way of telling me that I had something to offer the world. Though I made honor roll and honor society, my vision of my abilities and my future wavered. I wanted to go to college, but did I know why or what for? No. Did I know that I could keep up with students who likely had more rigorous preparation for college? Not at all. But I went anyway. In my high school courses, there was a clear stratification among the highly touted Ivy-League bound and those heading in alternative directions: vocational schools, community colleges, or the workforce. I landed at a community college because of health reasons and started my first semester at Suffolk County Community College (SCCC)—“Scruffolk” or “thirteenth grade,” as many of my classmates called it. I could feel the distance in my senior year between those heading to well-respected, four-year universities and those who’d start at SCCC. However, harnessing the faith that my mother had instilled in me, I approached my academics with great seriousness, surprising myself with a 3.9 GPA that first semester. Maybe I had something to offer in an academic space. I graduated with a 4.0 GPA, earned one of the largest and most competitive private scholarships in the country, and was accepted to Stony Brook University (SBU). I still didn’t feel right, but I couldn’t figure it out, so I suppressed those feelings and developed a persona to suit the spaces I would enter at SBU, yet the anxiety crept back. Marjorie Cook speaks to students’ perceptions, formed on the basis of faculty and family advisement, as well as societal views, of transferring from a community college to a four-year university. Cook found two main factors impacting whether students pursued

58  Katelynn DeLuca their goal to transfer to a four-year institution (Cook, 2010): students’ belief that a four-year college was comparable to a community college and the guidance students received prior to transferring. For working-class students, Cook found that they did not feel “well-match[ed] socially to the student body” at a four-year school (p. 10), which affected students’ “ability to see attendance at the selective research university as a possibility” (p. 11). Such insider/outsider status in academia is key, as working-class students and faculty attempt to gain increased mobility or break with societal expectations. The feeling of not matching with SBU students clung to me as I transferred, and it lingered throughout my time there. Encounters with other students and professors significantly affected how I approached my classes, classmates, and work. While others socialized frequently, participated in class, and waited until the last minute to complete work, I remained silent both inside and outside of the classroom (the opposite of my boisterous and outspoken high school self) and began assignments weeks in advance. I compared myself to classmates who had attended SBU since freshman year and carried serious concerns about my preparedness since I had attended a community college. When interacting with professors, beginning during my time at SCCC, I flooded my verbal and email interactions with apologies. Rather than recognize office hours as intended for students, I saw myself as taking up their precious time to work or prepare for classes. I wasn’t entitled to their time, energy, and feedback; I was taking it from them. As a sat in their offices, guilt pushed away thoughts and ideas I wanted to discuss. I feared that my mannerisms and language showed that I didn’t belong. While these feelings of inadequacy persisted, they also pushed me to excel and earn a graduate scholarship that fully funded my education. I finally started to value the path I had taken in my academics. As I think about what class is and how it is defined, these persistent outsider feelings sadly make sense. Though I earned a full scholarship, which translated into less out-of-pocket money spent on school, monetary gain did not change the position I held in society, my mind, my classes, or my community. When leaving the SBU campus, I headed to one of my jobs—cook, server, deli manager, house cleaner in the Hamptons, school bus driver— that helped pay for other expenses and build the security I was fearful of never having. Rather than head to the Student Activities Center to grab coffee with classmates or meet with study groups, I threw on ragged jeans, worn sneakers, and a uniform and headed off into another world. When I couldn’t change before my evening classes, I had no choice but to enter classrooms in those same clothes, carrying with me the world I had just left. I received stares or questions about why I looked “ummm . . . tired?” (the nice way of saying in shambles, I assume) and why I smelled like pizza, deli food, cleaners, or fuel. Every stare and question increased my alienation. Yet I also felt a sense of pride in my ability to work multiple jobs and earn an education. This isn’t to say that other students didn’t work; they did, as assistants at their parents’ businesses, in offices on campus, as occasional

Breaking the Silence and Removing the Garb  59 house sitters for neighbors. They spoke with pride about the flexibility and ease of their jobs, while I sat feeling as though I was operating on a separate continent, because the skills, persona, and language I needed for each stood in such strong opposition. When working outside academia, it was as if I wasn’t a person at all but a piece of machinery to serve others’ needs. My level of intelligence didn’t matter and rarely did customers, owners, or coworkers consider that I had interests or intelligence beyond my workingclass job. However, I was fortunate because the values I gained as a result of my experiences as well as the support of my mother helped me cope. I refused to allow poor treatment to alter who I was. I continued to work hard and hold high standards in all areas of my life. My background and my mother’s teachings brought me strength and intelligence not taught in the classroom, and I highly valued that. While teaching, I met students who appeared to express similar circumstances. I worried how the treatment they received, both in academia and outside, would affect their self-worth and the opportunities they saw available for themselves. If not for my mother’s support, where might I have landed given the opportunities I was told were available to me? How do others within my community see themselves in relation to those just a short distance away in miles but seemingly worlds apart in terms of wealth and cultural capital? I graduated at the top of my class from SBU and even enrolled in a PhD course during my last semester upon the recommendation of my professors and graduate program director—seeking shelter in an advisor’s office every week before the class to work up the courage to step into that room—and still the odd feeling persisted. It wasn’t a feeling that I could identify such as when a doctor asks you what kind of pain you’re experiencing: Does it radiate? Burn? Is it piercing? No matter what I did, this feeling followed me, even when two years later I applied to the doctoral program at SJU. It seemed like a decent idea when the deadline was months away, but as it grew closer, that creeping feeling of fear and alienation grew, and I backed out of applying. The feeling didn’t last, though, as I sat with my mother and explained what I had decided. She encouraged me to do what I deemed best for myself, but reminded me of the work ethic and intelligence I’d already displayed in higher education: “You’ve never failed before, what makes you think you will now? Regardless of the outcome, you are not your grades, so do what makes you happy.” I valued these words—and the source of them— yet begged her not to tell anyone about my doctoral program application to preserve my dignity when denied entry. Surprisingly, I was accepted and offered a fellowship. My response was not “oh, nice,” as if I expected it or that SJU should be happy to have me. My response was “oh shit. Oh shit. No way. This can’t be happening.” Even as I write this, I have to consider my affect and the perceptions readers may have of my inclusion of shit, a word often excised from academic

60  Katelynn DeLuca work and not viewed as appropriate or middle class. While other responses appear more suitable for presentation, the reality is that I am straddling two worlds—one in which “oh shit” may not be academic but says all it needs to for those within the working-class and another space that expects an affective response that shows poise and gentility (Dews and Law, 1995, p. 177). But part of advocating for and maintaining pride for my working-class roots is showing my genuine response, which breaks that standard academic mold and reveals exactly what I meant: questioning why this institution would choose me and the realization that I had to follow through. Questioning my acceptance is key, as it reveals the “patterns of privilege” that deem worthy certain stories, languages, writers, and cultures, while excluding others that exist within society (Gilyard, 2000, p. 266). I viewed myself as inferior to others in academia because of my positioning as a daughter of working-class parents and the product of a relatively low-income high school and a community college, and someone burdened with feelings of insecurity in my abilities and social position. My disbelief resulted from my understanding of my cultural, classed, and linguistic position as one who lacked the privilege of doctoral work and all that is gained by such status. But to be clear, when I was accepted and offered a fellowship, I wasn’t thinking in terms of class. I could only explain my thoughts and understandings by saying “it’s for other people.” Beyond that, I had no way of articulating what I sensed, saw, and felt, but also what I now know is a reality, as confirmed by various studies. The “Postsecondary Attainment: Differences by Socioeconomic Status” study found a smaller number of students of low socioeconomic status (SES) than those of middle SES earned a bachelor’s degree within eight years following graduation from high school (14% vs. 29%), compared to 60% of high-SES students (p. 2). These figures show it’s hard to ignore the need for further attention to the role that class plays in the lives of all individuals and the work needed to increase the number of low-SES students attaining college degrees. What I remember after my acceptance to SJU are the attempts I made to understand the new space I was occupying. The makeup of the campus, its physical materials and symbolic representations, became significant as I saw another view of what an institution is and could be. Sarah Ahmed (2012) asks important questions in relation to institutions, focusing on diversity: “I want to think specifically about institutional life: not only how institutions acquire a life of their own but also how we experience institutions or what it means to experience something as institutional” (p. 24). On my 65-mile ride home from SJU, I realized I was entering a private university that could afford to present its campus as elite and dedicate funds to aesthetic features that set it apart. During this time was I already becoming institutionalized as I quickly considered myself as “belonging” in this new space and as different from my home community? The symbolic meaning of the materials, both as a conscious choice made by the institution and for its students, affected my new

Breaking the Silence and Removing the Garb  61 view. Were students entering this private four-year university not intended to feel privileged as they passed through those gates and buildings rich with history? Why after months of avoiding that odd feeling at my low-wage jobs had that feeling crept its way back in now that I entered SJU? Could institutionalization be a major reason I again felt alienated? In my first semester, I began to feel like I’d finally made it, like I could convince myself that I wasn’t an imposter, but that was short-lived. I came to class each day in the garb I understood as appropriate for academia— tailored dress pants, suit jackets, blouses—which I modeled after my undergraduate faculty. Yet my classmates carried themselves with confidence as if academic work was in their DNA and didn’t shy away from voicing their ideas. I noticed that they didn’t dress in the ways I expected as they walked into classes in Converses and ripped jeans, further demonstrating their selfconfidence. My excitement faded to almost non-existent. I loved what I was learning, but the space felt foreign. I couldn’t even get the dress code right. While my love for composition studies was strong, the positioning I experienced throughout my academic career, both in and out of the classroom, started determining my direction. Educator and critical literacy activist Allen Luke (2010) focuses on the affect that the differences in curriculum based on social class has on students in his revisitation of the work of Jean Anyon and “the explicit ideological messages about agency, power, political economy and class position” being taught to students (p. 170). A clear message is sent to students about what and who is valued in the classroom and in society, and feelings of adequacy and inadequacy, inferiority and superiority, and power and subjection are created, modeled, and reinforced. In my SJU classes, I understood who held the power and privilege and how I could become one of those individuals. But my own feelings of inadequacy prevented me from obtaining that status and caused me to make changes to my self in an effort to attain such a status—changes I wasn’t sure I wanted to embrace and wasn’t quite able to process. Thoughts also grew about how I could withdraw from SJU and embrace a life in ragged jeans. But one day, I stayed late after a composition theory class and tears began to roll down my face. I had no idea what to say as my professor looked at me from across the table, so I blurted out, “This isn’t for me.” With a puzzled look, he asked what I meant. I replied, “I don’t belong here. I don’t know how I got in here, but I’m not like these other students. I don’t know what to do.” He reassured me that my application showed that I did belong, and I had the potential to be a successful doctoral student. Over my protests, he added that my recommendations spoke to my work ethic, passion, and dedication, and he then added something I’ll never forget: “For people like us, these spaces don’t feel normal, and so we don’t think we belong.” I was astonished. “Like ‘us’? I don’t get what you mean.” He smiled gently. “Us working-class folks. Academia is a space that many working-class students recognize as confusing and often leave as a result.

62  Katelynn DeLuca You have to ask yourself if you’re going to be one of those students that walks away.” I couldn’t believe it. Not only was I being identified as working class, but here was an academic I highly respected who also placed himself within this class category. That odd feeling didn’t just creep up; it flew out of me in tears, head shaking, and in awe. The answers to why I always felt like I was on the outside looking in finally became clear. I retraced my behavior in my undergraduate and graduate classes. Why was I always quiet? Why did I dress like I was going to a business meeting while other students seemed perfectly happy in their sneakers and sweatshirts? Why did I always hesitate to enter into rooms, offices, and buildings that looked like controlled environments? I thought back to that first moment with my mother at SJU. It hit me: Fraud? Imposter? I recognize now the reality that various factors and gatekeeping mechanisms have been created to ensure that students from specific backgrounds feel as though they don’t belong in certain academic or professional spaces. And as a workingclass individual, an instructor, and a member of society, it is my goal and responsibility “to engage [students] in discussions of culture, ideology, hegemony, and asymmetrical power relations—all that rugged theoretical terrain that sometimes seems far removed” from their lives (Gilyard, 2000, p. 267). Including students in these conversations is crucial to breaking down these barriers that surround them. Luke (2010 also explores student perceptions in his analysis of Anyon’s work, relating it to more recent educational policies such as No Child Left Behind: It is about how the enacted curriculum, in tandem with overall school ethos effectively structures and codes knowledge differently, in effect constituting different epistemic stances, dispositions and attitudes towards what will count as knowledge. The key policies of scripted, standardized pedagogy risk offering working-class, cultural and linguistic minority students precisely what Anyon presciently described: an enacted curriculum of basic skills, rule recognition and compliance. (pp. 179–180) Luke identifies class reproduction as about more than the access workingclass students have to ideological knowledge. There are different ways curriculum is coded and taught based on the values that teachers and administrators uphold. Therefore, if the overwhelming view of what counts as knowledge for certain student groups is determined to be basic writing and rule following, the students prescribed such schooling are unfamiliar with what exists beyond this. As a result, when entering spaces that convey differing values of knowledge, students struggle to find value in what they know, relate to students around them, and remain in academia. This reminds me of how the knowledge I’ve gained as a working-class individual

Breaking the Silence and Removing the Garb  63 hasn’t been valued within the classroom spaces where I’ve operated, which led me to question my value, sense of self, and whether I belong. While I’ve had many ah ha moments, through my experiences, I’ve learned that my hope as a professor, advisor, writing tutor, bus driver, and human being is that working-class individuals are not taught to become shells of who they used to be and are now supposed to be in various contexts. My goal is to increase the frequency and depth of discussions about sociocultural and socioeconomic class so that what is considered “for them” by mainstream society doesn’t limit their opportunities. I personally learned how to better understand myself, to think more deeply about the bodies in my classrooms and the body I present, to reconsider the language I use or don’t use in the classroom, what I do and don’t model, and what I share about myself. I’ve altered my courses and classrooms, but the foundational structure of English studies, which convinces scholars that our scholarship “must be organized along national or chronological lines”—i.e., the canon—continues to exist and receive support (Bizzell, 1994, p. 165). Therefore, any literature, writing, authors, or language that falls outside of the canon is often devalued. This must change. However, my realizations also caused me to recognize that some relationships in my home and community started to deteriorate as my academics progressed. I was devastated the first time my mother scoffed, “We can’t talk—you talk too much like an English major.” I had followed through on going to college and even pushed beyond the dreams we each held for me, but somehow I also created a gap between my mother and me. How could I respond? How do I respond now? Have I been removed from the place I once felt most comfortable, that crafted so much of the fabric of my identity? I’ve learned to play an academic role, but I also started giving up part of myself in the process. How might others feel pressure to do the same? Writing this, I’ve exposed myself, yet such exposure is relative to millions of students who struggle because of their class positioning and the modeling and structuring of institutions across the country. I can’t say that I’ve had some miraculous alteration in my approach to academic life, and I also can’t say it’s something that I hope does completely change. I refuse to give in to society’s desire to focus on the middle class and obscure the reality of working-class people. I know that, like many working-class academics, having a tenure-track position in academia puts me in an in-between position: I’m working class but entering a middle-class world. When I’m home, I feel like a puzzle piece that’s absorbed water—I’m the same shape and have the same edges, but I don’t quite fit the space that I once did. I’m proud to have grown in the ways that I think, analyze, and engage with the material world, but I also know it’s created a separation I am often unaware of until a friend or family member reminds me, “You’re not in school or teaching, ya know.” We must continue to push for more analysis and research of class discourses and spaces. If the hope is to recognize that all students want to learn, we must implement practices on campus

64  Katelynn DeLuca that welcome and encourage learning for all individuals so that they too can feel pride, rather than embarrassment, in the histories and experiential knowledge that make them them. From the first moment they and their families come to campus, we must do more to ensure that nobody feels such shame that they offer to wait in the car.

References Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anyon, J. (1980). Social class and the hidden curriculum of work. The Journal of Education, 162(1), 67–92. Bizzell, P. (1994). “Contact Zones” and English studies. College English, 56(2), 163–169. Cook, M. (2010). The effects of students’ perceptions of self, others, and institutions on community college transfer to a selective four-year University. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (822410964). Retrieved from http://search.proquest. com.jerome.stjohns.edu:81/docview/822410964?accountid=14068 Dews, B., & Leste Law, C. (Eds.). (1995). This fine place so far from home: Voices of academics from the working class. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Gilyard, K. (2000). Literacy, identity, imagination, flight. College Composition and Communication, 52(2), 260–272. Jensen, B. (2012). Reading classes on culture and classism in America. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Lindquist, J. (2002). A place to stand politics and persuasion in a working-class bar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Linkon, S. (1999). Teaching working class. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Lubrano, A. (2004). Limbo: Blue collar roots, White collar dreams. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Luke, A. (2010). Documenting reproduction and inequality: Revisiting Jean Anyon’s “Social class and school knowledge”. Curriculum Inquiry, 40(1), 167–182. Peckham, I. (2010). Going north thinking west: The intersections of social class, critical thinking, and politicized writing instruction. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Postsecondary attainment: Differences by socioeconomic status. (2015). Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_tva.pdf Zweig, M. (2000). The working class majority: America’s best kept secret. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.

5 Othered Moods and Muses Reflections on Rhetoric, Research, and the Mind Lauren DiPaula

My first night in the hospital, I made it through only by recognizing the fact that language can rewrite reality, rewrite it by renaming in my mind what was happening to me. I was cold and scared and every 15 minutes that whole night, the orderlies were checking on me, cracking the door open, letting the light in, watching me. I’d been scolded, stripped naked, checked for scars, told that everything I did or said was a symptom. I wondered why I had believed them when they said this would be a place to rest and recuperate—a place to go so that I would not have to be alone while I suffered. But then it clicked. I had the thought that, even though I was in a psychiatric hospital, this was an adventure—one of the scariest but most important of my life. I was a researcher, an explorer, not a patient— certainly not a mental patient. Time and again as those nine days wore on and the years after them, I would be reminded of where I had been and how being there marked me with a diagnosis. I would be overtaken by shame and self-loathing. But for the moment, that one little thought warmed me enough that I could finally find some peace. I have long wanted to say this in permanent and smudge-free ink: my dissertation is a piece of fiction. To me, it is fiction because I hid as a researcher; I did not out myself as someone who was like my participants. I couldn’t. So when others would ask why I had chosen my topic, I’d rarely give an honest answer. Instead, I would answer with reasons that saved me from being silenced by stigma. I would say that much has been written about famous writers and what they go through having depression or mania, but not much has been written about ordinary, unknown writers. I would say that very few people have looked at bipolar disorder from the composition studies side, only in terms of literary studies and creative writing. I would say that I wanted to know more about the connection between creativity and bipolar disorder—if there is one. But one time, I got too comfortable. I forgot. I let down my guard, and I blurted out the real reason: I had been diagnosed. At that moment, the moment when those words came out of my mouth, I heard what I said, and I was at once relieved and regretful. The truth was that I had wanted to spend my time learning everything about the diagnosis, especially about my own disordered brain. The truth was I wanted to know

66  Lauren DiPaula if bipolar made me the writer I thought I was. I interviewed 25 others and asked them what relationship they had with bipolar and writing and with writing with bipolar. And I then I told 21 stories of what they went through. As much as I believe that a good qualitative, naturalistic researcher knows and admits that she herself influences her findings, never did I tell what also was happening to me. I did tell my participants, however. It was, after all, sometimes how I found them. I managed to find participants at support groups, groups to which I otherwise would have been denied access if I hadn’t had my diagnosis. Group leaders were often reluctant to allow me to come until I mentioned that I, too, was one of them. I was allowed entree into participants’ lives because they knew they did not have to speak across stigma. I would not silence them. I was also an Other. I understood. They did not have to apologize for their stories. And I think part of me believed, too, that we were all working to get the outside world to understand—and that no one beyond us would otherwise listen if they really knew who was talking. Bipolar disorder is a mood disorder. The thought of how to express what this means has haunted me in the three years that have passed since my first draft of this piece. (Other thoughts should probably have taken greater prominence in my worried mind.) I could recite you the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) definition, the one that doctors read to themselves and their patients, the one that is to be followed without question, but that strategy feels hollow. To define bipolar further or to define it for myself personally is almost impossible. The words are never right, and they change all the time. I can say my body speeds up and then breaks—and my mind with it. They just do. I was sick while I was writing my dissertation. I was brand-new sick: I was diagnosed in December of 2005 and began dissertating in 2006, and even though I’d experienced it all most of my life, it wasn’t until then that it was given a name. I had just come out of the hospital, had just been diagnosed, and was going through brutal medication changes. Just before that, I was spending my graduate school years trying on the role of academic. I liked academia. I thought it fit me well. But then I was suddenly not an academic. I could not function as one. One of my favorite quotes that explains why is in Clark’s (2007) essay, “Invisible Disorder: Passing as an Academic”: “Academics like myself who struggle with mood disorders, invisible disabilities of the mind, find themselves at even more of a disadvantage in this academic culture of relentless energy, forward-focus and able-mindedness” (p. 128). With a body that falls apart like mine does, how could I even try to be an academic? In Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Price (2011) asks, “Indeed, do we even know what it means to have a disabled (unsound, ill, irrational, crazy) mind in the educational realm, a realm expressly dedicated to the life of the mind?” (p. 2). One chapter in that book, “The Essential Functions of the Position: Collegiality and Productivity,” calls into question readily accepted requirements such as

Othered Moods and Muses  67 collegiality and productivity, which are, as normally defined and expected, especially difficult for some disabled people. And if that isn’t bad enough, accessibility in the workplace for mental disabilities is still challenging. Because workplaces—academic in particular—are not designed to already include people with mental disabilities (what Disability Studies (DS) scholars talk about as Universal Design), workplaces need to accommodate difference. And accommodation means disclosure. Recently, Price, Salzer, O’Shea, and Kerschbaum (2017) conducted a 267-respondent survey on accommodation and disclosure. In their subsequent article entitled “Disclosures of Mental Disability by College and University Faculty: The Negotiation of Accommodations, Supports, and Barriers,” they reported on why faculty disclose and why they don’t, along with why and how they seek accommodation if they do seek it. The biggest idea I took from reading their study was this: because stigma reaches deep, because it is a barrier to people with mental disabilities really being part of a workplace, we need to make workplaces more accessible. They also wrote, One point does bear repeating, however: the stigma attached to mental disability seems to make many faculty reluctant to discuss their mental-health issues, with the consequence that their supervisors and colleagues may not have opportunities to be supportive. When the attitude toward mental disability is uncertain or unclear, faculty members may be more conservative with regard to sharing their mental disabilities with others. Wider attention to such issues among faculty—that is, systemic attention to making workplaces more accessible for mental disabilities—is a necessary step toward reducing the stigma associated with such disabilities. (para 42) In the meantime, disclosure is precarious (the problems with it are well theorized—see Price et al. for more), especially for those diagnosed with bipolar disorder. From the beginning of my research, wiser people (most who were “in the know” about my diagnosis) warned me against disclosure because mine was about, well, bipolar. As Thomas and Hughes (2006) wrote in their book You Don’t Have to Be Famous to Have Manic Depression, a title that is itself telling, “To be diagnosed as a manic depressive [the original term for bipolar disorder] goes to the core of who you are as a person” (p. 229). It does so in the following way, they explained: From the moment of diagnosis, the illness can explain that person’s thoughts, their moods and their emotions and from the moment they are diagnosed, just in case they become unwell again, their judgement is never to be fully trusted again. (p. 228)

68  Lauren DiPaula It now may seem that here I have erred greatly by opening myself up this way. I recognize that the consequences of my own disclosure might be devastating. Already, I’ve been denied some insurance benefits because I have disclosed. Beyond my physical wellness, though, my ability to conduct research might be questioned. My ability to walk into a classroom or a committee meeting or a conference session and be accepted and perceived as sane may have now been revoked. Part of the reason I have not yet until now spoken the truth of my diagnosis and its effect on my research is the fear of being silenced, of losing my agency as a writer, scholar, teacher, and researcher. Speaking about my diagnosis strips me of the possibility of really being listened to for what I have to say rather than for what my symptoms say. Prendergast (2001) observed, “That the mentally ill are treated as devoid of rhetoric would seem to me to be an obvious point: If people think you’re crazy, they don’t listen to you” (p. 57). Or, as Price (2011) explained it, “We speak from positions that are assumed to be subhuman, even nonhuman; and therefore, when we speak, our words go unheeded” (p. 26). Stigma threatens those of us who do want to disclose and then makes sure that if we do, no one will listen. I just wanted to learn how to speak. One does not have to look too hard to see examples of stigma, othering, and fear, even in my own field of composition studies. There is fear of mental disability, and it is pervasive. I will argue here that even when we try to offer solutions to our fear, it is critical that we don’t go about it by making the fear worse. An article I was drawn to as a researcher investigating the field’s understanding of mood disorders, “Responding When a Life Depends on It: What to Write in the Margins When Students Self-Disclose,” warrants revisiting here. Published in 1996 and quickly winning the award for best article of the year (1997) in its journal, this article is helpful in terms of how to respond to students who self-disclose, who write disturbing papers, which no doubt was the reason for its accolades. But an analysis of it demonstrates the great amount of unproductive fear that existed, and, because to my knowledge it has not been revisited, still to a certain extent exists in the field. In one passage, for instance, the author wrote that those with mental disabilities were more likely to live in the community than in institutions. She explained, “[S]ocietal pressures, federal government budget reductions for mental institutions, and advances in psychotropic drugs have hastened the release from institutions of more and more patients into the community” (Valentino, 1996, p. 276). Note that it is unclear whether these advancements in society and medicine are positive—though the context of the larger article suggests that they are not. Note, too, that those with such disabilities are still considered patients in that passage, even after they leave the hospital. One might wonder what it takes to get from patient to citizen. (A book to turn to here is From Psychiatric Patient to Citizen by Sayce (2000).)

Othered Moods and Muses  69 Another passage suggests that students with psychiatric disorders are more likely to be stressed out because they can’t handle their disorders and schoolwork at the same time, and, subsequently, “their naked emotions may emerge in their papers” (Valentino, 1996, p. 276). My interpretation is that she is suggesting that those with disabilities are not capable enough to be in school and that “naked emotions” on the page are not as equally possible of those without mental disabilities. In a move to establish the necessity of her article, the author also stated, “Teachers are in danger of getting caught in the quagmire of students’ disorders if they don’t acquire some guidelines for appropriately dealing with disclosure” (Valentino, 1996, p. 278). Though I agree and even do argue that teachers should be educated, I do not agree with quagmire. It may be that it feels much like a burden—but worse. I do agree, however, that guidelines are necessary, as they should be in working with all students. In another instance, the author writes that while these disabilities “can be controlled” by a number of means—“the scary news is that under ADA regulations, if these high-risk students do not require classroom accommodation, they do not have to disclose their illnesses to their professors” (Valentino, 1996, p. 276). Nondisclosure is in fact scary in a society that is already frightened of those who are high risk. Without the professor being properly educated and without the removal of stigma and subsequent othering, disclosure of students’ disabilities to their professors might make them too vulnerable. Again, we need education, not fear. On what appears to be (but isn’t) the flip side is fascination. Bipolar disorder, like most mental disabilities, is both stigmatized and romanticized. Hinshaw (2007), in The Mark of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change, explained that “mental illness tends to receive extremes of social perceptions, fluctuating between utter repulsion on one hand and fascination, awe, or reverence on the other” (p. 26). Bipolar disorder itself is linked, by scientists and popular writers, closely with literary genius. In composition studies, too, this has long been the case. Brand (1989) wrote, “In and out of public attention, one group constitutes the poet suicide. . . . Poets seem overrepresented on the rolls of the manicdepressives” (p. 173). The fascination with the possible connection between creative writing and bipolar disorder is pervasive, and creative writing is one place from where one might speak. It seems to be OK to be a poet and mad at the same time. Although the public is hungry for stories about madness and art, fascination is just as complicated as fear. There is something insidious about believing if someone suffers for her art, everything is worthwhile in the end. However, we may need fascination to counteract stigma. In her memoir Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, renown researcher and psychologist Jamison (1993) pointed out that, if society doesn’t see a productive aspect to such a horrible illness, medicine, and genetic engineering will work toward its extinction and that

70  Lauren DiPaula of those with it (p. 257). Later, in their seminal 2007 work, Goodwin and Jamison (2007) wrote, [G]enetic research has progressed to the point that ethical issues are now arising about prenatal screening and selective abortion, as well as the identification and treatment of individuals at high risk for developing bipolar disorder. It becomes particularly important under these circumstances to have at least some broad notion of the possible benefits, as well as catastrophic outcomes, of bipolar disorder not only for potential parents and the unborn child, but for society at large. (p. 405) This is particularly pertinent now with the current public obsession on DNA testing. To some extent, one might assert that our fascination with creativity and bipolar guards against possible dystopias, regardless of whether the connection is there. As a researcher, I was not immune to stigmatizing or romanticizing my participants. When doing so, I found it hard to listen beyond my own assumptions. I found it hard to take them seriously. I had to purposely and diligently fight off my own judgments of others whom I could not admit were like me. For example, one of my participants, whose data I dropped from the study, did and felt things so extreme that I myself thought of her as crazy, as someone not to listen to, as someone not like me. This was a low moment for me—one that I often reflect on. To some people (and to myself early on), bipolar is a moral or psychological weakness and/or unwillingness and inability to adequately cope with life’s troubles—troubles that other, stronger, people can trudge through successfully. (For more on stigma and perceptions of mental disabilities, see Hinshaw.) Because I had not dealt with those faulty beliefs and that shame, everything in my dissertation began to add up to a message I subconsciously needed to prove to others and especially myself: that this disorder was not my fault, and I was not weak. That is, while writing my dissertation, I set out to prove, by asking questions of the research on bipolar and of the participants in my study, that beyond being a biochemical medical disorder (thus it was not my fault), bipolar and its symptoms came upon its sufferers regardless of life situations (thus it was not my fault) and affected me cognitively (again, not my fault) in terms of how I wrote as well as why I wrote. Meanwhile, I felt pressure from others I had met through in my research, especially those who considered themselves psychiatric survivors and those who considered themselves part of the Mad Pride movement. Mad Pride is a movement that works for human rights for those with mental disabilities. One of its earliest leaders, Thomas Szasz, and no doubt others still today, believed that “ ‘mental illness’ is not objectively observable; it is a myth” (Lewis, 2013, p. 117). The movement has come to evolve into standing for those suffering from mental or emotional crises—referring to themselves as

Othered Moods and Muses  71 “consumer/survivor/ex-patients” or “c/s/x,” with consumers (those I identified the most with) being those who think of themselves as the determiner of their own treatment. In “A Mad Fight: Psychiatry and Disability Activism,” Lewis (2013) wrote that “many in Mad Pride (like many in the Deaf community) express discomfort with the ‘disability’ label. They do not see their mental difference as a disability, but rather as a valued capacity” (p. 114). Learning about Mad Pride and its rhetoric of ability made me begin to feel as if I had done something wrong in my research. If mental illness is a myth, one controlled by those who stand to benefit from it, I did not know where that left me and my medical narrative. That is, I had to see my disability as a medical illness in order to prove my point to my most demanding audience: me. Soon I learned that, by adopting the medical model and taking a detached yet “normal” researcher’s stance, I appeared to be guilty of a grave academic sin. Perhaps the most scathing critique of my work came from a scholar who has most likely not even seen it. Price (2011) wrote, When researchers (most often teachers) do give extended attention to neuroatypical or mentally disabled subjects (most often students), these students are usually treated as “Other,” that is, as special cases who should be written about—even diagnosed—by scholars writing from a “normal perspective.” Such studies often adhere, either tacitly or implicitly, to a medical model of disability that assumes doctors and psychiatrists are benign authorities and that diagnosis is a deterministic tool offering predictable insights into students’ ways of composing. (p. 47) To understand what I was doing, one must understand the difference between a medical and social model of disability—a concept at the core of DS. I had taken only a cursory glance at DS, inasmuch as I dismissed it out of hand because I misunderstood it. I did not want to be called disabled; I wanted to be considered abled. But every time I tried to publish my results, I was met with the question, why didn’t you speak from a DS standpoint? The social model of disability locates the disability in the barriers erected by society, not in the person herself. Linton (1998), in her seminal text Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, wrote that although there are benefits to the medical model, “the medicalization of disability casts human variation as deviance from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit, and, significantly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy” (Ch. 2). Whether or not I have a mental illness does not matter; what matters is how I will now situate myself in a culture that does not deem mental disabilities acceptable; rather, they are scary, abhorrent things to be eradicated. A medical model that I had adopted did not allow for a rewriting of the cultural script. A medical model did not see disability as a social

72  Lauren DiPaula construct and the discursive moves of medical professionals as rhetorical. “It is crucial to understand psychiatric discourse as a rhetorical endeavor,” wrote Price (2011), “not least because this discourse often claims to operate in ways that transcend rhetorical concerns such as context and audience” (p. 33). She includes in that psychiatric discourse the DSM, which, again, labeled and defined me—and my participants—as a diagnosis. I learned that even the connection between mental disability and creativity is a rhetorical endeavor. In a Disability Studies Quarterly article, Pryal (2011a), “The Creativity Mystique”) examined what she calls the creativity mystique as a cultural and rhetorical phenomenon. What DS taught me was that these rhetorics of ability and disability and fear and fascination are discourses that construct the way we think about mental disabilities. I needed to reconstruct the discourse in order to do what I wanted most: to write past stigma. In this way, although my dissertation was written without knowledge of DS, something was salvageable. I had asked the participants in my study how they wrote past stigma. I had asked, how do you make yourself heard? And they had told me they used fiction so as to get into people’s heads and explain things. That they wrote anonymously so that they didn’t have to deal with the risks of disclosure. When they wrote about their own lives, they wrote with deeper descriptions and more reflection so that they could make themselves understood. But would they be? How can we reach an audience who does not listen? Price wrote, “Rhetoric is not simply the words we speak or write or sign, nor is it simply what we look like or sound like. It is who we are, and beyond that, it is who we are allowed to be [emphasis added]” (p. 27). Who we allow others to be depends greatly on our own fear. The question continues: if it is a matter of who we are allowed to be, how can we with mental disabilities work to persuade readers to listen to us? There is sharing one’s story (which, by the way, requires a frightening disclosure). In fact, one mental illness advocacy organization I was part of in the early days of my diagnosis considered advocacy the final step in recovery, and advocacy for them was telling one’s story. One of the Mad Pride movement’s websites, mindfreedom.org, is full of stories of people who have survived. The National Alliance on Mental Illness solicits stories on its own website. Beyond these stories, there is also the more formal memoir form. To adequately discuss pathography (illness stories) and autopathography in this short space would be impossible, but I will give one example. In an essay examining mood memoirs, Pryal (2011b, “Genre”) analyzed strategies memoirists who write specifically about mood disorders use to overcome the stigma that blocks them from being heard. Or, in her words, she investigated “tactics for generating ethos in the face of the stigma of mental illness” (“Genre,” p. 480). She argued, “mood memoirs can be read as narrative-based responses to rhetorical exclusion suffered by the psychiatrically disabled” (“Genre,” p. 480). The tactics used in these responses

Othered Moods and Muses  73 already exist in other narratives that are available to us culturally. They involve memoirists creating ethos by declaring a selfless purpose for writing the memoir in an apologia; by describing the moment of awakening to an illness; by speaking back to bad doctors; and by laying claim to others with mood disorders in order to normalize a diagnosis. (“Genre,” p. 499) Similarly, Price discussed other strategies that those with mental disabilities have that subvert the master script and allow those with mental disabilities to challenge their readers and get their attention. Price described what she calls “counter-diagnostic strategies” (p. 177). “Following Prendergast . . . I believe that further study of autobiographical writings by people with mental disabilities will refigure key assumptions of autobiographical discourse, including rationality, coherence, truth, and independence” (p. 178). Moreover, “in counter-diagnosis, the autobiographical narrator uses language (here, pronouns), to subvert the diagnostic urge to ‘explain’ an irrational mind” (p. 179). She explains some of these strategies. An example is creative incoherence, which in her example she explains as “while the conventional I of autobiography is unified, and tends to progress through a linear narrative, the I’s of these narratives are strategically disorganized and incoherent” (p. 180). As I was pondering how to write past stigma, I came upon an anthology of women’s rhetorics. There, Ritchie and Ronald (2001) asserted, Throughout the years covered in this anthology . . . women must repeatedly argue for the right to speak in public at all. Over and over again, they must claim the right to name themselves rather than to be named. . . . The act of invention for women, then, begins in a different place from Aristotle’s conception of invention: women must first invent a way to speak in the context of being silenced and rendered invisible as persons. (p. xvii) What really struck me, though, was an article written by Annas (1985) in which she says of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf’s relation to her audience is complex and subversive. Built into the very structure of Woolf’s sentences is a combative stance in regard to the shadowy but real male audience which stands behind her real but shadowy audience of women. “But,” she begins her essay, acknowledging at the outset that she will be speaking in part to people who are not predisposed to agree with her or even understand her. (p. 365)

74  Lauren DiPaula This, too, is true of those with mental disabilities, so I see many parallels. I recently taught a course in composition studies in which we often talked about silencing the Other. As we discussed a feminist essay that used an intimate and personal voice to describe the writer’s experiences of being silenced and needing to challenge the patriarchy, some female students expressed a strong distaste for what they considered the essay’s “whiny” tone. Borrowing from many other scholars, I asked them, are we not largely (though not always) socially constructed to think of such essays as whiny? This is the way such voices are silenced, consciously or subconsciously. It is how we avoid listening or letting it affect us—or letting it disturb us. I then asked them this directly: How do you write to an audience that silences you? One student offered advice that was more complicated than anyone would admit: be honest. Write from the heart. Honesty and writing from the heart may seem naive. It may seem like I’m advocating disclosure, which I cannot, because it is still a risk. Risk or not, though, I continue to have a nagging yet reckless need to be honest. I now want to be heard not in the least because—no, more importantly because—my position itself is dangerous. In my dissertation, I tried to write past stigma by hiding my own identity and letting my research speak for itself. But I have disclosed here; I have recorded my narrative. I have pondered the stances from which I might exist and be heard. How do we write past what we are allowed to be and what we allow ourselves to be? Perhaps we see it as a rhetorical endeavor. Perhaps we can envision an audience of those who are stigmatized as well as those who stigmatize as accepting. And maybe that audience includes us, but us free of shame. Not long ago, I planned a trip to Denver to discuss at a conference how I write past stigma. I was overcome with the fear that I would leave but not arrive at my destination as soon as I booked my flight. With reflection and a friend’s insight, I realized it was my words, my message, that I feared might never arrive. There’s no safe place for them to fall and no guarantee my audience will listen to me. But I have this need to say them anyway, to be honest and speak from the heart.

References American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing. Annas, P. J. (1985). Style as politics: A feminist approach to teaching writing. College English, 47(4), 360–371. Brand, A. G. (1989). The psychology of writing: The affective experience. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Clark, H. (2007). Invisible disorder: Passing as an academic. In K. R. Myers (Ed.), Illness in the academy: A collection of pathographies by academics (pp. 123–130). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Othered Moods and Muses  75 Goodwin, F. K., & Jamison, K. R. (2007). Manic-depressive illness: Bipolar disorders and recurrent depression. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hinshaw, S. P. (2007). The mark of shame: Stigma of mental illness and an agenda for change. New York, NY: Oxford University Press [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Jamison, K. R. (1993). Touched with fire: Manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament. New York, NY: Free Press Paperback. Lewis, B. (2013). A mad fight: Psychiatry and disability activism. In L. J. Davis (Ed.), The disability studies reader (4th ed., pp. 447–450). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Linton, S. (1998). Claiming disability: Knowledge and identity. New York, NY: New York University Press. [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Mindfreedom: Win human rights in the mental health system! (2016). Retrieved from http://mindfreedom.org/ NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness. Retrieved from www.nami.org/# Prendergast, C. (2001). On the rhetorics of mental disability. In J. C. Wilson & C. Lewiecki-Wilson (Eds.), Embodied rhetorics: Disability in language and culture. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Price, M. (2011). Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Price, M., Salzer, M. S., O’Shea, A., & Kerschbaum, S. L. (2017). Disclosure of mental disability by college and university faculty: The negotiation of accommodations, supports, and barriers. Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(2). Retrieved from http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5487/4653 Pryal, K. R. G. (2011a). The creativity mystique and the rhetoric of mood disorders. Disability Studies Quarterly, 31(3). Retrieved from http://dsq-sds.org/article/ view/1671/1600 Pryal, K. R. G. (2011b). The genre of the mood memoir and the ethos of psychiatric disability. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40(5), 479–501. doi:10.1080/02773945.2 010.516304 Ritchie, J., & Ronald, K. (Eds.). (2001). Available means: An anthology of women’s rhetorics. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Sayce, L. (2000). From psychiatric patient to citizen: Overcoming discrimination and social exclusion. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Thomas, J., & Hughes, T. (2006). You don’t have to be famous to have manic depression: The insider’s guide to mental health. London: Penguin Books. Valentino, M. J. (1996). Responding when a life depends on it: What to write in the margins when students self-disclose. TETYC, 23(4), 274–283.

6 Over It/Not Over It/Getting Over It Checking White Male Privilege in the Midst of Otherness Keith Dorwick I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds . . . You say my name is ambivalence? [. . .] Not so. Only your labels split me. —Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Prieta”

People who live in the midst of intersectionality acknowledge or are aware of some identities or aspects of their identity that are apparently synchronous with each other and others that are in seeming conflict. Until recently, I didn’t see the various aspects of my own identity as anything but complementary; they always appeared to me as simply part of the complex intersectionality that, known or unknown, comprise any individual in a complex historical period. Other folk around me who identify more strongly as mainstream resist my multiple intersectionalities, such as refusing to acknowledge or accept my identity as a transgender person merely because I visibly present as male, with a beard, traditional male clothing and male pronouns (so far at least), though I am genderqueer. Like Anzaldúa in the epigraph, I feel whole in the midst of my many selves (to quote Walt Whitman, another queer who multiplied identities, “I contain multitudes”) and what pain I have from my intersectionality comes directly from the incessant demands of American mainstream culture to present and allow one identity per category, to set up binaries, and then to require—at great social cost to those who dare to defy binaries—that folks in all instances must choose one or another but never both/all of the above/either/and/not/sometimes/maybe/maybe not/subject to change/under construction/under review/provisional/fundamental. One term not on the list is fixed. Identity is never fixed and cannot be so because binaries will always collapse if you push hard enough. Multiplicity can and does lead to the charge of “ambivalence” that Anzaldúa rightly rejected; as she noted, intersectionality is the place where folks actually live. And yet the

Over It/Not Over It/Getting Over It  77 idea of multiple selves merely as performance per Goffman’s masks won’t do either. As Phil Manning (1991) noted, Goffman’s initial formulation in The Presentation of Self doesn’t allow a negative case: according to it, we are acting all the time. Goffman wrote that ‘all the activity of a given participant’ is an example of social acting (1959, p. 26; emphasis added, quoted Manning, 1991, p. 81) Though there is obviously both an element of performance and something that may be more fundamental and lasting in the social construction of our daily selves—in the article quoted earlier, Manning goes on to argue that Goffman pulled back from “acting all the time” to a more nuanced turn away from mere performance in his second edition of Presentation of the Self—there is also a deep reality to the multiple identities I faced as a teen: the multiple identities of gay/conservative Christian tormented me all through high school and my first, failed attempt at going to a Lutheran college in the western suburbs. I just couldn’t be both gay and dancing and sometimes (though rarely) drugging my way through the Chicago gay community of the ’90s and then on Sundays and Wednesday being the very good boy who went to Eucharist and sang in the chapel choir. As I said over and over again in those days, “This can’t go on.” And it didn’t only when I realized I could be both/and, and that I didn’t have to be in agreement with what others attempted to demand of me, whether in the church or the LGBTQ+ community. Once I came to this understanding, resistance that others offered didn’t and couldn’t threaten me—I might be offended or amused or angered (depending on the severity of the resistance and its source), but never threatened. My early scholarship, often derided by others as “me-search” but in fact a fusion of my own autobiographical, if constructed, self and the research then published on identity politics, gender, and sexuality, was nothing if not confident in being able to look back at my own self and accept who I was—a peace that included all understanding until a few years ago when a non-problematic male status stopped being a place in which I could live. I finally got bored writing about my own self as research subject and turned to other topics. I was over it. In short, and I do mean to shout here, I WROTE ABOUT ALL THIS STUFF IN THE ’90s, AND I THOUGHT I WAS OVER IT. Recently, however, I have realized I am not over it at all and that there is much work to be done, both for and with myself, but also for and with the larger world. Hence, in part, my involvement in this edited collection. I write again about myself because I realized why I needed to revisit the subject of my early work. Though I am outsided in all sorts of ways to various other people, and though I am quite comfy in being many selves, I just now am dealing—even as I write and no doubt for years to come—with the fact that my sense of comfort and ease comes via my white and male privilege, which outstrips all other considerations, aided by the fact that many of my particular outsidings are invisible often to me and usually to others living within white male able-bodied, middle-class privilege.

78  Keith Dorwick To my continued surprise, folks outside my local LGBT community don’t often see me as gay and will even tell me to my face that I’m wrong—an occurrence that is even more true when I disclose that I identify as bi (not an uncommon experience for bisexual folks).1 If they’re particularly wellmeaning and wish to consider themselves quite au courant and daring for doing so, insider mainstreamers will attempt to relegate me (let them try!) to gay, just gay. Those who identify as conservative more often want to force me to identify as straight and only straight. I resist this in all sorts of ways. My then partner and now husband and I once visited a church in Stratford Ontario, a conservative Lutheran congregation that insisted upon no women clergy, no open queers (sorry, not our kind), inerrant and literal reading of Scripture, and seven days of Creation, no more, no less, but a parish that was part of my home Christian tradition. Upon our arrival, the greeter looked us over in great confusion and said, “Where are your womenfolk?,” causing me to draw myself up and say, “We are our womenfolk,” a claim so outrageous in that context that the greeter walked away without another word. We walked into the sanctuary; we might have left, but that would have been authorizing their attempt at sexual normalizing. Let them try. But all this sense of my own strength, my own ability to rewrite society’s rules, my freedom to transgress—forgive me, but this revelation is very recent to me, though no news to women and people of color—is all based on my white and apparent male identity. Like all white folks in America, whether we know it or not, I move through the world protected by the immense, invisible shield of white privilege, without my ever needing to realize it is there. I know from conversations with other folks who live in various other intersectionalities and from my reading that the immense, invisible shield of which I just wrote is white supremacy at work. Recently, I was saying hello to the two Black women who lived next door and talking to them about our having some trees cut on our property and apologizing for the noise. Things were going swimmingly until I asked, “Oh, do you rent?” The answer to that question didn’t matter and didn’t need to be asked. I was apologizing for the noise, not asking for permission. But the moment I asked that question, in what I like to think of as innocence but was merely privilege speaking, they looked uncomfortable, started edging toward their door, and started calling me “sir.” White privilege had had its usual effect of shutting down the other and regulating it into submission. I tried to save the day and felt horrible about the position I’d put my neighbors in, but the damage was, at least for the moment, done. Well-meaning but wrong-headed white folks in America love to talk about being postracial or postfeminist or so on, arguing from their (our) privilege that we’re beyond all that. However, as Anna Carastathis has noted, intersectionality faces a peculiar historical dilemma. On the one hand, the Anglo- American political mainstream declares that we find ourselves

Over It/Not Over It/Getting Over It  79 in a “postracial,” “post-feminist,” “postcolonial” era; identity-based claims are greeted with suspicion and groups seeking redress of historical injustice face public cynicism and fatigue. [Critical] theories reveal not only that inequalities have not been attenuated, hierarchies have not been dismantled, and identities have not been dissipated into universal humanity; [ . . . as] global institutions adaptively reconfigure themselves in response to socially transformative movements, oppressive power relations have become increasingly mystified, inequalities seemingly more intractable, and institutions seemingly more difficult to transform. (2016, p. 2) These claims that Carastathis rightly critiques can only be made by those who are moving within various sets of privileges that remain in place at all times and in all situations that outrank those who do not hold such privilege(s) in spite of white and male accusations of favoritism or, arrogantly, attempts to describe people of color, the disabled, queers of all kinds, and women as discriminating against those who, in fact, hold much of the power in today’s culture. White supremacy is the source of my sense of safety at almost all times. Living with a general sense that one is safe and may proceed through life without danger is a reality that is not present or available to most nonwhite or non-male folks. I don’t have to think about the tragic turn a traffic stop can take, or wonder if police officers will allow me to proceed without shooting me on the presumption that I am, merely because of color, a threat to those around me. The missed stop sign, the five miles over the speed limit, the burned-out tail light have contributed to the deaths of too many Black folks who get described as “in the wrong place” as a justification for their murders—or executions. In fact, people of color and queers and women (but especially people of color) were merely doing their shopping, visiting family, going to work, and going to church: these are all activities that I can do at any time without wondering what might occur. Whether one is or is not a law-abiding citizen is irrelevant here. Even individuals involved in criminal activities deserve constitutionally protected due process and equal treatment under the law. I only face the dangers of daily life if I’m correctly read as a sexual minority. Walking through a park at night could put me at risk for accusations of cruising for sex and seeking out hustlers, as happened once in my home city. I skirted a park that was known as a gay haunt just after sunset only because it was the shortest route home from my office after a long day. I almost got arrested, just for walking home. At no point was I worried about being shot, though the officer’s animosity toward me merely for being on the outer sidewalk of a park that runs right next to my campus was intense enough that I might have been at risk for some kind of violence if I had chosen to run or even walk away.

80  Keith Dorwick Thus though I am at some risk for fag-bashing, none of the dangers of daily life faced by Black folk all the time occur to me in the Deep South; it helps that my area of the Deep South for someone like me who usually appears straight and white is surprisingly liberal, if very pro-Trump, because of the French Catholicism that is so prevalent in Louisiana. Moreover, this sense of danger was simply not present during my previous life in Chicago as a graduate student and before that as a worker in the Chicago banking community. I went about at all hours and to all places with only the occasional worry about what might happen if I did. These privileges (which include but are not limited to the fact that I am a full professor in the largest department in the largest college of my university) mean, too, that I can resist attempts to separate me from the various local identities that form and inform life in Southern Louisiana. When I almost got arrested, I simply treated the police officer as if he were some hapless student who had missed his first three weeks of class by not realizing it was entirely online2 and even feeling bold enough to threaten the officer and the local police department with a lawsuit for false arrest. His attempt to frighten me ended up with him on the defense and me walking home, though he did follow me all the way to my house, the red and blue lights on his police car blazing, until I opened my door and went inside. Other cultural inversions and resistances occur: one member of a choir in which I sing used to insist on talking to me in French, though she knows full well I don’t speak anything beyond bon jour—a linguistic choice that I read as a form of harassment: an attempt to embarrass me and mark me as forever an outsider. Other folks have told that I “really ought to learn French,” including some who don’t themselves speak French and in spite of the fact that at my age second language acquisition is almost impossible. But, again, my sense of privilege meant that I felt comfortable with responding to her with a greeting in German (Wie geht’s?). I took German in high school, undergraduate studies, and, finally, in graduate school in order to read documents from the Lutheran Reformation, then an area of research for me. The particular diction I used was by far the most informal and casual, to the point of being rude. If I’d wanted to be polite and formal, I would have said “Wie geht es Ihnen?” In other words, I was using my education as a club against someone merely saying “good morning.” My diction was an act of hostility, one that I knew I could get away with. These stories aren’t just amusing moments from the all too Gothic South. They are nothing less than attacks and counter-attacks as my local community struggles to deal with my multifaceted identities. This immense sense of privilege was and is complicated by my sense of social justice. I both marched for hunger and in gay pride parades as a teenager. The current resistance by students at Parkland High School following yet another school shooting, which occurred last week as I write this, speaks deeply to me and reminds me of my younger take-no-prisoners persona. Though the media has generally treated the student activism at Parkland as

Over It/Not Over It/Getting Over It  81 a new thing, Lornet Turnbull (2018) makes the connections between this moment and the larger history of teen activism clear: Since the Feb. 14 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, the national spotlight has been on the courageous student survivors who have been too outraged to be cast only as victims of tragedy. Rather, they have been activated, calling out lawmakers and demanding gun reforms. This is not new. From civil rights to Standing Rock, high school students, many not yet old enough to vote, have raised their voices and become formidable allies to effect change. Turnbull further notes that many of the earlier young activists were people of color: There are many examples throughout the civil rights era of brave actions by high school students. While most people know the name Rosa Parks, few might know about Claudette Colvin, who in 1955 was just 15 when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama—nine months before Parks was arrested for the same offense. Turnbull then adds that [y]ears earlier, Barbara Johns led a walkout at the all-Black Robert Russa Moton High School in Virginia to protest racial injustice there. She contacted the NAACP, which sued on her behalf, and her case became one of five involved in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling. More recently, one of the largest Native resistance efforts in modern U.S. history, the uprising at Standing Rock had its beginnings in actions by an indigenous youth group called the One Mind Youth Movement. As I grew older, I continued to be concerned with social justice issues in my university teaching: I wondered if some of the [. . .] work I did (and do) could be of any interest to students struggling with a multitude of real-world issues: financial aid and student loans. multiple part-time jobs, and parents who had not been to college. Though proud of their children. they had no idea how to support [them] as they entered school. I taught a number of students with child-care concerns. even though they were first-year university students, only seventeen and eighteen years old and just out of high school. Students told me about sexual abuse and other forms of violence from uncles. mothers. fathers. cousins, and older brothers.

82  Keith Dorwick One gay student had fallen in love, decided he was ready for sex with his partner, and became HIV positive on his very first act of sexual intercourse one month into his studies at my university: his partner knew, but had failed to inform him. My student was seventeen at the time. Privilege meant that I could present myself as normative to my students and to myself. I never worried much about money growing up, though I now realize that my parents did. After I moved out, I always had a place to live, though one not necessarily with electricity, heat, or phone because I was months and months behind on my rent after being fired for being openly gay. Once I entered graduate school and moved in with my husband (an attorney), problems like those my students faced were no longer of my world. The wide range of issues they faced (and I appropriated in my writing as a member of white society who is and was fairly well off) were just another entry on my end-of-the-year workload documents and no longer something that I viewed as part of my own past. At this stage of my growth, I would not write about students, but with them, as coauthors. The main exception to my social invisibility was and is my HIV, which over the past 30 years has marked my body in multitudinous ways— outward signs visible to all even where I live in the Deep South. Jokes from hostile folks who use so-called humor as an attack included calling me Skeletor, or a zombie, or telling me that they thought I was dead, or asking how far I was along and was I expecting twins? Actually, those particular examples are indeed what I go through all the time, but in fact, they came from one gay man who called me all that until getting in a car accident that meant a near total loss of mobility. After that, he wanted to be friends, though he has never bothered to apologize for years of harassment. Well, let him try, though I understand that his newly acquired disability makes mine more understandable to him. And perhaps I should forgive him, apology or no, since, in the same essay I quoted earlier, I referenced myself in extremely similar terms: My body began to shift its weight around in ways we now know to be characteristic of the use of protease inhibitors [a then revolutionary treatment for HIV], which reduces the amount of virus in the blood to amazingly low levels, but shifts fat distribution in the body in disfiguring ways. Of course, it was good that my viral load was undetectable, but my quality of life began to suffer as it never had before. Even though I was working out three times a week, my belly began to bloat, and I lost most of the musculature of my arms and legs. Except for that obscene belly, I began to get thinner and thinner. and my veins, especially on my arms, began to become more and more raised and prominent. Like many [folks] on protease inhibitors, I lost much of the facial fat younger people possess, the cause of the characteristic gauntness of people living with HIV. I seemingly aged overnight, and although

Over It/Not Over It/Getting Over It  83 I’d been coping well with other visible signs of aging, such as graying hair, the rapid changes caused by protease inhibitors made me a little bit crazy [a term I would no longer use given its ableist bias]. I would cry in the bathroom on the floor above my office for hours on end and concoct schemes to remove the protruding veins by excising them with a paring knife. I felt like some poor creature from a horror movie, one of the undead in those cheap English Dracula movies with Christopher Lee. I saw myself as a walking skeleton. (Dorwick, 2006) The changes I saw in myself then and the changes other folks see now are in sharp contrast to my age (60), my race (white, oh so white), and my seemingly male persona. The invisibility of my white privilege to myself but decidedly not to those who are even more outsided than I am is compounded by the fact that I have been brought up as white and male, and those habits have shaped me. (These were central ideas to liberation efforts of the ’90s, of course.) None of this was apparent to me when I wrote my essays about my own multiple identities—as I styled them then—in which I was othered in many ways but would have and did present myself as not racist and not sexist, as working class and therefore sympathetic to factory workers; after all, my dad was a factory worker. I didn’t realize until years after the fact how hard my parents had worked to make sure that we wouldn’t end up in a similar position. I would like to claim I didn’t know. But I did really. Or at least I should have, after watching my parents live separated lives, not because of an unhappy marriage but because they worked different shifts: my mother during the day as a nurse, my father as a tool-and-die maker on nights because the money was better. I didn’t realize how hard that was until my husband and I made a similar choice when I took a good job in Louisiana, and he kept his very good job in Chicago: we were in a distance relationship for 15 years, more than the 13 years we’d been together, before his retirement and move to Louisiana—a relationship only made possible by our collective wealth that allowed us to travel and see each other every two or three weeks. Throughout this, I may have been othered, I thought, but at least I hadn’t been damaged by the pernicious racism and sexism and ableism all around me. I thought I was free of all that, that I was over it, that growing up in the western suburbs of Chicago meant that I didn’t see race, even though people around my neighborhood might stumble over the N-word and substitute dark or ghetto or shady and think that made it better, which it certainly did not. After all, I said to myself, I would never use any of those terms. Usually, recovering a past self as autobiography, as here, is a tricky business: our present selves want desperately to both understand and forgive our past selves. At least one form of autobiography is an attempt to present a positive self-portrayal. We want our past selves to look their very best,

84  Keith Dorwick to put on their company dress, to use the right fork. But unlike most folks, though, my interest in my multiple selves and my sense of being very othered was documented in the shape of essays I published early in my career when dealing with societal issues and cultural forces. I’m stuck with my own past selves as represented in those early essays. Their presence means I critique my own past self by reading my own texts—the concrete texts as seen in print—as evidence as to how I thought back then and, hopefully, see some— though not enough—progress since. This was the key, I thought back then: though white, I am often othered by others and am othered as I go through the world. I was gay, I thought, and there’s the difference. I was working class and therefore not able to shift codes and catch the nuances of a given situation as can many of my colleagues, which gave me a sense of ideological purity. I am from a workingclass background, with a mother who was a RN for most of her life and did not have any postsecondary degrees until her retirement and work as an ordained Lutheran minister and a father who was a tool-and-die maker for much of his life before retirement. But even in the face of all this, I can quiet a student with a single chilling glance by use of my white, perceived male privilege and my age—a detriment for those who present as female, whether older or younger. I also remain an outsider in an academy which, for the most part, is either secular or associated with evangelical Christianity. As a progressive Christian, I’m not always able to find a balance between intellectual labor and a belief in a world full of mystery and miracle. Being both outside and inside makes me feel decidedly off center: thoroughly queer, absolutely working class, devotedly Christian but white and seemingly male. I now have to face the hard work of dealing with my own racism and other -isms, while continuing to live in a thoroughly prejudicial society. What I now know is that it’s not enough. I’m not over it, by which I mean white, male, able-bodied, and economic privilege. I will fight for other outsiders by using the power I have because of privilege, but I have far to go before the work I have started will be anywhere near done. Finally, I am ironically aware that my use of the epigraph from Gloria Anzaldúa I cited at the start of the essay is a lie, an appropriation of one of the key texts by a feminist scholar and author of color. My whiteness trumps my intersectionality every day and in most encounters. I hope to improve my ability to pierce through the veils of power that have been so invisible to me in the past. I will no doubt stumble. But let me try; let me try.

Notes 1 This is hardly a new issue for bisexuals. In the November 1995 issue of Off Our Backs, Megary Sigler published the following letter: Dear Womyn of “Off Our Backs,” I am a student at UMCP and I discovered your wonderful news journal in the MD Co-op. Your articles are timely and informative. However, there is one group of womyn who I feel are almost always invisible in media and

Over It/Not Over It/Getting Over It  85 your journal is no exception. Nowhere have I read anything about bisexual womyn in your paper. We suffer the same abuses and discrimination as lesbians. We (at least those of us who are true to ourselves) do not “pass” for straight. We are just as hurt by homophobia and sexism. One ad in the paper says “lesbians only.” We’re not accepted by straights or gays, it seems. Please consider our point-of-view. With Love, Megary Sigler Baltimore, MD (1995, p. 21) 2 A true story and not the only time it has occurred. I now read this seemingly selfdestructive move as an attempt by a student to cope with getting an education and simply not knowing how online courses operate or even that they exist. After three weeks, the student reached out to me, not me to him. As a working-class scholar, I remember—when I bother to—how terrifying talking to faculty can be.

References Anzaldúa, G. (1981). La Prieta. Retrieved March 3, 2018, from https://rachelmichellelee.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/la-prieta.pdf Carastathis, A. (2016). Intersectionality: Origins, contestations, horizons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Dorwick, K. (2006). From darkness to light: Struggling with the tenure-track. In J. A. Inman & B. L. Hewett (Eds.), Technology and English studies: Innovative professional paths (pp. 91–103). Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Manning, P. (1991). Drama as life: The significance of Goffman’s changing use of the theatrical metaphor. Sociological Theory, 9(1), 70–86. doi:10.2307/201874 Sigler, M. (1995). [Letter to the Editor.] Off Our Backs, 25(10), 21–21. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/20835320 Turnbull, L. (2018). High school students demanding gun reform join rich history of teen resistance. Yes Magazine. Retrieved from www.yesmagazine.org/peoplepower/high-school-students-demanding-gun-reform-join-rich-history-of-teenresistance-20180223

7 The Racialised Knowledge Economy Fataneh Farahani and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert

Introduction The focus of this article is to challenge and problematise how racialising and othering processes construct knowledge production and knowing subjects in the academic institutions. We draw on our conversations, writings, and experiences within the Swedish academy as “non-Swedes” (for discussion on construction of Swedishness, see Mattsson, 2005) and through our specific geo-political positionalities (Farahani, 2010, 2015; Koobak & ThaparBjörkert, 2012). Thapar-Björkert’s post-colonial positionality was shaped through the legacy of her parents’ anti-colonial activism. The spatialcolonial contexts of academic institutions in the United Kingdom, together with the nationalist biographical trajectories that she shared with her parents in India, gave postcoloniality an emotional and political salience. She developed strong perceptions of “white privilege” encompassed within what Chicano scholars refer to as “academic colonialism” (see Reyes & Halcon, 1988). Farahani was raised in a traditional working-class family in a specific political-historical Iranian setting and carried a suitcase filled with failed dreams of a miscarried revolution (1979 Iranian revolution), a pointless, long war between Iran and Iraq (1980–1988), and several experiences of exile. Her entrance to Western academia as a “mature” and “different” student is characterised by firsthand experience of the variety of (post) colonial challenges of “adjustment” to different societies and academic milieus. We consider our positions and positionings as a ‘space for theorising” (hooks, 1989) and our theorising as a “location of healing” (hooks, 2005: 36. hooks, 1994) to articulate multilayered subject positions which locate us differently in different contexts. Emphasising the empirical significance of intersectionality for transformative knowledge production, we aim to distance ourselves from a deployment of “ornamental intersectionality” which as Bilge (2013) argues is an active disarticulation of radical politics of social justice and undermines intersectionality’s credibility as “an analytical and political tool elaborated by less powerful social actors facing multiple minoritizations” (see Bilge, 2013, p. 410). By employing our personal—yet subjective and mediated—experiences, we pay particular attention to how we can use (our)

The Racialised Knowledge Economy  87 experience as an analytical source. However, we want to avoid offering our experiences an exclusive privilege of definition since it might strengthen an epistemological standpoint that those who have “experience” know better and have somehow access to genuine knowledge, regardless of their intersecting subject positions, political ideologies and positionalities in relation to power and powerlessness. On the other hand, disregarding and disbelieving people’s lived experiences has always been a powerful approach to discredit the political views, writings, or artistic expressions of women and racialised and sexualised minorities. In doing so, the experience of unmarked privilege (white—male middleclass—privilege) becomes the only dominant singular story. In addition, by merely placing accounts of people of colour and women in the category of “experiential,” we neglect their theoretical contributions. As a result, white scholars are often seen as the only ones most equipped for theorising and producing knowledge and in a schema which constructs a disembodied theorist as the legitimate academic subject, drawing on one’s own experiences of racialisation can be “dismissed as subjective and ‘confessional’ ” (Simmonds, 1997, p. 52). While writing this piece, we are aware that we are simultaneously unpacking contemporary components of social relations and drawing on the historical and political contexts that have framed these relations, in this case, Swedish exceptionalism which constructs Sweden as inherently gender equal, anti-racist, and immune to racist beliefs and practices (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014). This context becomes important to place our experiences, which we share, like many others, from the viewpoint of marginality rather than centrality. We demonstrate how the reiteration of racial norms within the academy, as elsewhere, through “the regulatory normative ideal of a compulsive Eurocentrism” establishes, as Stuart Hall explains, “the logic within which the racialized and ethnicized body is constituted discursively” (Hall, 1996, p. 16; also see Said, 1979). Though the racialised knowledge producer and their knowledge challenge the existing default epistemological accounts, they are only intelligible within this framework of “compulsive eurocentrism” and existing racialised hierarchies. In doing so, whiteness maintains its privilege and power through its invisibility, while the racialised “other” navigates the difficulty of being simultaneously “marked” yet invisible (see Koobak & Thapar-Björkert, 2012). Drawing on the debates within post-colonial and migration studies (Collet, 2008; Farahani, 2010; Kusow, 2003; Narayan, 1993; Nowicka & Cieslik, 2013), feminist historiography and epistemology (Coloma, 2008; Withers, 2015), and studies on racial epistemology (Fricker, 2007; Collins, 1989, 1990; hooks, 1995, 2005; Hunter, 2002), we will outline how the process of knowledge production reflects and reproduces a default epistemology within the academy with its blind spots on the specific gendered and raced historical, political, and economic contexts, which legitimise certain knowledge claims and knowledge producers while marginalising and excluding other epistemologies. In doing so, we observe epistemology not

88  Fataneh Farahani and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert only as a way of knowing but also as a well-established system with a specific racial and gendered history that has a specific worldview and interest both for those within the academy and those who inhabit a space outside of it (see Ladson-Billings, 2000, 2003).

Research on Racial Inequality Regimes in Academia While there are many quantitative and qualitative studies, narrative-based accounts as well as theoretically well-developed scholarly productions on unequal opportunity in the academy and personal experiences of racialised academic subjects in the USA, Canada, England, and Australia (Fenton, Carter, & Modood, 2000; Margolis, 2001; Poynting & Mason, 2007; Mirza, 2009; Palmer & Andrews, 2016; Henry & Tator, 2009; Bonner, Robinson, & Hughes, 2015), the area is relatively new and highly contested in Sweden. The prevalent distress in talking about racism in general and the refusal to recognise race as a category of/for discrimination in particular, undeniably, is one of the contributing factors that has resulted in this topic being empirically understudied, theoretically underdeveloped, and politically contested in Sweden. Furthermore, negating discourses such as “normative colourblindness,” “sanctioned ignorance,” and “white liberal doubt” obstruct any serious efforts to discuss matters of racism while normatively sustaining an understanding that you “should not pay attention to race” (Habel, 2012, pp. 111–112). This is further compounded by the fact that Sweden is heavily influenced by current discourses espoused by both liberal and conservative forces that assume that Western societies have transcended problems of racism and sexism, and moved to a post-racial and post-feminist phase (Bilge, 2013, Ahmed, 2012). This racial grammar as Bonilla-Silva argues, “is a distillate of racial ideology and, hence, of white supremacy” and shapes how “we see or don’t see race in social phenomena, how we frame matters as racial or not race-related, and even how we feel about race matters” (Bonilla-Silva, 2012, p. 174). Ironically, for a racialised academic, it is difficult to conduct a conversation about racism because a one-dimensional view of power (for example, if you are from the middle class or have a higher education) often complicates or invalidate experiences of racism (and sexism). For example, in 2014, Farahani published a text about home and homelessness where she discusses not only how those who do not have the “right/normative body” should work harder within everyday institutional academic norms but also how knowledge production is affected by structural racism. A blogger (bullskit, 2015) posted a note called “hemlösa akaemiker” (homeless academics) on Farahani’s text as being “pretend knowledge” and pretend homelessness (https://toklandet. wordpress.com/2014/10/25/hemlosa-akademiker/). The blog has a picture of a homeless white man and the blogger writes, “What luck the person in the picture has of his white privileges.” The blogger also suggests that Farahani should dedicate herself to “study her own brown eyes instead of engaging in critical white studies.” There are also several comments that strongly

The Racialised Knowledge Economy  89 criticise feminist and anti-racist knowledge production and negate the presence of Farahani’s text on different university websites, which in itself shows that the anonymous bloggers are equipped with adequate cultural capital. Some scholars have shown the mutual constitution of gendered and racialised structures of inequality in higher education, as well as in research policy in Sweden (Behtoui (2017); Hübinette & Mählck, 2015; Andersoon, 2014; Mählck, 2012; Mählck & Fellesson, 2014). Focussing on academic women with a migrant background in Sweden, Mählck (2013, p. 69) investigates how “embodied dimensions of processes of racialization” are integral for the construction of inequality regimes in academia. Through the notion of “embodied discursive geographies,” Mählck (2016) analyses how the processes of intersectional, gendered, and racialised inequalities shift across different post-colonial work sites and create “contradictory positionalities of privilege and disadvantage” (Mählck, 2016, pp. 9–10). In one of the pioneer studies on “ethnic” discrimination among students in the Swedish academy, Fazlhashemi (2002) underlines the existence of a normative notion of Swedishness as an invisible but significant factor that not only creates a monocultural and institutionally homogeneous environment but also is sustained through low mobility within the Swedish academy (between as well as within universities). Academics with a foreign background, more than others, must have knowledge, patience, skill, and time in order to cope with “sailing in the headwinds” (de los Reyes, 2007). Furthermore, Saxonberg and Sawyer (2006) argue how a disproportionate emphasis on educational merits and teaching experiences (often experienced by ethnic-Swedish academics), besides the arbitrariness and opportunities to manipulate service settings, are part of the “cultural cloning” process (2006, p. 436) which limits employment opportunities for academics with a foreign background.

Habitus and Entitlements A question that has troubled us through our academic journeys is about who feels “at home” within the academy and who feels (un)comfortable in those settings? Our gender, race, class background, ethnicity, civil status, and religious and cultural (un)attachments, among other factors, places us outside normative academic domains and with doubts about whether we rightfully occupy (or are not allowed to occupy) certain spaces and positions. This troubling sense of feeling like an “invader occupant,” to use Sara Ahmed’s expression (2012, p. 37), is constructed through intersecting and shifting power relations that position us in specific ways in different settings. Thus, while all can, in theory, enter, it is certain types of bodies that are tacitly designated as being the “natural” occupants, having the right to belong, while others are marked out as being “out of place.” Not being the somatic norm, they are space invaders. (Puwar, 2004, p. 8)

90  Fataneh Farahani and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert Similarly, Edward Said, in his memoir, tellingly entitled Out of Place (1999), shows how the epistemological and ontological distinction between the Western subject and racialised, othered oriental subject has been tangible for him in daily practices (Said, 1999, p. 19). This sense of “out of place”ness and marginality, which takes the white (male) as the universal knower, blocks one to reason and present her/his knowledge on an equal platform. Moreover, while the racialised other is marginalised, is spoken about, s/he is, as Almedia argues, “also a necessary condition for the continuation of colonial and epistemic violence in mainstream institutions” (Almedia, 2015, p. 81; also see Smedley and Hutchinson, 2012). The white, Western knower (male) embodies the universality of Western epistemologies but who needs to “invent” the racialised other for reaffirming his/her superiority as much as an anti-Semite would invent a Jew if it did not exist (see Sartre, 1962). As individuals working within the academy, our “categories of perception of the social world” are shaped through an internalisation and “tacit acceptance” (taken for granted) of the “social space” (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 728) constituted by the structures and hierarchies of our formal and informal academic settings (such as seminars, conferences, within the pages of scholarly journals, lunch rooms, and academic corridors). Thus an institution, such as the university, can only become efficacious if it is objectified in bodies in the form of durable dispositions that recognise and comply with the specific demands of the institution. The “socialised subjectivity” of the white habitus inculcated by the academic environment “conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters” (Bonilla-Silva, 2014, p. 152). It facilitates the institutionalisation of normative routines and practices, leading some “bodies” to be constantly aware of their environments, thus self-policing themselves. Furthermore, the “double historicity” of habitus builds upon the specific socialised trajectory of the individual, on the one hand, and on the other, to the historical work of preceding generations on the cognitive structures that are embodied by the individual (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 139; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2001, p. 4). This is important for understanding not only the hidden mechanisms of disparities within the academy but also the production of racialised hierarchies of political and social entitlement, which determines what is legitimate or illegitimate. The “hidden” curriculum of embedded norms and values, while not explicitly stated, follows its own rhythm of inclusion and exclusion through discursive practices that validate some experiences and render others illegitimate (also see Margolis, 2001). Ball (1990) states that “educational sites are subject to discourse but are also centrally involved in the propagation and selective dissemination of discourses, the ‘social appropriation’ of discourses” (1990, p. 3). Arguably, even when knowledge is produced “outside” of the compulsory eurocentrism as a counter-discourse (such as major part of post-colonial theories), they are often bounded by the limits imposed by the eurocentrism. For instance, when Farahani was asked to contribute a “pedagogical

The Racialised Knowledge Economy  91 easily accessible” chapter on feminist movements/feminist theory for undergraduate students, she realised that in order to fulfill the criteria, she had to (re)produce the highly problematic historiography of feminist genealogy based exclusively on experiences of (white heterosexual) women in England and USA (not even Europe as a whole), while excluding other women’s movements and their struggle for gender equality. These “epistemic habits” (Stoler, 2010, p. 39) tend to create uniform accounts of feminism’s emergence based on the Anglo-American feminist history (Hemmings, 2011) and is temporally and spatially non-specific—for example, the limited and exclusive wave-based representations of the history of feminism (Withers, 2015; Batra, 2010; Caughie, 2010; Graff, 2007; Tripp, 2006), which disallowed Farahani to tell a different story. Another example of the limits imposed by compulsive eurocentrism draws on our observation that at academic institutions in Europe, there is a significant dearth of perspectives of “third world” scholars on courses taught under the ambit of development studies. The marginalisation of scholars from the south in the curricula perpetuates the “European-descent” assumptions about what constitutes real “intellectualism” (Stanfield, 1985, p. 398). Thus, for us as people of colour, these Eurocentric epistemologies lead to an “apartheid of knowledge” (Bernal & Villalpando, 2002, p. 169), where we are expected to consume knowledge, which directly concerns us but which lacks our voices, social realities, and colonial genealogies. Furthermore, we need to be attentive to the earned strength of unprivileged subjects and the unearned power of privileged subjects exemplified in the differential processes of (non)selection within the academy. Non-natives have to conciliate between being positioned as “experts” on work that carries little academic capital (such as bachelor and MSc supervisions) but as “non-experts” on work (such as PhD supervision) that carries rewards, accolades, and international appreciation, and which the dominant white community claims to be their right. In many universities, promotion to professorships are tied up with being “principal” supervisors to PhD candidates, and while non-natives are often called upon to participate in informal processes of knowledge sharing (commenting on PhD drafts, “green light” committees, participation in PhD seminars), these rarely materialise into formal processes such as being “opponents” or examiners to PhD candidates, responsibilities that carry academic currency. These spaces are often in the first place secured for the white establishment, no matter how inexperienced or inappropriate their area of specialisation in relation to their PhD subjects. When we do get asked by our white colleagues, it’s as second best; as standins or to fill in the last minute void created when “their” priority candidate declines at the last minute. Thus while our knowledge is seemingly appropriated to improve candidates’ PhD drafts, we are nonetheless relegated as (non)-knowledgeable subjects when the purpose is served. Furthermore, a relatively new academic subject (such as a PhD student) “come[s] into being by being appropriated by, and by appropriating, available enactments and

92  Fataneh Farahani and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert desires that are recognisable as ‘academic’ ” (Petersen, 2007, p. 478). To perform “inappropriate academicity” carries too heavy a risk of not being recognised as a “legitimate subject.” Those keen on an appropriate academic identity, in our experience, tacitly come to embody the same habitus as the white establishment and in the hope of gaining recognition as academics, doctoral students, therefore, see appropriate academic identity as coming from “Western” (and white) supervisors rather than non-natives, even though the latter might be more equipped to provide the guidance.

Epistemic Entitlement The academic labour that we have to perform as a “native” seemingly carries advantages for the white establishment who either cast us as experts on cultural practices or expect us to translate our cultures and explain the political circumstances of our country to them (see Khan, 2005), while the establishment maintains the privilege of ignorance. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007), Sullivan and Tuana (p. 3) understand ignorance not “as a simple lack of knowledge” but “as an active production of particular kinds of knowledges for various social and political purposes” (p. 161). Thus epistemologies of ignorance are “not as a feature of neglectful epistemic practice but as a substantive epistemic practice in itself” (Alcoff, 2007p. 39; also see Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008). This sanctioned opacity, as we call it, arises from “white cognitive dysfunction” (Alcoff, 2007, p. 55), which enables the “whites” to consistently “act wrongly while thinking they are acting rightly” (Bailey, 2007, p. 81; also see Bailey,1998). Similarly, Essed (2000) illustrates how academic women of colour in the academy are expected to draw from cultural experience in catering to students of colour, or fulfilling institutional needs such as bringing “colour” to all-white committees, ''pressures to participate in community events . . . [and] a commitment to supporting students of colour (and critical students in general), requiring among other things understanding, availability, sharing and giving” (Essed, 2000, p. 890; also see Patton, 2004). On many occasions, Thapar-Björkert has felt l like an Indian ambassador at university sites and expected to share her knowledge and cultural capital with those from the dominant country. Nonetheless, such engagements are unaccompanied by any sustainable academic credit, and we are expected to create our “own space” rather than to “join those in power on an equal basis” (Lund, 2010, p. 20). Furthermore, many white colleagues derive pleasure from the author’s culture, expressed in statements such as “I love Indian food” or “I love Bollywood movies” or “my best friend is an Indian.” However, this commodification of pleasure is seldom linked to “unlearning racism. . . . the desire to enhance one’s status in the context of ‘whiteness’ even as one appropriates black culture” (hooks, 1995, p. 157). Furthermore, to critically evaluate white appropriation, we need to understand not only how one can “possess” white privilege, but also how it is “done” through different processes (Pease, 2006,

The Racialised Knowledge Economy  93 p. 17). The normative and unmarked nature of privilege’ sustains the sense of entitlement through which members of non-stigmatised statuses maintain their positions. Furthermore, one’s own (un)privileged social location has an impact on one’s ability to make epistemic claims; which may result in the continuation or (re)production of privilege and/or marginalisation. Over the last decade, the use of “correct” vocabulary and theoretical and methodological apparatuses—such as intersectionality—has become a form of anti-racist capital for some white feminists (Mirza & Gunaratnam, 2014). This “whitening of intersectionality,” as Bilge argues, decentres “the constitutive role of race in intersectional thought and praxis” (2013:412) and diminishes the theoretical significance of intersectionality produced by feminists of color.

Comfort and Dis(comfort) Zones and Everything In Between In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed discusses how the word comfort “suggests well-being and satisfaction, but it can also suggest an ease and easiness. If white bodies are comfortable it is because they can sink into spaces that extend their shape” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 40). “If we think of institutional norms as somatic,” Ahmed declares, “then we can show how by assuming a body, institutions can generate an idea of appropriate conduct without making this explicit. The institute ‘institutes’ the body that is instituting” (2012, p. 38). Thus when one’s body, intellectual interests, and experiences are confirmed and extended through the given institutional norms, one can feel “at home.” In so doing, one’s feelings of at-home-ness can even enhance the physical, social, intellectual, and emotional spaces that s/he inhabits. The (un)comfortable subject, on the other hand, arguably becomes more (un)comfortable by being (dis)acknowledged as one who does (not) fit and one who is (not) at home. “Bodies stick out when they are out of place,” Ahmed states (2012, p. 41), and the very “sticking-out-ness” from the norm reconfirms the prevailing norms. In such circumstances, even “being welcomed” is to actually be positioned as one who is not at home (Ahmed, 2012, p. 43) since the very “inclusion” and “hospitable acceptance” of bodies that do not appear white (able bodied, middle class, heterosexual, etc.) are in fact for the purpose of (re)establishing the whiteness (or other given norms) of the given institutions. Remarkably, in these circumstances, any “achievement” of those subjects who are not perceived as embodying the normative subject is not only understood as a sign of overcoming “institutional whiteness” (see, e.g., Ahmed, 2012), but is also instrumentalised as a comforting argument for denying institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. The simple rationale behind this denial—oddly enough—is “you are here. Therefore, there is no racism.” Thus processes of inclusion, instead of empowering the minority, arguably sustain white privilege, as the “white” body continues to

94  Fataneh Farahani and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert be the unmarked norm. Even after seven years as a tenured senior lecturer at her department nearly every teaching semester, Suruchi gets asked by students and colleagues in other departments (including visiting scholars from other Swedish universities), “How long is your contract at Uppsala university” or “Will you be here next semester?” Colleagues from other universities in Sweden who happen to meet her after a stretch of time also add, “Are you still working at Uppsala.” While this could be interpreted as a lack of knowledge about her job status at Uppsala, it also masks an inherent assumption that racialised scholars have temporary contractual positions and could not possibly be in a tenured position. While it has been established in Britain that academics with a migrant background often find themselves working at “new” universities (see Fenton et al., 2000; Ross, 2016), there is also evidence to suggest that in Sweden, academics from a migrant background remain peripheral to the mainstream education hubs of Uppsala, Lund, Stockholm, and Gothenberg (Behtoui, 2017).

Accent Ceiling Different conditions for knowledge productions and knowledge (de)valuation has an effect on bodies that are constructed as impeccable knowledgeable subjects and those that will never be quite as impeccably knowledgeable. Drawing on her framework of “testimonial injustice” within institutional spaces, Fricker (2007) suggests that some speakers receive more credibility than they otherwise would have or less credibility than what they would have. Academic subjects with undesired racialised accents are not only constantly disqualified because of to their accents but also their accents often reaffirm the “quality” and qualification of those who are constructed as native speakers or have desirable accents. The metaphor of “accent ceiling” (Collins & Low, 2010) envisages clearly how racialised practices are expressed differently by institutional gatekeepers. Like the established concept of “glass ceiling,” which refers to invisible, though tangible, barriers that prevent one from achieving further success, the accent ceiling has an effect on the (un)recognition of one’s qualifications. According to our experiences, while we find the height of this ceiling being considerably lower in Sweden than in English-speaking countries, the purpose remains the same. Modifying and clarifying other people’s accents—although it happens in different ways and extents—fulfills different purposes. It often offers the native speakers the authority to first correct you (thereby reaffirming herself or himself as a knowable subject) and sometimes in correcting you, also appropriate your ideas as her/his own. Thus our own words often get recycled by those with the correct diction and command over the language. Farahani recalls how while giving a guest lecture, her colleague (who had invited her) decided to stay in the classroom and listen to Farahani in order to be able to follow students’ reflections during the subsequent seminars. After the first part of the lecture and during the break, the colleague walked towards

The Racialised Knowledge Economy  95 the whiteboard and corrected Farahani’s two spelling mistakes. This is a reminder of how the “epistemic levels of symbolic violence” in the production of knowledge are inseparable from structures of power and oppression (Guhin & Wyrtzen, 2013, p. 234). It is thus not surprising as Suruchi has often observed that native Indians often endeavour to “fit in” rather than claim a voice from a position of marginality—to the extent that they jettison their own mother tongue and embrace the Swedish language together with actively seeking Swedish friends and culturally associating themselves with mainstream Swedish culture. This internalisation of the “racial contract” is in itself very problematic, as nonnatives see their past as a “wasteland of non-achievement,” which makes them distance themselves from their culture (Mills, 1997, pp. 89–109; also see Hooks, 1995). Instead of realising that the “logic of white supremacy” could be challenged if people were to trust their own thinking and identify with their own culture—a culture that often becomes the “spice that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture”—they get locked in the process of “internalised oppression.”

Conclusion In this chapter, we draw on the epistemological centrality and legitimacy of experiential knowledge to identify the multiple modalities of racism in institutions for higher education. We place our experiences of navigating through historically white universities within a geo-political context framed through a supposedly “colour blind” and “post-racial society.” We highlight the dynamics of racialisation processes on the production of knowledge and how the “normative absence/pathological presence” of certain bodies legitimates certain knowledge(s) and devalues others. The importance of racebased epistemologies in our chapter is not to “colour” Western scholarship, but to de-center and challenge the epistemological practices and activities that naturalise Western ways of thinking.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Tobias Hübinette and Lisa Käll for their valuable comments and critical interventions on previous drafts of this chapter.

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98  Fataneh Farahani and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert Hübinette, T., & Mählck, P. (2015). The racial grammar of Swedish higher education and research policy: The limits and conditions of researching race in a colour-blind context. In R. Andreassen & K. Vitus (Eds.), Affectivity and race formations: A Nordic case study (pp. 59–73). Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Hunter, M. (2002). Rethinking epistemology, methodology, and racism: Or, is White sociology really dead? Race and Society, 5(2002), 119–138. Khan, S. (2005). Reconfiguring the native informant: Positionality in the global age. Signs, 30(4), 2017–2037. Koobak, R., & Thapar-Björkert, S. (2012). Becoming non-Swedish: Locating the paradoxes of in/visible identities. Feminist Review (102), 125–134. Kusow, A. M. (2003). Beyond indigenous authenticity: Reflections on the insider/ outsider debate in immigration research. Symbolic Interaction, 26(4), 591–599. Ladson-Billings, G. (2000). Racialized discourses and ethnic epistemologies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 257–277). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Ladson-Billings, G. (2003). ‘It’s your world, I’m just trying to explain it’: Understanding our epistemological and methodological challenges. Qualitative Inquiry, 9(1), 5–12. Lund, L. C. (2010). The nature of White privilege in the teaching and training of adults. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 125, 15–33. Mählck, P. (2012). Situating Swedish research policy landscape in the global knowledge economy. Centre for Gender Excellence at Linköping University, Work in Progress Report Series, X(14). Mählck, P. (2013). Academic women with migrant background in the global knowledge economy: Bodies, hierarchies and resistance. Women’s Studies International Forum, 36, 65–74. Mählck, P. (2016). Academics on the move? Gender, race and place in transnational academic mobility. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 1–12. Mählck, P., & Fellesson, M. (2014). Kunskapspolitikens blinda fläck- rasifieringes grammatik i akademin [The blind spot of politics of knowledge: The racial grammar in the academy]. In K. Sandell (Ed.), Att bryta innanförskapet: kritiska perspektiv på jämställdhet och mångfald i akademin [Breaking inclusionary agreements: Critical perspectives on equality and diversity in the academy]. Göteborg: Makadam förlag. Margolis, E. (2001). The hidden curriculum in higher education. New York, NY: Routledge. Mattsson, K. (2005). Diskrimineringens andra ansikte—svenskhet och det vita västerländska. i Paulina de los Reyes & Masoud Kamali (red.), Bortom vi och dem. Teoretiska reflektioner om makt, integration och strukturell diskriminering: Rapport av Utredningen om makt, integration och strukturell diskrminering (p. 41). SOU, Stockholm: Fritzes offentliga publikationer. McIntosh, P. (1992). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies. In M. Anderson & P. Collins (Eds.), Race, class and gender: An anthology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mirza, H. (2009). Race, gender and educational desire: Why Black women succeed and fail. New York, NY: Routledge.

The Racialised Knowledge Economy  99 Mirza, H., & Gunaratnam, Y. (2014). ‘The Branch on which I sit’: Heidi Safia Mirza in conversation with Yasmin Gunaratnam. Feminist Review, 108, 125–133. Narayan, K. (1993). How native is a “native” anthropologist?’ American Anthropologist, 95(3), 671–686. Nowicka, M., & Cieslik, A. (2013, November). Beyond methodological nationalism in insider research with migrants. Migration Studies, 18, 1–1.5. Palmer, L., & Andrews, K. (2016). Blackness in Britain. New York, NY: Routledge. Petersen, E. B. (2007). Negotiating academicity: Postgraduate research supervision as category boundary work. Studies in Higher Education, 32, 475–487. Poynting, S., & Mason, V. (2007). The resistible rise of Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001. The Australian Sociological Association, 43(1), 61–86. Proctor, R. N., & Schiebinger, L. (2008). The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Puwar, N. (2004). Space invaders: Race, gender and bodies out of place. Oxford and New York, NY: Berg Publishers. Reyes, M., & Halcón, J. (1988). Racism in academia: The old wolf revisited. Harvard Educational Review, 58(3), 299–315. Ross, A. (2016). Universities do not challenge racism says UK’s first Black studies professor. The Guardian. Retreived from www.theguardian.com/education/2016/ oct/23/universities-do-not-challenge-racism-says-uks-first-black-studies-professor Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York, NY: Random House. Said, E. (1999). Out of place: A memoir. London: Granta Books. Sartre, J-P. (1995/1962). Anti-semite and jew. New York, NY: Schocken Books. Saxonberg, S., & Sawyer, L. (2006). Uteslutningsmekanismer och etnisk reproduktion inom Akademin” [Exclusionary mechanisms and ethnic reproduction within the academy]. In L. Sawyer & M. Kamali (Eds.), Utbildningens dilemma: Demokratiska ideal och andrafierande praxis [The Dilemma of Education: Democratic Ideals and Othering Practice]. SOU, 40(405–463). Simmonds, F. N. (1997). My body myself: How does a Black woman do sociology? In H. S. Mirza (Ed.), Black British feminism: A reader (pp. 226–239). London: Routledge. Smedley, A., & Hutchinson, J. F. (Eds.). (2012). Racism in the academy: The new millennium. Commission on Race and Racism in Anthropology and American Anthropological Association.Washington, DC Stanfield, J. H. (1985). The ethnocentric basis of social science knowledge production. Review of Research in Education, 12, 387–415. Stoler, A. L. (2010). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sullivan, S., & Tuana, N. (2007). Race and epistemologies of ignorance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Tripp, A. M. (2006). The evolution of transnational feminisms: Consensus, conflict and new dynamics. In M. M. Ferree & A. M. Tripp (Eds), Global feminism: Transnational women’s activism, organising and human rights (pp. 51–79). New York and London: New York University Press. Withers, D. M. (2015). Strategic affinities: Historiography and epistemology in contemporary feminist knowledge politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 22, 129–142.

8 Strangers in a Strange Land Elena G. Garcia and Ben G. Goodwin

Introduction When any newly graduating scholar enters the academic job market, there are innumerable worries, anxiety about being able to find a job, concern about whether the hard work being done will be valued. Elena’s job search was compounded by our desire to find one institution where we could both work. An issue easily overlooked is fitting in with the culture of the city you move to. It is this problem that we will be focusing on, for it was an issue that had the least influence over our decisions to accept our positions at Utah Valley University (UVU) but has become the leading factor in our job satisfaction. To provide some context for the experiences we discuss in this chapter, we first share brief glimpses into our backgrounds. Ben’s Background I grew up in the small town of Hendersonville, North Carolina. It’s a religious community, as most of the South is—those who aren’t Baptist are predominantly Christian. My parents were atypical citizens for this region. My father is an ex-Episcopalian from Buffalo; my mother grew up in Long Island, New York, and while her family considers themselves “culturally Jewish,” they have been staunch atheists since the Holocaust. I think of myself as a Liberal Agnostic. From the beginning of elementary school, I felt Othered by my lack of beliefs. Both of my parents encouraged me from an early age to stand up for my identity, which led to heated conversations with my peers and declarations that I was sure to burn in eternal hellfire. Had it not been for the strong medical community in Hendersonville and the higher-than-average penchant for secularism within medical families like mine, I wouldn’t have had the childhood friends I did. In fact, my best friend from my childhood years was the son of Islamic immigrants from Jordan; we bonded together largely because of shared Otherness.

Strangers in a Strange Land  101 Elena’s Background I grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan: Cereal City, USA. It is a working-class community with cereal factories downtown and an industrial park just outside the city border. My father, in fact, has worked at Post Cereals for nearly 40 years. So, like many Michigan children, I grew up in a working-class family. It is this identity that dominated my cultural upbringing more so than ethnicity—my father is the son of Mexican immigrants and my mother’s ancestors are European—or religion—both of my parents are Catholic. There are certainly pockets of ethnic and religious groups, but those are fairly rare. Instead, we live in diverse ethnic and religious communities, and discussions of religious practices tend to remain in the private sphere. Working-class culture dominates Michigan because it is the one commonality many of us have. . . . . . Utah Valley University Elena ended up accepting an assistant professor position at UVU. UVU is located in Orem, Utah, which is a twin city with Provo, the home of Brigham Young University. Orem and Provo are located in the Utah Valley, nicknamed Happy Valley, and, as Salt Lake City has grown in population and diversity, many of the more conservative residents traveled south to settle here. UVU began as the Central Utah Vocational School in 1941 (Utah Valley University, 2015). Later, it became a community college, then a state college, and less than a decade ago a regional university. Its identity as a community college is maintained through open enrollment and attendance by a large number of nontraditional students. In addition to its unique history, UVU is also a commuter-only campus. There is no on-campus housing; yet the university has nearly 40,000 students in attendance, having recently become the most highly attended university in the state. It is a large institution with a small college personality, which has positive and negative effects on its operations. Uniquely Utah Every location and institution has a unique culture influenced by race, religion, history, politics, and government. The following is a quick list of statistics that help to display the unique nature of the dominant Utah culture: • •

92% of Utah residents are white (compared to a 78% national average) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015). 94% of Utah County residents are white (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015).

102  Elena G. Garcia and Ben G. Goodwin •

Utah County has an average of 3.61 people per household (compared to a national average of 2.63) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015). • 35% of Utah County residents are under 18 (compared to a 23% national average) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015). • 80% of Utah residents are religious (compared to a 49% national average) (Canham, 2012). • 62% of Utah residents are Mormon (compared to a national average of under 2%) (Canham, 2012). • 81% of Utah County residents are Mormon (Canham, 2012). • The average age of first marriage in Utah is 23.5 years for women and 25.6 for men (the lowest nationally for both genders, compared with 27 years for women and 29 years for men nationally) (Shim, 2014). • Utah’s birth rate is 25% higher than the national average (1 out of every 12 women of “child-bearing age” give birth every year compared to 1 out of 16 nationally). (The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2015). • Over 80% of Utah lawmakers (including senators, members of the Utah House of Representatives, mayors, and other publicly elected officials) are Mormon (Canham, 2012). • 64% of Utah residents are Republican (the highest percentage nationally) (Saad, 2012). Essentially in Utah, and Utah County in particular, the population is predominantly white, conservative, and highly religious. The Latter-Day Saints Religion and Mormon Culture To contextualize our Otherness, we must explain the extent to which the Latter-day Saints (LDS) religion influences the local culture. We want to emphasize, though, that we differentiate between the LDS religion—the worldwide church—and Utah Mormon culture—the dominant regional behaviors and practices. While the culture has certainly developed because of the LDS religion, not all LDS practitioners engage in these behaviors and practices. We do not pretend to be experts in the LDS religion or of the culture in which we live. Our descriptions will be based on our observations, what we’ve been told by long-time residents, and discussions posted online. The LDS religion and beliefs have directly contributed to Utah being a highly religious, highly conservative state. Doctrine prohibits drinking alcohol, coffee, and tea; smoking of all kinds; and sex before marriage. The religion and culture also looks negatively upon non-heteronormative identities and practices, body modification, facial hair on men, and non-modest clothing on women. Family is extremely important, so members often marry very young and start large families. Birth control of any sort, then, is highly discouraged. Its government is predominantly made up of LDS-practicing politicians, and policies tend to follow suit (Canham, 2015).

Strangers in a Strange Land  103 Living in Utah County Utah County has quite a high population density, and it is the unofficial religious center. The picture is set effectively by Joanna Brooks (2010), author of the blog Ask Mormon Girl: Imagine moving through your daily life—work, school, grocery store— safely assuring that at least 75% of the people you encounter every day share your religion. . . . a religion capable of functioning as a holistic culture, a religion that stresses its difference from the rest of the world and the importance of unity among its members. That sense of social totality is what Mormons in Utah County—those who were born there as well as those who have self-selected in—can experience every day. However, she adds, “if your life falls outside the majority patterns, Happy Valley can be a very lonely place indeed.” Non-Mormons are sometimes called “gentiles,” a name used to identify them as Other, a very clear minority (Kessler, 2011). Brooks (2010) also characterizes Utah County as a “fairly intense Mormon immersion experience, a wonderful place to visit, but not a place some of us would choose to live” with a commenter adding that Utah County has “a certain relentless homogeneousness.” It is difficult for non-LDS newcomers to enter community groups because of the church organizational structure. Members are separated into geographical wards, which become the center for worship, community service, and socialization (Church of Jesus Christ, 2016). The ward is such a dominating force that when one moves away, the relationships formed there tend to end. Because of this ward-based community structure, Utah County newcomers are advised to attend ward events and activities, even if they are non-LDS. Otherwise, becoming part of a neighborhood community is incredibly difficult.

Our Struggle to Find Community We provide this background of the LDS religion and Mormon culture to help explain our struggle to find our place. The stories we share help to illustrate this struggle. To conceptualize the impact of these experiences, we’ll draw on Pratt’s (2002) concept of contact zones because it describes the coming together of different peoples within moments of contact. Pratt (2002) describes how she developed the term to contrast with traditional ideas of communities and how they function; specifically, the utopian envisioning of modern nations, regions, and institutions as “imagined communities” (p. 11–12). These are viewed as places with a unified identity and shared set of beliefs and values, even though most members do not interact with each other regularly (p. 12). Pratt (2002) sees imagined

104  Elena G. Garcia and Ben G. Goodwin communities as constructing a flawed perspective that “despite whatever conflicts or systematic social differences might be in play, it is assumed that all participants are engaged in the same game and that the game is the same for all players” (p. 13). Such a perspective is indeed flawed, because real communities are made up of members of different classes, cultures, and positions of authority, creating interactions and relationships where some members exercise authority and some members must submit to or question it. There is an air of fighting, which Daphne Key (2002) explains, suggests the “prospect of one victor emerging in battle . . . that racial, cultural, and ideological differences can create a battlefield scenario” (p. 102). She adds that “power redistribution can allow all participants to emerge victorious,” but this can only occur “when those in power are willing to sacrifice enough to let others grow” (p. 102). To be hired into a new institution and move into a new community culture is by definition to enter into myriad contact zones. Engaging with the culture of a new institution, department, region, community, neighborhood—all of these place new hires into contact zones where they might become the Other and must grapple with established dominance and authority. . . . . . Ben: False Assumptions and First Impressions When Elena told me that she had been accepted at UVU, and that one of her prime concerns was not fitting in with the strongly established and powerful LDS culture, I thought it would be no big deal. How much different could being a Liberal Agnostic among Conservative Baptists be than among Conservative Mormons? I even assured her that my childhood experience would help the both of us deal with and overcome the inevitable culture shock. I was wrong. I remember clearly our first night in Provo. We’d just unpacked the car and decided to head to the nearest grocery store for provisions. Unbeknownst to us, supermarkets cannot sell wine products. When I couldn’t find a celebratory bottle of champagne and asked about it, I was in for a rude awakening. I have seldom heard more disgust in someone’s voice as I did from the woman behind the counter who said loudly and dismissively, “We don’t sell that kind of thing here. I think there’s an alcohol store down the street.” This moment represented first contact within the contact zone of Utah Valley. Elena: Otherness on Display My body automatically Others me in this place. My ethnicity stands out in a predominantly white culture. I have tattoos and piercings, which are still quite taboo in LDS culture. I also love to dye my hair bright colors, and

Strangers in a Strange Land  105 though some younger individuals do the same, I rarely see boldly colored hair on adult, professional women. Some new UVU employees choose to remove their piercings, wear clothes that purposefully cover their tattoos, and only dye their hair using natural colors. I quite purposefully refuse to make such drastic adjustments to the ways I present my body, despite how visibly it marks me as Other. I chose to maintain these physical markers when I interviewed for my position at UVU—I wanted to test whether I would be accepted. My department’s acceptance of me did, in part, lead me to choose this position. It turns out that my identity hasn’t hindered my academic success in any obvious ways. . . . . . In reading this chapter, you might wonder if we have chosen to try to integrate with the local culture by attending ward activities or the local temple open house events (temples are otherwise closed to non-Mormons). In other words, what effort have we made to fit in? The honest truth is that we haven’t done much to integrate, due to how uncomfortable we feel within these religious settings. Attending LDS activities is seen as a display of openness to the religion and its beliefs, and an invitation for conversion. However, we hold strong views about the conservative beliefs of LDS practitioners, the policies and laws that have been influenced by the church, and the ways in which many Mormons treat Others. Therefore, we feel it would be disingenuous to attend church-sponsored events. We know this choice has hindered our ability to integrate within the community, but we have consciously made the decision to avoid these contact zones in favor of holding true to our own identities. . . . . . Elena: A Small Window into the Contact Zone I participate in an inclusion subcommittee on creating a safe campus environment for students and employees. In one meeting, our facilitator asked a very loaded question: “What about the university makes you feel unsafe physically, emotionally, professionally?” He then asked for the door to our meeting room to be closed and for the meeting note-taker to close his laptop. This level of privacy was important, because the conversation inevitably focused on the outsider, Othered perspectives of the group’s non-LDS members. Clearly, our facilitator knew that any conversation about the local LDS culture and religion needed to be handled with great care. However, he was also aware that quite a few of us existed in a very particular state of Otherness. Moments like these—contact zones where earnest and open discussion of LDS versus non-LDS conflict—carry this kind of subversive and cautious atmosphere. As a result, they are rare, fleeting, and difficult to initiate. . . . . .

106  Elena G. Garcia and Ben G. Goodwin Because of the unique nature of our area, almost every interaction becomes a contact zone for us—a space where we are entering into engagement with the dominant culture. What’s more, these contact zones are clearly controlled by that dominant culture. Expectations others have of us, our behavior, our language, even our appearance, are filtered through the lens of that culture. Leaving the house means entering into a series of contact zones where our position as Other and our place in the cultural hierarchy is predetermined. Thankfully, at UVU, there are those small pockets of faculty who are also Othered and have provided moments of reprieve from these oppressive experiences.

Higher Education as Sanctuary? Elena: Looking Past Locality Within the job market preparation workshops provided by my graduate department, we worked on developing strong submission materials, preparing for interviews, considering our clothing choices on campus visits, and negotiating our contracts. I felt incredibly well-prepared to find and choose a job. However, missing from our conversations was a discussion of the affect that a community and institutional culture can have on job satisfaction. I was strongly advised against considering the geography of positions because that would limit my options. The most important consideration, I was told, was finding a good job in a good department that would highly value my work and compensate me for it. I pushed aside the fact that the high-quality job I found was located in Utah County. After all, I was lucky. Ben and I figured that while we wouldn’t quite fit in with the local culture, we would be at a large, public university, places I’ve seen as sanctuaries of rationality and highly diverse perspectives. Even if contact zones within the community ended up being difficult to navigate, we were confident that zones within the university would provide us an easier avenue for integration. Ben: Religion and the Research Paper In each semester comes a moment that I dislike because of how Othered it makes me feel: my course’s research module. Like many teachers, I have students pick their own topic to research. Now, every teacher has a student here and there who picks a topic based on their religious beliefs or tries to use those beliefs as support or evidence in their research, but that’s what 80% of my students are likely to do. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to suggest topics other than gay marriage, abortion, or sex before marriage, or to explain why personal or religious beliefs don’t count as research sources, without being viewed as an outsider—or worse, as an adversary. I’ve taken to banning a list of topics, including a list of non-religious topics that are too

Strangers in a Strange Land  107 often selected and done poorly (the death penalty, marijuana legalization, violence in video games, etc.) so that I’m not singling out Mormon students. I know that I am avoiding the creation of a contact zone between my students and me, but in doing so, I hope to create a contact zone between my students and new and challenging perspectives and information. ***** When we came to UVU, we hoped that higher education might provide a safe house to help work through the inevitable struggles of integrating into the LDS culture. Safe houses, according to Pratt (2002), are “social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogenous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, [and] temporary protection” (p. 17). We had assumed that the university could be such a space. Likely, this assumption is related to an explanation Penrod (2002) provides: “Colleges and universities are direct creations of imagined communities . . . where, regardless of whatever actual inequalities or exploitations may prevail, the institution is always visualized as a place of great, level solidarity” (p. 167). Clearly, though, the university is imagined as a place of solidarity rather than actually being that kind of haven. Rather than being a sanctuary, it is a contact zone. This reality is unfortunate because universities need to be safe, supportive, and welcoming spaces for new faculty rather than being one of the most aggressive contact zones. In their book Rethinking Faculty Work: Higher Education’s Strategic Imperative, Gappa, Austin, and Trice (2007) explain that “faculty members who feel connected with their institutions are more likely to stay. Thus a collegial environment enhances the satisfaction of faculty members who experience it, and it strengthens the quality of the institution overall” (p. 306). Given the large investment of time, energy, and money it takes to hire a new faculty member, and given the importance of high-quality faculty to the success of a university (Gappa et al., 2007, p. 323), there should be an intense emphasis on new faculty developing connection and commitment to their institutions. Therefore, universities need to take great care in creating the sanctuary of a safe house, particularly for new faculty. We were not prepared to take control of crafting a safe space for ourselves at UVU. We accepted a good job, found a place to live, packed up our stuff, and traveled across the country unprepared for the immense impact that the LDS religion has on the Utah Valley culture. Our department seemed to believe that we would find our way despite our difference. When we’ve talked to our colleagues about our struggles fitting in, we’ve resoundingly been asked one question: “Have you thought about moving to Salt Lake City? It’s much less conservative.” But Salt Lake City is 80 or more miles from campus, which didn’t sound like a solution. This is all we’ve been given to help us cope—creating a safe space by creating distance between ourselves and the contact zone—and it isn’t enough.

108  Elena G. Garcia and Ben G. Goodwin

Culturally Diverse Recruitment and Hiring As student populations across the country continue to become increasingly and broadly diverse, and the accumulating literature stating that a diverse faculty “plays a critical role in fostering an intellectual environment reflective of the diversity of students and the broader society,” colleges and universities have amped up their recruitment of faculty who bring with them difference of some sort (Seifert & Umbach, 2008, p. 357). Elena became one such faculty member. ***** Elena: Positioned as Diverse When I arrived at UVU, it was stated, almost blatantly, that one of the reasons they liked me so much was because I am very different from the local culture. The department has a goal to expand students’ ideas and experiences, especially those who are within the LDS cultural group, and I would help them do that. They loved that my appearance and my identity would challenge students’ assumptions about Others. In my first year at UVU, I was asked by my department chair if I’d be willing to participate in a video project discussing diversity. It seems that UVU has a hard time holding on to employees who don’t fit into the dominant culture, and the goal of the video was to explore why. I shared that my concerns with the diversity problems on campus had much less to do with racial or ethnic diversity, and had much more to do with other cultural identifiers—namely, religion, gender, and what most people consider to be alternative culture (piercings, tattoos, and the like). Since participating in this project, I’ve been approached by faculty and administrators across the university who recognize me. Some explain, “I never would have thought about diversity meaning anything other than racial diversity if you hadn’t mentioned it.” ***** The development of this diversity video project as well as the dedication from the President’s Council of UVU’s inclusion initiative indicates that the institution wants to create a welcoming environment for faculty and students. However, as stated by Dumas-Hines, Cochran, and Williams (2001): [T]he university cannot assume that changing words in a mission statement or knowing the number of culturally diverse populations will have any effect on the interactions of individuals on its campus without some attention to its climate . . . [which] must show that all diverse populations are valued. (p. 438–439)

Strangers in a Strange Land  109 Hiring diverse faculty simply is not enough. What is necessary moves beyond recruitment and hiring into “transforming academic culture so that it welcomes and embraces those who are currently regarded as ‘other’ and increases the opportunity for alternative points of view to challenge dominant ideologies and deep-rooted social hierarchies” (Harris & González, 2012, p. 8). To fully support the diverse faculty that UVU has hired requires departments, faculty, administrators, policies, etc., to commit to taking a hard look at the institutional culture and environment (Dumas-Hines et al., 2001, p. 437; Gappa et al., 2007, p. 332; Harris & González, 2012, p. 13; Seifert & Umbach, 2008, p. 377). Gathering individuals’ anecdotal experiences, and fully listening to and accepting the validity of those stories, is an important way to explore the real climate and culture of an institution deeply. We see the stories we are sharing within this chapter as demonstrating what such an exploration can reveal. ***** Ben: Glares and Stares Everywhere I go on campus, it seems that someone is staring or glaring at me. Since having a beard goes against LDS doctrine, my facial hair alone is a clear sign I am non-Mormon. When I first walk into the classroom, the confusion and concern is palpable. I can almost hear my students thinking, “This is our professor?” To their credit, I do eventually earn their respect and trust, but beginning each course, this reaction reinforces how I am seen and judged as Other. Starting in the position of having to prove myself as being worthy of their respect is a constant and frankly demoralizing signal of my outside status. It’s something I haven’t felt since I was a child. In addition, it also provides a constant pressure of censorship: every word I speak has the potential to offend students and cement my position as Other. I constantly wrestle with how or if to talk about political or religious subject matter, having to ask myself, “Will this jeopardize the trust and respect I have built with my students?” And when I do make a comment or remark that reveals my Othered status, the glares and stares return. Elena: A Troubling Phone Call During my first week at UVU, an advisor stopped by my office saying, “I just received a phone call from the mother of one of your students. She said her husband doesn’t like the idea of his daughter’s teacher having tattoos and blue hair.” Though I was a bit amused at this situation, I was also concerned. If I already had parents calling the department complaining about the way I look, would I face this all the time? Would I constantly have

110  Elena G. Garcia and Ben G. Goodwin to be defended by administrators in my department? It wasn’t a great start to teaching at UVU, even though it wasn’t a surprise. Thankfully, since then, I haven’t been made aware of any similar phone calls, but the Othered feeling of that first week lingers. Ben: Sundays in a Ghost Town A small but surprisingly impactful way in which we are constantly reminded of our Otherness is that most businesses and stores in Utah are closed on Sunday, UVU’s campus included. Only certain staff members have access, and the rest of us must call the campus police officer on duty and be escorted to our offices. As an employee at UVU, this means a giant hassle and a clear reminder that I am not a member of the majority culture whose beliefs and values frown upon Sunday work. When I do have to come in, the campus officer is always perturbed and confused about my presence, often going to the extent of questioning why I need to get into the building or why I’m working on a Sunday in the first place. With all the other businesses closed as well, it feels like I can’t get anything done on a Sunday—reminding me weekly of my Othered status. Elena: Misidentification I was standing by an elevator one day after class when a middle-aged woman walked up near me. She examined me and then said in a pleasant voice, “So, what do you major in?” I’ve heard this question before. I’m not particularly young looking, and I was in a fairly professional dress. I responded as I always do, “Actually, I’m a professor.” “Oh!” was her reply, and it is the common reply. Then she caught herself and continued the conversation. “What department do you work in?” People on campus tend to assume I’m a student before they assume I’m faculty—this has never happened to my husband. They examine my face, my body, and assume I must be a student. Their assumptions are so strong that they don’t even ask, “Are you a student?” Nope. “What do you major in?” ***** These experiences, and those of Others like us within the contact zone of UVU represent an important aspect of life inside the university culture. However, the administration and faculty members that are a part of the majority do minimal work to hear, understand, or recognize them. The following section explains why such stories of Othered experiences should be welcomed and how they could be used to improve the integration of diverse faculty.

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Repositioning Others and Redefining the Contact Zone At UVU, some Othering is explicit—like the parent calling about Elena’s appearance or the intense staring—while some is incredibly subtle—like campus being closed on Sundays. When a university, as a whole or within individual departments, hires faculty who add difference and diversity to the existing culture, it is their responsibility to help keep those employees from feeling oppressively Othered. Our first major recommendation, then, is for institutions of higher education to become deeply aware of their particular institutional culture as well as the local cultures of areas where employees are likely to live. An institution like UVU should be clearly aware of its own culture and not the “imagined community” many of us tend to assume about higher education. Unfortunately, self-examination can be just as difficult for universities as it is for individuals, probably more so. The LDS cultural dislike of negativity and conflict further complicate things. However, it is essential if the university wants to retain its diverse employees. Once a university has begun exploring its own cultural climate, our second recommendation is for institutions of higher education to provide new employees with safe houses so they can better navigate the contact zones. Pratt (2002) argues, “Where there are legacies of subordination, groups need places for healing and mutual recognition, safe houses in which to construct shared understandings, knowledges, claims on the world that they can bring with them into the contact zone” (p. 17). We argue that educational institutions need to provide such spaces for incoming employees. After providing safe spaces for Othered employees where they can discuss their struggles, both groups—dominant and Othered—could come together to construct more egalitarian contact zones. This second recommendation is especially important for institutions seeking to add diversity to their pool of employees. It needs to be recognized, though, that simply bringing diverse employees to campus isn’t the end of the work. That diversity isn’t going to make any change to the dominant culture unless those employees are provided space to recover from the battles inherent to contact zones. It would also be helpful to guide new employees through the acclimation process of the community at large. We were left to fend for ourselves when we came to UVU and have found it very difficult to find a place for us within the Utah Valley community. We have yet to feel any sense of home here. Given the belonging we both felt in our original homes, the dramatic shift has been incredibly disruptive. It places a stress on us that we cannot avoid and don’t know how to remedy. Providing avenues of access into local communities would go a long way toward helping new, Othered members of the university believe they can establish some roots. When institutions spend so much money on bringing employees to their campus only to let them fend for themselves, that money will be wasted

112  Elena G. Garcia and Ben G. Goodwin when those employees look for new positions because they cannot make a home. Providing safe houses to help employees learn how to navigate both the institution and the community, as well as providing egalitarian contact zones within which each group can come to new understandings about each other are two ways that Othered individuals can start to feel safe and valued. ***** Elena: Positive Steps In the inclusion committee meeting described earlier, another difficult question was asked: “What can we do to help Othered employees feel accepted by and connected to UVU?” This question was first met with looks of concern. We then started throwing around a few ideas, eventually concluding that there need to be opportunities to form relationships with colleagues across the university beyond committee work. With the effect of wards making it difficult for newcomers to form relationships outside of the university, socializing within the context of the university might be an interesting solution. There was a lot of excitement about the potential of such an approach.

Conclusion Ultimately, creating contact zones for diverse faculty means building “multicultural campus communities characterized by mutual respect and caring” (Gappa et al., 2007, p. 308). The cultural conflicts that arise need to be mitigated by a sense of security and protection created by the university. At UVU, this would mean that contact zone participants need to be respectful of the vast array of religious practices as well as lack of religious beliefs, in addition to other aspects of difference. If UVU does indeed want to recruit and retain diverse faculty, it needs to do such work. Closing our discussion, we want to ensure that we are not unfairly representing our institution as a hostile and intolerant place. It is, generally, a rather nice place to work. We have the wonderful luxury of working in the same department, our offices just a few feet from each other. We are encouraged to engage in a wide range of research, teaching, and service projects. The university as a whole has also provided us with opportunities to grow as professionals and to have an impact. Yet despite all of these positive attributes, the fact is that we have no reprieve from engaging in contact zones. As a result, we continuously consider whether we can make this place our home. It is our hope that by sharing our experiences and suggestions, both institutions and those seeking a place at those institutions will more carefully consider the impact local culture has on their futures.

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References Brooks, J. (2010, August 15). I’m not LDS, and I live in Utah County: What is up with this place? Retrieved from http://askmormongirl.wordpress.com Canham, M. (2012, April 17). Census: Share of Utah’s Mormon residents holds steady. The Salt Lake Tribune. Retrieved from www.saltrib.com Canham, M. (2015, April 22). Mormon political clout in Utah: Republicans say it’s just right, but Dems say LDS faith has too much. The Salt Lake Tribune. Retrieved from http://saltrib.com Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, The. (2016). What is a ward/stake/ branch? Retrieved from www.mormon.org Dumas-Hines, F. A., Cochran, L. L., & Williams, E. U. (2001, September). Promoting diversity: Recommendations for recruitment and retention of minorities in higher education. College Street Journal, 35(3), 433–441. Gappa, J. M., Austin, A. E., & Trice, A. G. (2007). Rethinking faculty work: Higher education’s strategic imperative. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Harris, A. P., & González, C. G. (2012). Introduction. In G. Gutiérrez y Muhs, Y. Flores Niemann, C. G. González, & A. P. Harris (Eds.), Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women in academia (pp. 1–14). Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Henry, J. Kaiser Family Foundation, The. (2015, September). Birth rate per 1,000 women ages 15–44. State Health Facts. Retrieved from http://kff.org Kessler, M. (2011, October 20). ‘Fitting in’ as a non-Mormon in Utah. St. George News. Retrieved from www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2011/10/20/%E2%80% 98fitting-in%E2%80%99-as-a-non-mormon-in-utah/#.Vq6ZjvkrKUk Key, D. (2002). Safe houses and sacrifices: Filling the room with precious riches. In J. M. Wolff (Ed.), Professing in the contact zone: Bringing theory and practice together (pp. 102–118). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Penrod, D. (2002). “Can’t we all just get along?” When a college community resists the contact zone. In J. M. Wolff (Ed.), Professing in the contact zone: Bringing theory and practice together (pp. 166–196). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Pratt, M. L. (2002). Arts of the contact zone. In J. M. Wolff (Ed.), Professing in the contact zone: Bringing theory and practice together (pp. 1–18). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Saad, L. (2012, August 3). Heavily democratic states are concentrated in the east. Retrieved from www.gallup.com/home.aspx Seifert, T. A., & Umbach, P. D. (2008). The effects of faculty demographic characteristics and disciplinary context on dimensions of job satisfaction. Research in Higher Education, 49, 357–381. Shim, E. (2014, June 27). The median age of marriage in every state in the U.S., in two maps. Retrieved from http://mic.com/articles/92361/the-median-age-ofmarriage-in-every-state-in-the-u-s-in-two-maps#.bSyEzyO8J United States Census Bureau. (2015, August 31). Utah. State and County Quick Facts. Retrieved from http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/49000.html Utah Valley University. (2015). History of the University. Retrieved from www.uvu. edu/visitors/aboutuvu/history.html

9 To and for Whom Am I Speaking? Reading and Teaching AfricanAmerican Literature Outside of the United States Kimiko Hiranuma Author’s Note This research was supported in part by a grant from MEXT/JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 15K16700.

Introduction Every time I tell people that I study African-American literature, they say that the fact I am studying it is great, interesting, and wonderful. I agree with them. Yet what exactly is “great, interesting, and wonderful” about my studying African-American literature is rather ambiguous. I am a Japanese woman living in Japan, and my native tongue is Japanese. I teach at a college in Japan, and, therefore, my students are mostly Japanese, and my classes are often conducted in Japanese. I write and publish both in Japanese and English. I write in Japanese because as a Japanese scholar and teacher, it is necessary for me to be able to conduct research and teach in my native tongue. I write in English because I need to prove that I am intellectually articulate enough in the original language of my research subject. Proof of fluency in English is nowadays mandatory, as it also shows that you have caught up with global academia. Of course, the original intention of writing and publishing in English is that you want to communicate your idea to a wider global audience. But writing in your second language while you are required to teach and write in Japanese could easily be overwhelming. Moreover, in Japan, teaching and conducting research in Japanese tends to be prioritized over doing so in English, to prove your scholarly status. Given these contradictory factors, my scholarly contribution to academia is very difficult to judge because of my status as a Japanese scholar of an American subject, living and working outside of the United States. I am not saying my situation is unique. I am one of many non-American scholars who live outside of the United States and study a subject related to the States. Yet the existence of scholars like me is rather unknown because opportunities to have our voices heard tend to be limited by language use and geopolitics. It is undeniable that English proficiency is one of the minimum conditions for scholars to achieve renown. In global academia, your academic

To and for Whom Am I Speaking?  115 achievement is judged in terms of your works done in English, while your works in your native tongue are virtually unknown to most of the readers in the Western hemisphere. The fact that there are scholarly works on AfricanAmerican literature done outside of the United States sounds remote as well as exotic because of this issue of language and global academia. Beneath the surface of globalized academia, in which diversity is taken for granted, there exists a hierarchy of language: if you do not write and publish in English, the significance of your works is likely dismissed. The researcher’s own background as a non-American scholar working on an American subject could have significance in such a situation. You are foreign to the very subject you are working on, which ironically makes you interesting as a scholar. As one of the world’s major literary contributors, American literature attracts many students, including those who are not natives of the United States. One can say that literature offers representations of a certain culture in a certain society, and therefore one might learn the cultural nuances of the “Other,” which is oftentimes crucial in bridging differences between two or more cultures or societies. The problem is that when a non-American studies American literature, an uneven power dynamic, rather than a mutual cultural exchange between the student and the Other, can emerge. Indeed, studying American literature imparts the values of American culture, the global standard of cultural capital, the unshakable hierarchy of the English language, and the inevitable reality of global capitalism, as well as erects academic values and standards against which a student’s degree of competence in global academia is judged. In other words, for students outside of the United States, studying American literature reveals their own Otherness rather than that of the Other whom they had sought to discover and acknowledge. As they study American subjects, they find that they are outside of the original discourse; they do not have a background in the Western tradition, language, and society that are the subjects of criticism. They are foreign—they find that they are outside of Western academia. Well, then, why do I study African-American literature? This chapter is about my complex relationship with African-American literary studies, in which I happened to find one of the most important challenges that any human being can face and which should be taken seriously as each individual’s own problem: the issue of human dignity and yet-to-beachieved love and peace in the world. The way I approach African-American literature is slightly quirky because of my ethnicity, nationality, gender, and native tongue. Taking myself as an example, I will discuss how scholars of African-American literature outside the United States who study the marginalization, discrimination, and “Othering” that are often the subjects of that literature, feel themselves “Othered” in the very process of studying it. By delineating a lesser-known corner of academia in this global age, I hope to reveal the problems and challenges we have to face in twenty-first century academia, and to portray how my narrative could help build a new cornerstone of academia in the age of globalization.

116  Kimiko Hiranuma

The Power of Empathy: Others’ Fascination With the Othered First, let me begin with my narrative: how I came to be a student of AfricanAmerican literature. My personal background here will show the ways in which a certain genre of literature and its criticism attract an unexpected readership. In my case, it was my relationship with African-American literature, a literary genre of the “Other” in one of the most prominent bodies of national literature—a minority literature in the United States—that gave me the opportunity to contemplate the overall power dynamics in global academia. My first encounter with African-American literature was with Professor Azusa Nishimoto, who taught at the university where I did my undergraduate degree. She was there once a week as a guest lecturer, teaching African-American women’s fiction. In Professor Nishimoto’s class on AfricanAmerican women’s literature, students learned how to analyze and interpret texts written by many African-American writers, in which are embedded implicit and explicit critical views on the social, historical, and political situations surrounding blacks in the United States. For me, learning the history of African-American literature and its criticism with a focus on race and ethnicity was different from reading and learning about the United States and appreciating some of the world’s greatest literature and thought. The class also taught critical race theory, one of the most important discourses of the Other among cultural critics, which critiques the exclusionary and blind nature of the authoritative majority. There is not enough space here for me to explain how much I learned from Professor Nishimoto’s class and how it gave me a new scope of understanding when reading literary texts. But I will submit that reading representations of race and ethnicity in AfricanAmerican texts with a critical point of view is an act of unveiling layers of social and historical problems. What I learned gave me the insight necessary to examine how racism and oppression can degrade a certain group of people. This was the first time I had touched upon the important role of literary criticism in revealing political insights and attitudes within literature. My reading experience of African-American literature also allowed me to appreciate other genres of writings on racism and the history of oppression in the United States. The way society alienates certain groups of people and the trauma they have endured were things I felt responsible to study and transmit to others, even though I, as a 20-year-old Japanese student, did not know how or to whom I would speak. As I look back, I see two reasons for my fascination with African-American literature and its criticism. The first was the newness to me of race and ethnicity as analytical concepts and critical race theory in cultural criticism. This new analytical tool had the power to delineate the complex intersections of social oppression represented in the literary texts, and it forced me, as a reading subject, to become involved in the act of interpretation. At this

To and for Whom Am I Speaking?  117 point, I was not yet familiar with the cultural, social, and historical background of the United States; I had to tackle every single sentence in those texts I read in order to grasp the meaning of them fully. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed how I could unfold the meaning of words and narratives in the texts, and contextualize those within the wider scope of US history. Interestingly, I believe that I became an attentive reader because I am not a native speaker of English. English as a second language continuously challenged me to pay careful attention to every detail of the texts I read, and therefore it consequently trained me to be critical. In other words, a sense of being Othered by the English language forced me to engage myself with the very texts I was reading as a non-native English speaker. This experience taught me the significance of studying African-American literature; it was not simply learning the majority culture—American culture—but rather actively thinking about and criticizing the marginalized experiences, and their contexts, of the Othered in texts written by Americans. The second reason for my fascination is a by-product of the first. I found that reading for the undercurrent of Otherness in African-American texts, with the help of my new analytical concept of criticizing its social, historical, and political background, was also a way to empower the reading of self. Realizing that I, as a Japanese woman, could empathize with AfricanAmerican subjects was a tremendous discovery to me, however insolent that may seem now. The process of identifying with the characters in the texts is complex and arbitrary. When reading African-American literature, I did not envision myself as a black person. It was rather that I empathized with the sense of being marginalized, oppressed, and alienated. It had more to do with the familiar pains that I felt as a woman in Japanese society where traditional gender roles still exist. Applying literary theory to AfricanAmerican texts indeed reflected the reading self—me, myself—as a marginalized Other, which gave me an opportunity to contemplate my own state in the world. As a Japanese undergraduate studying literature in English, African-American literary study provided me with a tool to analyze the text as well as the world I lived in. I became aware of subtle and oftentimes unconscious prejudices people have, the state of being a woman, and class differences within Japanese society. Language, texts, and the act of criticism taught me how this experience of Otherness works in relation to my research subject, African-American literature, and myself as a Japanese student. The concept of Otherness is appealing for many non-American students of American literature because it gives them a solid sense of being a reading subject as well as the experience of empathizing with another Other. I do not mean that minority literature is easy; indeed, the challenges minority authors face and the missions they embark upon are very difficult and not yet resolved. But it is easier in the sense that the proximity of the scholars to their subject is closer, however illogical that may be. The experience of being marginalized in global academia overlaps with their subjects’ experience of being marginalized in the

118  Kimiko Hiranuma United States. Of course, the context of marginalization and oppression in minority literature of the United States is very much different from the one in which we non-American scholars find ourselves. And it is a risky analogy to make—we are not, after all, minorities in the United States and do not share their history and situation. Yes, there is similarity in underlying social structures between the subjects we study and ourselves, but the reality of oppression and actual condition of being marginalized are quite a different matter. Yet again, more and more non-American scholars are working on minority literature of the United States, and one of the important reasons for that is this interesting and problematic analogy. Simultaneously looking at Others and being Othered themselves, scholars of minority literature outside of the United States pursue their research—and I am one of them.

To and For Whom Am I Speaking? Reading African-American literature in the university classroom eventually led me to pursue degrees in English. During my higher education, I went to the United States specifically to study African-American literature. I attended the University of Rochester as an exchange student and later enrolled in the MA program at the Graduate School of Rutgers-Newark. After receiving my degree from Rutgers-Newark, I decided to go back to Japan to work on my PhD. This decision seemed quite reasonable to me, since at that time, I envisioned myself eventually teaching African-American literature to Japanese students. However, as I endeavored to acquire knowledge of African-American literature, I gradually understood the complicated nature of my relationship to my research topic. One aspect of this was the problem of power dynamics in academia, which expresses itself in relation to both audience and the Other in a global context. The problem of audience cuts two ways. First and foremost, there are no texts that do not anticipate their readers. African-American literature also has intended readers, and they are sometimes more specific than those aimed at by other literary genres. One of the most important AfricanAmerican thinkers, and the author of the milestone 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk (1999) W.E.B. Du Bois famously stated, “all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of purists” (782). Du Bois’s use of the term propaganda sounds overtly political today, but he insinuates a more general sense of mission. Implicitly criticizing the concept of art for art’s sake, Du Bois claims that African-American literature has a mission to achieve, and it is this mission that makes the literature of African-American writers meaningful and that contextualizes it within the American literary canon. There have been, of course, heated arguments about whether art is propaganda or something more than a political tool in African-American literature and criticism. And I do believe that Du Bois did not simply claim that art should be political and that artistic value should be judged against its effectiveness as propaganda. However, more important here is that what

To and for Whom Am I Speaking?  119 is at stake in African-American literature cannot be understood without the historical and political context of the United States. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1989) claims, “Unlike almost every literary tradition, the Afro-American literary tradition was generated as a response to eighteenth-and nineteenthcentury allegations that persons of African descent did not, and could not, create literature” (25). The sense of mission in their works is, indeed, one of their most appealing characteristics because it concerns the voice of the oppressed, which is a specific yet universal experience of human beings. Nevertheless, when this universal experience of human beings is stated as a specifically African-American experience and has a specific intended audience, the texts unconsciously eliminates certain groups of readers. Even if this is the case, this aspect of African-American literature gives insights that are still beneficial for every one of us in the twenty-first century. Frederick Douglass’s undaunted spirit, Harriet Jacobs’s feminist writings, Charles W. Chesnutt’s dilemma of black intellectuals, Du Bois’s articulation of the “soul” of black people, the artistic flowering of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, African-American writers of the twentieth century, particularly the highly influential trio of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, as well as the emergence of African-American women writers—every one of their works had a mission and a powerful message to convince the world to strive for a more humane society. Furthermore, an important characteristic of literary criticism is that it reveals this sense of mission diachronically as well as synchronically; it is diachronic because the issues and challenges are continuously changing throughout the history, and synchronic because the essential problems of the humanities remain common within those changing issues and challenges. The significance of literary works speaks to contemporary readers and reveals that what was at stake in the past continues to be a challenge. Contemporary readers can reflect on the shadows of the past and then recontextualize those obstacles and problems within the present. Reading and studying African-American literature especially allows us to do this: connecting the past to the present, and then envisioning the future. Here I have written “past,” “present,” and “future,” but whose past, present, and future am I referring to? Most of the time, the unconscious embedded within texts written by African-American writers envisions, in a broad sense, the social restructuring of American or Western society. I do not neglect the fact that the scope of contemporary African-American writers and critics is broader than the American continent. Yet the more I, as a Japanese scholar, study African-American literature, the more I am perplexed by their use of the pronouns “we,” “us,” and “our.” No matter how I engage myself with the issues and discourses in the texts, I am certainly not African-American, and therefore I am not one of “us” to which they are referring. The gap that non-U.S. scholars face is our juxtaposed but not synchronized positions relative to AfricanAmerican texts. The second problem with audience is rather simple: I am also a scholar who needs an audience. What happens if the scholar’s subject

120  Kimiko Hiranuma is specific to a certain nation, which is not their own, and largely conducted in the language of that nation, also not their own? To and for whom am I speaking? Unifying the positions of scholars outside of the American scholarly tradition, the concept of Otherness and its use in the study of African-American literature and other minority studies provide insight into literary studies. For scholars outside of the United States, literary theory has an interesting way of reflecting ourselves as Othered while reading the Others’ narratives. This binary situation becomes a problem when I find myself wanting my voice to be heard. The power dynamics of academia clearly make little of scholarship from Asia—the other side of global academia—when it comes to the subject/object of humanities whose traditions lie in Western academia. And this is no exception in African-American literary studies. Still, research-wise, I can write and present my papers in English in order to reach a larger audience. The lesser-known reality is that I often have to travel overseas to present my papers at international conferences, but also write in Japanese to maintain a presence in the Japanese academic community. Balancing these two tasks has been my main focus during the past couple of years. In doing so, I have learned the difficulty of defining myself in academia. When I speak about African-American subjects, I have to state my opinion as a Japanese scholar looking at the United States. This especially happens when I present my papers in the States. My Japanese-ness (though there exists no such thing called Japanese-ness) has to come into my work if I want my voice to be heard by the Western audience. This is precisely because I am outside of Western academia; in order to get inside—or at least talk to the people inside—I have to claim my Otherness and allow it to support the meaning of my research. And what about my teaching African-American literature to Japanese students? Is that not “great, interesting, and wonderful?” Yes, certainly it is. Yet when most of the students can barely breathe after I assign 30 pages of reading from an original text (written in English, not the Japanesetranslated version of an African-American work) for the next week’s class, it is clear that my experience of teaching African-American literature in Japan is different from that of teachers in the Unites States. I am not disparaging my students by pointing out their level of fluency in English. I am saying that there is a long way to go before they can actually study literature as a subject in a foreign language. As a non-native speaker of English, living outside of the United States and growing up in Japan, one first has to learn English as a language and become fluent, be trained properly as a literature student, and then acquire knowledge of the cultural, social, political, and historical backgrounds of a country that is foreign to him or her. After this process, the student is finally able to start studying AfricanAmerican literature. This is how much effort is required when English as

To and for Whom Am I Speaking?  121 a second language students take up subjects largely written in English. For me, luckily, the opportunity to study abroad was the breakthrough in this process of studying literature of the United States. But in order to study abroad, you have to be motivated, rich, and, most importantly, fortunate. And how many of us are fortunate in this age of globalization is an uncomfortable question. Now, it should not be too difficult to imagine that teaching African-American literature is more like teaching English and lecturing on US culture than engaging students with the intellectually exciting exploration of literary texts. As a teacher, I try hard to have my students achieve a certain fluency in literary criticism. It is, however, such a hard task, as explained earlier. One of the ideal teaching styles for me is to integrate what comes up in the classroom into my research. But I find it very difficult, and I often draw a line between teaching and research. Negotiating those two aspects of my professional life has been one of the challenges I face in Japan. Furthermore, this reveals a new problem we now face in this global age: the power dynamics of worldwide academia. A Japanese-English-French trilingual writer, Minae Mizumura urgently argues how the English language is becoming a standard of worldwide discussion, the dominant language in which to do anything important in the world. And this leads to a point where the concept of national literature declines in the face of English as a global common language. In her book, The Fall of Language in the Age of English (2008), Mizumura laments this “asymmetry” between English and other languages, predicting that sooner or later the pervasive power of the English language will sweep away the other languages and the cultural backgrounds that are associated with those tongues. However pessimistic this may seem, Mizumura’s argument pins down the uncomfortable nature of reading and studying (African) American literature. We as scholars outside of the United States cannot escape the power dynamics of academia in a globalizing world. Studying an American subject, even if it is AfricanAmerican literature, inevitably pertains to the complex relationship of language and culture, and to the way the world works. Teaching AfricanAmerican literature is difficult also in this sense because I have to teach “English” as a language in order to teach the “American” context because the language carries the culture on its back. Most college students in Japan, however, might need to learn the subjects of their own nation, such as Japanese history and literature. Thus being a teacher and scholar of African-American literature in Japan inevitably involves the experience of being Othered. The English language as a global standard and the power dynamics of global academia situate non-American/non-Western scholars in its hemisphere. In this situation, it is hard to answer the question, to and for whom am I speaking? Like a writer, a scholar needs to have a mission. Having a sense of being Othered in academia, my challenge is to find my mission from the outside.

122  Kimiko Hiranuma

From the Outside of African-American Literature: Otherness and My Narrative Interestingly, my narrative of being Othered in academia coincides with the challenges faced by African-American literature and its critics in the twentyfirst century. Recent tendencies in African-American literary criticism indeed touch upon the very challenge I am facing as a Japanese scholar. In his essay “The End of Black American Narrative” (2008), Charles Johnson discusses the limitations of identity politics and the difficulty of finding the next step in African-American literature and its criticism in the twenty-first century. He suggests, “The old black American narrative has outlived its usefulness” (43). Claiming that the old black American narrative is the “narrative of victimization” (33), in which the conflict is first “slavery, then segregation and legal disenfranchisement” (35), Johnson emphasizes the need to challenge racially designated literary genres. He redefines the meaning of literature as an artistic as well as philosophical tool for comprehending our lives in the contemporary world. Johnson also quotes from Du Bois’s “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926) and questions what the ultimate goal for AfricanAmerican literature is. What Johnson finds insightful in Du Bois’s lecture is that Du Bois raises a series of questions that point to the problem of identity politics in contemporary African-American literary criticism. Human races are not biological facts, but rather the ramifications of social and cultural practices that have caused countless tragedies throughout the history of humanity. The dilemma of African-American literature is that racial identity is something that is simultaneously desired and denied. African-American literary criticism’s ultimate aim is ostensibly to establish non-essentialistic literary criticism; however, paradoxically, it needs race to define itself. The way African-American literature became a genre—with the writers’ ancestry defining the group—and how other generic characteristics were considered subordinate came to be problematic in the late twentieth century. Gene Andrew Jarrett (2006) argues that African-American literature is anomalous and capable of exploring various themes other than race. Werner Sollors’s (1999) study on interracial literature pushes the boundaries of African-American literature. Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) reminds us anew of how complex and continually changing the field is by historicizing the notion of African-American literature itself. Discussions of African-American racial identity and its problematic relationship with the formation of the literary canon indeed share some of the issues surrounding international scholars I mentioned earlier. The scholar of African-American literature has a deep understanding that the history and experiences of African-Americans are very unique and racially specific ones. Yet it is also true that at the heart of those African-American experiences lie lessons of the utmost importance for humanities. This dilemma for the scholar of African-American literature naturally overlaps with my

To and for Whom Am I Speaking?  123 experience as a Japanese scholar who studies the Othered of a major country. Like the challenge in today’s African-American literary criticism, I have to move from my bewilderment of being Othered in academia to a new understanding of this Otherness. Toni Morrison’s (1989) astute questions apply to the challenge in global academia: The question of what constitutes the art of a black writer, for whom that modifier is more search than fact, has some urgency. In other words, other than melanin and subject matter, what, in fact, may make me a black writer? Other than my own ethnicity—what is going on in my work that makes me believe it is demonstrably inseparable from a cultural specificity that is Afro-American? (19) What Morrison asks us does not only apply to African-American literature, but also to contemporary issues in overall academia. We must examine what and who is the Other we are talking about and how the experience of seeing the Other as well as being Othered can have an effect on our thoughts and conduct. As I strive for a better way to negotiate my research and identity, I find it important to acknowledge my Otherness in global academia not within the frameworks of advantage/disadvantage or positive/negative. The experience of being Othered in academia is a condition from which I can see my research and teaching as something both inside and outside. I am inside of academia because, when I engage myself with the problems of my research subjects, I am everywhere in the world—like now, writing about myself in English, in Japan, to an English-speaking audience. I am also outside of academia because I always carry my nationality, ethnicity, and gender on my back no matter what language I speak or which subjects I work on, and therefore I consciously keep a certain distance from Western academia. This sense of duality gives Otherness a new meaning: it is not a concept that divides inside from outside, but rather it is the condition that each of us should keep in our minds as a scope of critical thinking. Furthermore, this sense of duality, the experience of being inside and outside, allows me to examine not only African-American literature but also other problems and issues in global academia with a critical mind-set that overarches subordinate concepts in humanities. I say Otherness is a critical mind-set because it is not a single and constant critical approach, but rather the larger framework in which I situate my work. With this critical mind-set, my work will not be simply “a work by a Japanese scholar” or “a work on African-American literature”—it will be my work as well as the Other’s work, in which the complex power dynamics of a global world will be traced along with my research subject. By weaving my narrative with the concept of Otherness in AfricanAmerican literature I have tried to situate my research and myself within a

124  Kimiko Hiranuma worldwide academic context. In so doing, I have found myself overlapping with as well as differing from the writers and critics I have studied until now. I have, hopefully, revealed the relationship between non-American scholars and the cultural representations of the United States as their research subject. This relationship is complex, difficult, and indeed interesting in terms of thinking about the power dynamics within academia in a global context. As I wrote earlier, American literature, and especially minority literature such as African-American literature, as a field of study has an important role in the twenty-first century in terms of envisioning a better world. Again, I believe that what Morrison (1997) says in her essay “Home” teaches us the importance of racially specific history and experience that simultaneously appeal to our universal humanity: I have never lived, or have any of us, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a world, one free of racial hierarchy, is usually imagined or described as dreamscape—Edenesque, utopian, so remote are the possibilities of its development. . . . I prefer to think of a-world-in-whichrace-does-not-matter as something other than a theme park, or a failed and always-failing dream, or as the father’s house of many rooms, I am thinking of it as home. (3) We can perhaps come close to the world Morrison talks about here—a world where any kind of boundaries among humans disappear—by keeping Otherness in our minds whenever we read, think, and speak about anything that concerns the humanities. The changing proximity between myself and African-American literature and its criticism embodies the dynamics of academia, and therefore the Otherness I discuss here will continuously remain fluid. My mission is to keep inquiring into this complex yet exciting configuration from inside and outside, patiently waiting for the time when I can enter the “home” of which Morrison dreams.

References Du Bois, W. E. B. (1926). Criteria of Negro art. In H. L. Gates Jr. & N. Y. McKay (Eds.), The Norton anthology of African-American literature (pp. 777–784). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1999). The souls of Black folk. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Gates, H. L. Jr. (1989). Figures in Black: Words, signs, and the “racial” self. Oxford: Oxford UP. Jarrett, G. A. (Ed.). (2006). African-American literature beyond race: An alternative reader. New York, NY: New York University Press. Johnson, C. (2008). The end of the Black American narrative. American Scholar, 77(3), 32–42. Mizumura, M. (2008). The fall of language in the age of English (Nihongo ga Horobiru Toki). Tokyo: Chikuma-Shobo.

To and for Whom Am I Speaking?  125 Morrison, T. (1989). Unspeakable things unspoken: The Afro-American presence in American literature. Michigan Quarterly Review, 28(1), 1–34. Morrison, T. (1997). Home. In W. Lubiano (Ed.), The house that race built: Black Americans, U.S. terrain. (1st ed., pp. 3–12). New York, NY: Vintage. Sollors, W. (1999). Neither Black nor White yet both: Thematic explorations of interracial literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warren, K. (2011). What was African-American literature? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

10 From the “Third World” to a Third World? Tales of a Nepalese Graduate Student in the USA Madhav Kafle Introduction Thinking it would be useful for my academic job search preparation, I browsed through The MLA Guide to the Job Search (Showalter et al., 1996) recently only to find that it had virtually no advice for international graduate students like me. While this handbook might be now called dated, lack of materials that directly address the challenges of international students in English-dominant countries is a common trend. While diversity is glorified everywhere, omissions of a significant population from handbooks such as The MLA Guide are examples of a form of Othering as I will detail next. To that end, I narrate the academic challenges of a first-generation international graduate student studying Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) and Applied Linguistics in the USA. My story is of somebody who is from one of the Third World countries, Nepal, and who belonged to a supposedly “majority group” over there but is often seen as belonging to a minority group in the host country. To be more specific, I will share my conflicting subject-positions—i.e., marginal and not so marginal, created in my migratory academic journey. I will draw from positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) to reflect upon my own experiences as a majority belonging person from a “periphery” country trying to acquire academic community membership in one of the “center” countries—i.e., the USA. Positioning theory helps us to engage in contradictory discursive practices that a person from the periphery might have while migrating to the center (Wallerstein, 2011). Therefore, in this chapter, I discuss how a person belonging to a majority group might be positioned as a minority in a new country and can face contradictory subject positions. Possible strategies for negotiating such subject positions when one moves to a different locale and is subjected to a different set of socio-academic norms and expectations are also discussed. Specifically, I will narrate how the monolingual policy in the USA has undermined my multilingual repertoire and how I try to reposition myself as a multilingual subject to gain agency. In this chapter, I will analyze three major interrelated incompatibilities in my positioning created by a change in my membership (majority to

From the “Third World” to a Third World?  127 minority) status because of mobility, my concomitant insider and outsider position (teacher as well as learner) in the host country, and a disconnect between my ascribed and negotiated identities (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004). Next, I first present some vignettes from my narrative that showcase such contradictions and then analyze them from the perspective of positioning theory before discussing possible steps to be taken to successfully resolve such tensions.

My Identity as an English Teacher in Nepal As an English teacher in Nepal almost a decade ago, I enjoyed enormous respect both personally and professionally. Mainly because of the lack of a high-skilled workforce in English then in Nepal, the increasing demands of an English workforce, and a feverish craze toward English in Nepal in general, English teachers in Nepal, in comparison to other teachers, were perceived relatively better by the public. Hailing from a rural village, I was among the few people from my locality to major in English and get a graduate degree in it. Even though I am ashamed to admit it now, it also provided me more financial gain, as I could easily earn extra cash by tutoring students in private, which I believe is still a common practice in Nepal. Because of the almost automatic high status given to English in Nepal, I as a higher secondary school—i.e., grades 11 and 12—teacher in rural Nepal was often seen as a person having knowledge from the other world, a conduit of scientific knowledge from across the seven seas, and thus a potential contributor for regional/national development. Like many people in other “Third World” nations, Nepalese tend to see English as a passport to the “First World”—i.e., developed countries—and therefore the craze for English is insurmountable there. When the Maoist uprising1 was going on in Nepal, it was heard that the Maoist guerillas spared the English teachers so that they could make the teachers translate various documents to English from Nepali and vice versa. This explains the general positive perception of English teachers in Nepal. This self-serving narrative is just to juxtapose the identity change once I arrive in the USA and not to glorify that kind of treatment.

Status Change From a Norm Provider to a Learner in the USA However, the fame I had in Nepal did not last long after I arrived in the USA, where I felt that I was seen as a second-class citizen. A high-skilled English teacher in the Nepalese context, I was positioned as a second language learner once I began my second masters’ degree in TESL in the USA. All of a sudden, my authenticity as an English teaching professional was put into question; it happened not only because of others’ perceptions about me but also because of my self-perceptions. I describe how I was positioned and how I interpreted such positioning next.

128  Madhav Kafle In the early weeks of the fall of 2007, I had just initiated my graduate degree in TESL at one of the northeastern US universities with full funding provided by my teaching assistantship. I was quite happy that not only was my tuition covered but also that I would get a stipend to cover my personal expenses. My responsibility as a graduate assistant was to assist an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in a local elementary school nearby. I was excited to experience academic work on US soil. However, on the very first week of my assistantship, one of the teachers at that elementary school bluntly told me that I had an accent, indicating I could not belong here. I was already aware that everybody has an accent and took this comment as a form of linguistic discrimination. I became quite sad, but I did not respond to the teacher at that time, not knowing how to defend myself strongly. I have another anecdote from the same school after some weeks. One day one of the ESL students from the class I was assisting told me in class, to my embarrassment, “Mr. Kafle, you have yellow teeth!” Thankfully, the ESL teacher, whom I was assisting, came to my rescue and said something like “No, his teeth are better than mine. Why are you saying so?” Since this student was a fourth grader and a new comer from Germany, I would have disregarded her comment, but the way the teacher defended me made me think about why this white girl was saying this to me. While I never knew the actual reason, I thought that because I was a dark-skinned and thickaccented guy from a poor country, Nepal, maybe the kid was showing some sort of resistance to my presence in that ESL space where she might have imagined only native speakers (read white Americans) as teachers. Whatever the actual cause, nativeness came to my mind at that time as one of the prominent possible factors. Similar Othering incidents kept happening time and again, even after I had been socialized into the US academia for more than three years. I was now a graduate instructor as a doctoral student at another US university where I had my own classes and agendas to teach. I always have been a dedicated teacher and planned my lessons very well for the classes I was teaching in the United States as well. In fact, I had already taught three sections of the ESL writing course when another instance of Othering occurred. One day, I happened to run into one of the students who had dropped my ESL class in our shared teaching assistant (TA) office and realized something was not right with the student. The student seemed visibly distraught after seeing me and tried to avoid eye contact from me at all costs. He seemed quite ill at ease there. It soon turned out that the student had enrolled in another section of the ESL class taught by my colleague, who was also a non-native speaker of English but happened to be white. Until this point, I had not viewed this student’s dropping my class as significant, as students dropped/ added classes in the initial weeks of the semesters. While the student might have other valid reasons for switching the sections, my impression was that he had dropped my course because I was a “brown” non-native speaker. This is indeed a case of nativeness being conflated with whiteness: the

From the “Third World” to a Third World?  129 student seems to have taken for granted that all the white-skinned people are “native” speakers of English. One more narrative before proceeding would not be too much. In one of my very first publication attempts, the reviewer commented blithely that my writing contained a lot of traces of non-nativeness. He ended his commentary by giving me some sort of an order: “Make sure you check your writing with a native speaker before sending it back.” As a doctoral candidate in Applied Linguistics, I was now familiar with the literature that dealt with the issue of discrimination to non-native speakers of English (e.g. Llurda, 2004; Davies, 2013), and I knew that such a comment was totally inappropriate and professionally demoralizing, but again, I could not respond to this reviewer as I had wished because of fear of professional crisis. In fact, this kind of feedback from a senior reviewer shut me down for about two months, because I could not resolve this on my own. But I finally collected myself and shared the incident with my colleagues only to find out that it was a common weapon of the reviewers. One of my native speaker friends had actually received a very similar comment. This helped me to take the comment somewhat lightheartedly, but some damage to my positioning had already been done because of the traumatic experience. Next, I try to analyze why phenomena such as that mentioned earlier keep occurring by drawing on the framework of positioning theory, which helps us to understand how people position themselves while interacting with others.

Positioning Theory Davies and Harré (1990) define positioning as “the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines” (p. 48). In a discursive process, we assign ourselves a position and may ascribe a position to our interlocutor(s) while that might be happening from the side of the interlocutor as well. Positioning, therefore, is also at times referred to as identity, subjectivity, and subject positions (Abdi, 2011; Block, 2005; Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; de Costa, 2011). According to Davies and Harré (1990), there are two types of positionings: interactive (how individuals are situated) and reflective (how individuals situate themselves). While positioning is often considered a by-product of the interaction between people, it can also be enhanced by artifacts, practices, and systems, as they can at times represent interlocutors. Positioning and the process of Othering can have a symbiotic relationship. Positioning can be an effect of Othering and vice versa. Othering is often validated by a normative paradigm of binary epistemology (Said, 1979) and minorities are projected as the group(s) who should follow the footsteps of the majority without questioning it. Fundamentally, Othering happens as a projection of identity in the negation. It is defined in terms of what it is not. For example, “ESL/EFL learners are often constructed as the Other or

130  Madhav Kafle as members of traditional cultures conditioned by collectivism and respect for authorities” (Kubota & Lin, 2009, p. viii), thus not equipped well with individualism and critical thinking as in the West. Further, Othering is also caused by the nation-state framework academia tends to operate in the USA and elsewhere. Nation-state thinking frequently creates boundaries of a particular variety of language and attaches it to a geographical boundary. Next, the population that does not fit with the ideal expectations stipulated by the dominant group is labeled as “Others” who can neither belong to the language nor to the country. However, Othering is not a uniquely “Western” phenomenon. In fact, one can be an Outsider even in one’s original community (Canagarajah, 2001). Likewise, a person despite looking phenotypically similar and sharing the same language can still be seen as an outsider in some contexts. For example, Nero (2015), originally from Guyana, reveals tensions in her positioning while interviewing her Jamaican research participants, who had significant overlaps of geopolitical and linguistic background with Nero. Situatedness of the competing discourses should also be considered as part of positioning while analyzing narratives of Othering. As an international student from a Third World country, Nepal, which, despite its sovereign past, can now be said to be a postcolonial space. As a person holding the passport of that country, along with my personal outlooks, I am already bound to be ascribed by certain identities in general. At the same time, I might be strategically using particular aspects of my identities as befits the situation. Therefore, understanding not only the top-down structures but also the bottom-up practices in the discursive process would be essential. Reflective positioning is the way out to not let the bottom-up (micro) practices be ignored by the top-down (macro) structures as they wish. This highlights the need to explore possible multiple layers of marginalization of a person from the periphery. Overall, I hope this discussion of positioning theory will be useful in seeing any interactional context as a dynamic, discursive, dialogic, and power-ridden process.

Reflecting Critically About My Positions How should we look at the story of a person from the periphery when he tells it when he is at the center? As an international graduate student from a peripheral country working as an English language teaching (ELT) professional in a center country, USA, what challenges did I face and still face in terms of positioning? As I have indicated earlier, three focal points are essential to discuss the interrelated contradictions (tensions) in my positioning: a Majority to minority (mobility) b Insider/outsider, expert/novice (perception) c Ascribed versus negotiated identities (negotiation)

From the “Third World” to a Third World?  131 Relocating from Nepal to the United States prized me with downward mobility, as I became a minority right away. I was concomitantly seen both as an insider and outsider to the profession of TESOL: insider because I was an English teacher by profession and was still in that profession pursuing a graduate degree and outsider because I was almost always seen as an English learner by the community at large. As a corollary of this latter contradiction, there came a conflict in my identity as listed in the third point noted earlier. Even though I was ascribed an identity of an outsider or novice, I kept negotiating my identity as I could by trying to present myself as an expert. Now let us do a deeper analysis of this process in the following section. The first issue will be analyzed from the perspective of native-speakerism because the Othering I felt after coming to the USA is mainly because of my non-native speaker of English status. Next, looking at the macro-level—i.e., geopolitical context of the USA, where English only is the de facto language policy in academia—I reflect why I am perceived as having conflicting positions of insider/outsider and expert/novice. Finally, I outline some negotiation strategies to overcome such contradictory discourses.

Native-Speakerism The ideology of nativeness has thoroughly affected my life, including my studies, work, and professional activities. My aforementioned narratives ranging from initial days of my study in the USA to the present day attest to this fact. At various points, I was explicitly positioned as a non-native speaker, which automatically invalidated my authenticity and made me a perpetual learner. So why did this happen? It happened mainly because of the myth of language as a discrete entity connected with a particular community. As Morgan and Clarke (2011, p. 818) argue, in our modernist understanding of language, the identity of a speaker is often connected with “the ontological/existential status of languages and cultures.” Such connection then helps to create a fallacy that only native speakers are the authorities of that language. It neglects various other reasons people from other countries might be studying that language. While my authenticity as an English teacher might have been questioned at some contexts in Nepal, I was still considered an expert, thus an insider of the ELT profession. But the moment I entered the USA, I was positioned as someone not belonging to the country and its people in any way. My accents in both oral and written forms, which are different from Standard English, already tagged me as an alien, perpetually doomed to be a second language learner. Why was I perceived as someone to be avoided by ESL students in the USA? It is understandable that because of the attitudes pervasive in the society not only the perceived monolinguals but also the multilinguals themselves subscribe to the view that white native speakers are the ideal teachers of that language. In this regard, Shuck (2006) explains how the discourse

132  Madhav Kafle of nativeness and non-nativeness is normalized in US context equalizing nativeness with whiteness. In addition, in the case of some newly arrived ESL students, they might “naively subscribe to the native speaker fallacy, the belief stemming mainly from their experience with incompetent, barely proficient English teachers in their own countries” (Braine, 1999, p. xvi) as well. In fact, in terms of choosing teachers, I myself fell victim to this naïveté initially; however, I was able to develop a nuanced view gradually once I became a member of the TESOL organization and came to know through TESOL/Applied Linguistics literature (e.g. Davies, 2013) that nativeness was not the only factor essential for effective pedagogy. Thus it is ironic that I was considered an expert and my performance was rarely questioned when I was away from the center, but when I came to the center to gain more knowledge, I was treated as a minority with questionable agency.

English Only and Its Consequences The tacit institutional US policy of English only, which rarely values the multilingual habitus students bring, has at times made me feel excluded from academic interactions whether they took place in classroom discussions, departmental gatherings, or local and international academic conferences more because of the fear of not being intelligible than the unfamiliarity with the participation conventions. Thus one of the consequences of studying in an English only environment was that I initially felt alienated from the academia itself. To give you some examples, in my master’s classes, I sat there often times being submissive and taking a subservient role. I thought that there was some kind of deficiency in me. I was never able to finish the assigned readings, let alone reflect critically about them. Since the course goals were motivated by the frame of English only, the multilingual repertoire was rarely brought up in the discussion and thus remained hidden. The goal of language learning was to mimic the native speaker by all means. Here came my professional identity crisis: am I an insider to the game of TESL and Applied Linguistics or an outsider just trying to mimic the center? Can I ever portray myself as an expert of teaching English, or will I never gain legitimacy as an expert user? I have to acknowledge that I have not yet been able to resolve this tension fully, as my self-positioning indicates in the next section.

Self-positioning My self-ideologies also contributed to my own victimization as I was being complicit in how my identity was being ascribed as a non-native object. The inferiority complex always haunted me. My lack of confidence in the new land was caused not only by the new system here but also by other factors that I could not change, including my tiny physique compared to most of Americans. Seeing tall and healthy-looking bodies, their energetic

From the “Third World” to a Third World?  133 participation during class, and superb fluency in “their” language, my perception of myself suffered terribly. This was in fact not only an impression from others but also my own romanticization to some extent. I said to my inner self, I can never be that fluent, smart, and authoritative in the profession of ELT. While I have been used to the behaviors of the students I teach, I am still anxious about my positioning when I go to the job market this year. Despite all the toil and perseverance until now, I am ambivalent about my own competitiveness in the job market as studies still show that non-native speakers are discriminated by many hirers (Ruecker & Ives, 2015) based on their nativeness status. This sense of insecurity stems from nativeness being linked to multiple factors besides linguistic proficiency. My ambivalence is the result of two seemingly contradictory lines of thinking: language belongs to anyone who uses it versus how I can claim authentic knowledge of a language when I use multiple ones in my daily life. While I am expected to write in Standard English for my academic life—e.g., for the process of knowledge creation—at the same time, I have experiences that can be called translingual (Canagarajah, 2013), as my practice of using language does not neatly fit into English or Nepali. English, as a global language is used in all corners of the world: there is no question about this statement. However, do these users also have a right to delineate the nature of the language and its forms and meanings? This question begs many more questions. Next, I suggest some possible ways for gaining voice in such a scenario.

Steps for Gaining Agency While this sort of deskilling is not unique to me, as this has happened to many others in diasporic communities, my deskilling has many more ramifications in my identity than for other professions where language is not the key expertise. For people like me, whose expertise is decidedly linguistic performance, the pressure to publish in English seems to be higher than for other non-native graduate students for whom expertise is specific content knowledge and not language. Despite such realization, however, many students do not know early enough how to actively take part in their community of practice. It is therefore essential that novice students be socialized into the knowledge production process early in their graduate studies. This does not mean all the academic departments are turning a blind eye to the non-native speaker students’ needs, but it is often the case that program handbooks and policies only imply what is expected from the students in general and leaves the issue of how an international student like me can successfully navigate academia virtually unaddressed (cf. Vick, Furlong, & Lurie, 2016). So it is the graduate international students themselves who should decide when to act, as a sociocultural-mediated capacity to act or not to

134  Madhav Kafle act constitutes their agency (van Lier, 2009). They need to act to develop strategies of dealing with contradictions. One of the contradictions to be addressed urgently is while the professional organizations acknowledge that multilingual instructors will be better prepared to deal with the linguistic repertoire of the students to prepare them for the knowledge economy, we routinely hear that many advertisements require native speaker or nativelike proficiency as a precondition of application (Mahboob & Golden, 2013. This makes multilingual speakers anxious as the hidden message seems to be that they “need not apply” (Braine, 1999, p. 22). In my own case, in my early years of graduate study in the USA, because of my personal lack of awareness about the existence of caucuses on nonnative speaker issues, not to mention unfamiliarity with the American university education, immigration issues, and the process of knowledge production, I did not know where to turn to when I had conflicting positionings. I became familiar with various support groups and resources for the novice ELT professionals relatively later. For example, collections by Braine (1999) and Belcher and Connor (2001) portray stories of non-native academic professionals. Similarly, research has showcased that English-only policy does not fit the ethos of the increasingly diverse classrooms as well as the globalizing world (Horner, Lu, Royster, & Trimbur, 2011; May, 2014). Therefore, professional development of international graduate students in the United States should be taken with priority not only by the students themselves but also by graduate programs. Morgan and Clarke assert that taking part in the discursive process dialogically and framing issues from our perspective is the best way to have agency. Because “misrecognition and alienation are not only concerns/conditions of the mind but also of the social world” (Morgan & Clarke, 2011, p. 819), the exchange between the self and other is indeed crucial. Along the same lines, Norton (2012, p. 4) also points out the importance of dialog when she says that our identity (or positioning) is “discursively constructed and as always socially and historically embedded.” The discursive approach is also useful in understanding the power relations in cross-cultural contact situations (Williams, 2003). For instance, if I had not shared with my friends being told by the reviewer “make sure you check your writing with a native speaker,” I would have never been able to finish that publication piece, which might have hurt me for the long run. International students like me should not shy away from sharing the value of their perspectives in the knowledge-making process. The difference of perspective brought by international students can make the process more democratic if they take part in the disciplinary dialogs. To that end, I encourage all graduate students like me to share their narratives, as it is often on us to create helpful resources for ourselves. Our narratives would highlight the multicompetence we bring and enable us to transcend the narrow lens of native-speakerism.

From the “Third World” to a Third World?  135 In the late modern age of rapid change caused by ease of long distance connections, travel, and mass migrations not only of people but also of various artifacts, difference rather than commonality has become the norm. When difference is the norm, then contradictions and ambivalence might characterize our lives. In famous postcolonial scholar Bhabha’s (1994, p. 207) terms, the subject is split. Thus we are bound to live with conflicting values, identities, and norms (Canagarajah, 2012). As we live in a world where diversity is an everyday reality, transnational and cosmopolitan orientation is a necessity in all communities, including academic (Appiah, 2006; Horner et al., 2011). I have now come to understand that being proficient like a native speaker is not only unattainable (Ortega, 2009) but also impractical. Every person who does not participate aggressively in class is not in fact submissive and deficient (Morita, 2004); they are just negotiating their academic identities. In this light, our pedagogies, policies, and practices should be geared toward such orientations.

Conclusion While my story is primarily that of a graduate international student, I hope it will be useful to others with similar backgrounds. As I have tried to show through my aforementioned narratives, if international students are not to be felt unjustly Othered in the dominant countries, then their multilingual identities should be accepted and taken as normal. Without such a shift in treatment, it would be difficult to have ample availability of guidance in their academic career. We now know that international students’ mobility from the periphery to the center is going to keep continuing until the foreseeable future (Bhandari & Blumenthal, 2011). While such mobility is making the traditionally English dominant countries more multilingual, it is still the case that a particular brand of English is portrayed as having the highest value among other types of Englishes around the world. This has sustained the monolingual English-only policy and contributed to social inequalities. Since difference as norm is the current human condition, as I have argued in this narrative, cosmopolitan approaches can help significantly to make academia (as well as other communities) a safe haven for people of all races, colors, classes, sexes, genders, abilities, and nationalities. Given the sizeable number of non-native speakers, and with English now becoming a family of languages (Crystal, 2004), curriculum and instruction in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, as well as other areas, should be updated to reflect such multilingual reality.

Note 1 The decade long Maoist insurgency started in 1996 and ended in 2006. It was a war between the government forces and the Maoist rebels, who have now joined the democracy. More than 15,000 people lost their lives because of the war.

136  Madhav Kafle

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From the “Third World” to a Third World?  137 Morita, N. (2004). Negotiating participation and identity in second language academic communities. Tesol Quarterly, 38(4), 573–603. Nero, S. (2015). Language, identity, and insider/outsider positionality in Caribbean Creole English research. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(3), 341–368. Norton, B. (2012). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. Bristol, PA: Multilingual Matters. Ortega, L. (2009). Understanding second language acquisition. London: Hodder Education. Pavlenko, A., & Blackledge, A. (2004). Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Ruecker, T., & Ives, L. (2015). White native English speakers needed: The rhetorical construction of privilege in online teacher recruitment spaces. TESOL Quarterly, 49(4), 733–756. Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Showalter, E., Figler, H., Kletzer, L. G., Schuster, J. H., & Katz, S. R. (1996). The MLA guide to the job search: A handbook for departments and for PhDs and PhD candidates in English and foreign languages. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Shuck, G. (2006). Racializing the nonnative English speaker. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 5(4), 259–276. van Lier, L. (2009). Forward: Agency, self and identity in language learning. In B. O’Rourke & L. Carson (Eds.), Language learner autonomy: Policy, curriculum, classroom (pp. ix–xviii). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Vick, J. M., Furlong, J. S., & Lurie, R. (2016). The academic job search handbook. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wallerstein, I. (2011). The modern world-system I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century, with a new prologue. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, B. T. (2003). Speak for yourself? Power and hybridity in the cross-cultural classroom. College Composition and Communication, 586–609.

11 Worlds Apart A Third World Academic’s Navigation of US Higher Education and Citizenship Santosh Khadka Early Life in Rural Nepal I was born and raised in a small village named Jyamire in Eastern Nepal. I remained in that place until I was 16. Until the early ’90s, the village did not have any connection to roads and telecommunication networks, nor did it have any institutions of higher education and health care. We were five members in the family: my parents and three children. I had one older brother and one younger sister. While my father used to serve in the Nepal police force and had a lot of transfers to different places around the country, my mother stayed with us in the village as a regular housewife. When I was 5, we heard that our father brought in a second wife. Polygamy was illegal in Nepal even then, and a stepfamily is out of the norm and always a horror story for the affected families. That totally changed the dynamics of our family. He stopped sending cash to us and did not come to see us for two years. In his absence, our mother took full charge of the family. We children were still very young then. As a breadwinner for the family, our mother had to do the farming, feed the cattle, and take care of all of us, and she did all that alone. Our lives as kids were still OK because our mother was always there to provide for us. But one day, to our great shock, a police team came to our home and arrested her. We later found that she was charged with infidelity. As a police officer, my father was in power then, and he obviously wanted to remove her out of his way. For different charges, she was put to jail for three years, and as an infant, our sister spent her first few infant years in the jail with our mother. Our life saw many twists and turns in the following years. Our father did not show up; he obviously had his second family. Our paternal grandfather loved us, but he was a widower. Our paternal grandmother passed when our father was still a child, and our paternal grandfather never married again for the love of his young children. The old man wanted to integrate us in the joint family, but our only aunt with whom grandfather was staying in a joint family home never wanted to consider us as part of her family. Three of us—my brother, me, and our little sister, who joined us after our mother was released from the prison—were left to survive or die on our own. We

Worlds Apart  139 were all still very young—I was 6, brother was 10, and our sister was just 2 years old, but we had to do everything our mother did for us—cultivate fields, raise cattle, look after our little sister, and keep ourselves alive. I am recounting this story because this all had a serious effect on my education. When I was in grade 3, I had a hard time attending classes during farming and harvest seasons. After the second-quarter exam, I completely stopped going to classes because I was afraid I was missing too many. I did not attend any classes in the third and fourth quarters of that academic year. I had totally given up. But one day close to the final annual exam, my uncle’s daughter, who was a year younger than me but in the same grade, told me that I was still on the class roster, and our class teacher regularly called my name while taking the roll. I was delighted to learn that and went back to school just to sit for the final exam—and even with that gap, I topped the class for that year. My attendance was irregular throughout my elementary and middle school years for reasons stemming from our family situation, but I always did well in the class with self-study. My village only had a middle school then; when I reached grade 8, I had to join high school in the district headquarters, which required me to walk 2 hours in the morning to get to the school and 2 hours in the evening to get back home to the village. My brother was in grade 10 when I joined him in the high school and was preparing for his School Leaving Certificate (SLC) examination, a nationwide standardized testing notoriously known as an “Iron Gate.” Yet even then, I still missed many classes; in order to give my brother more preparation time, I stayed back home and shouldered everything, including taking care of our little sister. When he attempted and failed the SLC exam, however, he stayed back home and allowed me to attend school regularly; this had a magical effect on my performance. I topped the entire district in grades 9 and 10, and was all excited about sitting for my own SLC exam— but then came another turn in my life.

Migration to the Southern Plains One day, when I was in grade 10, our father floated the idea of migrating to Itahari, then a small town in Nepal’s Southern plains. He needed to sell the property in our village to purchase land there. We obviously did not have power to stop him—everything belonged to him. In no time, he sold everything, and we all moved to Itahari. I wanted to stay back in the village and finish high school because my father had no idea how transferring to a different school close to taking the high-stakes SLC exam would affect me. The SLC exam at that time tested content knowledge from both grade 9 and 10 for eight different courses in a 3-hour, sit-in exam for each course, but when I was admitted to a new school in Itahari, my father changed three courses for me in grade 10 without consulting me. With no other

140  Santosh Khadka options left, I studied all three new courses on my own, both from grade 9 and 10, but got generous support and guidance from some teachers at my new school when they knew that I did well in the second-quarter exam; as a result, I passed the SLC examination with good marks. When it came to choosing a major for college, I was in a dilemma. Given my marks, I thought I should pursue engineering, but my father and stepmother decided not to support my choice. For the engineering study, I had to go either to Dharan or Biratnagar, two neighboring cities, which meant leaving home. When engineering did not work out for me, I thought I would go for in the business or management field, but when the principal of my elementary school in Jyamire told me that he would offer me a job as a teacher upon completing an intermediate degree in English, I decided to specialize in English. I studied hard and was at the top of my class of 300. As a result, in my early intermediate second year (grade 12), one of my friends hired me to teach in his English-medium boarding school in the same town. I joined his school, deferring my dream of returning to my village to teach. I pursued my bachelor’s degree in English at the same campus while still teaching in my friend’s middle school. The next five years remained very productive for me. I topped each year I studied and started teaching in a reputed high school in the same city as a middle school teacher.

Moving to Kathmandu After completing my BA, I decided to move to the capital city of Kathmandu to pursue my master’s degree. I faced resistance from my parents this time as well, but I ignored their suggestion that I go to a local college and instead decided to join Tribhuvan University’s Central Department of English in Kathmandu for my graduate study. Unfortunately, I could not remain in the Central Department long; senior students who were dissatisfied with their final exam results burnt down the whole department, which resulted in the indefinite closure of the department. I was very worried after the incident and started looking for alternative institutions to continue my studies. I found that a Pokhara University affiliate, the Institute of Advanced Communication, Education, and Research offered MA and MPhil degrees in English. However, it was a private college, and its fee was quite high for me. I still visited the institute, liked their American model curriculum, and joined it with the support of my older brother, who by then was working as a police constable and making some money. In the very first week of my study, however, I landed a teaching job at an English-medium school close to my campus. Even with college in the morning and work in the day, I topped each of the four semesters and earned my MA in English degree with a dean’s list award in 2004. My life totally changed after earning this degree. I started teaching at Padma Kanya Campus, one of Tribhuvan University’s women-only constituent campus in Kathmandu. I also began publishing with Ekta Publication,

Worlds Apart  141 a top-ranked publishing house in Nepal. Within a few years, our team at Ekta published comprehensive bilingual dictionaries (Nepali to English and English to Nepali). In less than three years, I was teaching in top-tier graduate programs in Nepal, including at my own alma mater, while continuing to work in the publication house. Until that point, I had the impression that only rich people could go to the United States to study. I had, in fact, checked out some educational consultancies in Kathmandu for guidance, but each one wanted me to have savings of at least $50,000 per annum, as well as a huge annual income to prove my financial capability to fund my education in the United States, which I clearly did not have. Thankfully, however, I found that with my GPA, I could come to the United States with full-funding support. I prepared and sat for the GRE and TOEFL tests, and then worked on a writing sample and a statement of purpose. Once I had a full admission package, I sent it to six different graduate programs. I had applied for the fall of 2008, but the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL) offered me a teaching assistant (TA) position in the spring. I decided to grab that opportunity. The transition from Nepal to the United States was hard, but I learned a lot in the process. In a single semester, I learned what the expectations of graduate programs in the United States were and what pedagogical skills I needed to develop to teach at an American institution. I did well my first semester and was all set to be a writing instructor—but my academic career took another twist. As soon as the first semester was over, I heard from Syracuse University, in New York, that I was admitted to their top-ranked writing program and that I had been awarded an assistantship, which included tuition, medical insurance, and a monthly salary large enough to support a small family. I was not yet married, but was beyond thrilled by the news. I was also somewhat torn. I wanted to go to Syracuse, but I did not want to deceive the program at ULL, which brought me to this country in the first place. I broke the news to the graduate director; he was heartbroken. He wanted me to stay in the department, partly because he would have to find another candidate to replace me. But when I talked to my designated advisor, who was also the chair of the department, he happily wished me luck, because he knew that Syracuse’s writing program was outstanding and that my future prospects would be better there. With his approval, I moved to Syracuse. Syracuse’s program was rigorous and demanding. Coming from a different country and academic system, I struggled to catch up with the learning level of my fellow classmates, who came to Syracuse from some of the best schools in the United States. I remained silent in class most of the time, but nevertheless completed assignments and projects on time. I had similar challenges with teaching. I was not very interactive in the class the first few semesters, but slowly picked up the language fluency and the teaching techniques specific to the semester system in the United States. Both my PhD program and teaching experiences honed my academic and pedagogical

142  Santosh Khadka skills. I became more and more active and interactive, and by the time I was beginning my final dissertation work, I had taught both undergraduate and graduate courses, published multiple research articles in academic journals, and had developed my own area of research and scholarship. In my dissertation, I developed my own theory of teaching writing and experimented with it among diverse students in the US classrooms. When I was still working on my project, I was offered a job in an American university in the Middle East with an attractive package, but my advisor suggested that I not go outside the United States for a job, hoping that I would test the US market in the following year. By the time the job market opened the following year, I had finished the dissertation. I applied to multiple positions across the United States and Canada, and received more than 35 interviews, which were followed up by campus visits to multiple universities. At one point, I had four job offers in hand at the same time: one from a major university in Canada and three others from universities in Texas, New York, and California. I joined California State University, Northridge, in the greater Los Angeles area as tenure-track faculty, where I am also currently the director of the writing proficiency exam on a campus of 44,000 students. I have a fabulous campus community and an institution that I can be proud of. I love where I am now.

Visas, Permanent Residency, and Citizenship Study abroad in the United States for a Nepalese student begins not with an admission to an academic program and enrollment into courses, but with the US consulate trusting the applicant and granting him or her a student visa. Securing a student visa alone is a tremendous feat for many aspiring Nepalese students. The consulate looks at family, economic, and cultural ties of each applicant before making an adjudication on visa applications. As the US Educational Foundation in Nepal’s official website states, “Colleges and universities in the U.S. cost between $12,000 and $65,000 per year,” which is beyond financial capacity for many Nepalese families with an average per capita income, according to World Bank (2017), of $729.50 in 2016. Unless one gets full funding through scholarships or some kind of assistantship, earning a US degree remains a distant dream for many Nepalese students. I was lucky to receive full funding through a teaching assistantship, so getting a student visa did not prove to be an ordeal for me, unlike students who want to come to self-finance study. A student F1 visa comes with some restrictions: international students can’t work off campus; they can work only 20 hours on campus; their spouses, on a dependent F2 visa, can’t work; and international students must prove they can afford to bring their spouses and children to the United States. I was single when I first came to the United States, but I got married the following summer during my first trip back home. Upon returning to the United States, I was barred from boarding a flight in India on suspicion

Worlds Apart  143 of holding a fake visa. I was detained by airline security (Indian employees who worked for a US airline) and deported to Nepal; they had the courage to deport me because I was a Nepali citizen. While in detention, I cried helplessly. The airline staff asked for a bribe to expedite my deportation process, and even though the airline was clearly at fault, how could I challenge them on foreign soil? I had to go back to the American consulate in Kathmandu and reapply for the visa. Even though I was granted another visa—only after going through a regular visa application process once more—I took a totally different route to the United States to make sure that the episode did not repeat again. I learned from the consulate in Kathmandu after my deportation that airline security has no authority to deport a passenger in transit, that only immigration officers at the port of entry in the United States could deny me entry to the nation. Nevertheless, the airline did it, and they got away with it. When I got back to the United States, I demanded a refund from the airline for detaining me in India. They duly apologized for their wrongful action and complied. Yet no amount of money could compensate for my experience of being othered in a foreign land. The other tragic problem with my student visa was that my spouse, who was a practicing dentist in Nepal, was unable to work for nearly seven years after coming to the United States in 2009 until we were granted permanent residency in 2016. When we were married, she was the director of a dental wing of a large hospital in the second-largest city of Nepal. However, as soon as she landed in the United States, she was restricted to the role of a dependent wife because a dependent F2 visa does not allow spouses to work. She could not go back to school because we had no funds to pay for the expensive tuition fee for a dental school. Seven potentially productive years of her professional life were wasted in terms of her professional growth, even though her contribution to my academic and family well-being has been tremendous. We were blessed with a girl and a boy during my doctoral study, and I could dedicate my full attention to my studies because my spouse shouldered most of the household responsibilities. After I landed a job, I was sponsored by a work H1B visa initially, which allowed me to work for three years with an option to renew for an additional three years— but my wife still could not work or study because her dependent H4B visa also restricted employment. Luckily, my university sponsored permanent residency for us. After a long wait of 18 months, we both received green cards, which finally opened the gates of opportunities for her. She immediately attended a dental college and earned her degree and multiple dental certifications; she is now working as an instructor for multiple dental programs close to our home in Los Angeles. But none of that came to her easily. A decade of her most productive work life was put on hold, and her fate totally depended on my fate. What if I’d never landed a job? What if my institution had not sponsored green cards for us? What if our green card applications were not approved? I can’t even imagine the course our lives would have taken had those things

144  Santosh Khadka not happened as smoothly as they did. We would not be in the United States, even though both of our kids are US citizens. In fact, our lives would not be as stable as they are now for a multitude of reasons, some of which I will describe next.

Why We Stayed It may seem ironic, but after staying in the United States for five full years, the thought of returning home was painful for us. The primary reason was that both of our kids were born in this country. Another major factor was not having a secure job in Nepal and having no funds in reserve to start a new life in there. I started looking for a job as soon as I was halfway through my dissertation project. I wanted to land a job and secure a work visa before my student visa expired. The visa adjustment in the United States is a delicate and complicated process, and the transition from student to worker and then to permanent resident proves nightmarish for most foreign students and workers. I had heard all kinds of myths about the job market and was reeling under uncertainty. The dominant myth was that the search committees prioritize candidates based on race, nationality, and native language, and that committees preferred white, US American, and native English speakers as their faculty colleagues. Unfortunately, I did not fall into any of those categories. I was worried, particularly because I had no plan B if I did not get a job in the United States. I had no home in the capital city of Nepal. Though there may be opportunities for me if I were to return, it would take another 20 years of around-the-clock work to buy a home or property in the capital city at Nepal’s current pay rate. I was also hesitant to go back because of a separate myth about Nepali individuals staying in the United States. Friends and family back home assume that the United States is a super-rich country and any individual who makes it to the United States will be able to accumulate a lot of money, but my situation was completely different. I hadn’t saved much in my student life; getting married, renting an apartment, and nurturing a family of four on a TA stipend in itself was challenging, especially considering that my spouse was barred from working. We obviously had not been saving enough to start a new chapter in Nepal. I was desperate to find a well-paying job and applied for positions all over the world. My first job offer came from a school in the Middle East, and initially we were all very excited to make a move there. Before making a final decision though, we considered a lot of factors; the Middle East is closer to home and the job came with an attractive pay and benefit package, including health coverage, free school for the kids, annual holiday tickets for the whole family, and no income tax. However, as I further researched this opportunity, I discovered that it would have been a nice gig for some white dude who is a native speaker of English with a North American or British degree, but obviously not for someone with my positionality. I soon learned that I would, in

Worlds Apart  145 fact, be subject to othering by the othered communities in the West, something especially true for me as a Nepali worker in an Arab country. According to Al Jazeera (2016), Nepal alone sent close to 500,000 migrant workers mostly to Malaysia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia in 2015. The Guardian (2017), in an investigative piece, reports that Qatar is currently employing some half-million Nepali migrant workers in its infrastructure construction projects for World Cup 2022. These workers are being exploited to the extent that “human rights activists describe it as a form of ‘modern-day slavery.’ ” I would also have been put into the same box and treated as one of those migrant workers within the larger community—if not in the institution I would be working at—had I decided to accept the offer. I was particularly disheartened by an incident where a Nepali science teacher at Qatar Academy was arrested, imprisoned, and later deported amidst increasing international pressure over a heated exchange with his middle school students concerning stereotypes. As per a Washington Post article, seventh graders at the academy teased this teacher, saying he was a duplicate of Jackie Chan, a Hong Kong actor, because of his Mongolian features. He took it as a lighthearted joke at the beginning, but got agitated when the teasing continued and the level of harassment grew worse in the following days. Tired of the constant insults, he tried to explain what a parallel stereotype for these Muslim students would be by giving an example of how they would feel if they all were called terrorists for being Muslims. Through that analogy, he meant to explain the damaging effects of stereotyping, but his example was taken out of context when students reported it to the principal of the school and the principal, in turn, reported the incident to the religious police. In no time, the teacher was arrested and detained without an opportunity for clarification, and was later deported to Nepal. He escaped being imprisoned on the accusations of defaming the God amidst international outcry. The international pressure worked for him, largely because this individual had studied and worked in both the United States and Germany before working in Qatar. (Kafle, 2013). It’s hard to think about what his situation would have been had he not had all those alumni connections, and had he not had a high academic profile. This particular incident foregrounds the fact that othering and privilege are relative phenomena. A Muslim scholar or a student from the Middle East might feel othered and stereotyped in the United States, but the same individual might be privileged in her or his own communities relative to many other individuals who are the outsiders in their communities. My own case is not much different. I did not have to wait long before I received another offer from an elite Canadian university. I was over the moon and jumping up and down, not only because I had a job in hand but also because the university was sponsoring our permanent residency applications. The city we would move to was not going to be much different from upstate New York, where we were residing at the time. That excitement, however, was overshadowed by the

146  Santosh Khadka much greater excitement that came about after I received three other job offers from different universities in New York, Texas, and California. Canada was immediately off the list of finalists, not because it had issues, but because the United States had been our home. After I accepted the job offer in California, I applied for what is called an Optional Practical Training, which allows for taking temporary employment for up to 12 months; this meant I had 12 months to transition from being a student to being a worker in the United States. Because mine was a tenure-track job, my new school filed a work H1B visa for me even before I officially joined the faculty. I was thrilled to receive the H1B before starting to teach in the fall. The transition from being a student to being a worker was super smooth for me, but that does not mean the restrictions were lifted for my wife. After receiving our green cards, we were in line to receive American citizenship within a few years, but our visa journey, like everyone else’s, was not smooth sailing. It was tortuous for me and utterly damaging for my spouse. Our visa status always put immense pressure on me and made me highly vulnerable while it sucked ten productive years from my wife’s life. The US government must rethink and reevaluate its visa policy for spouses of foreign students and workers. Most other developed countries such as Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom offer work permits to spouses of their foreign students and workers, but it’s a shame for a country like the United States, which projects itself as the champion of rights and equal opportunities for everyone, to subject spouses (mostly females) of students and foreign workers to severe restrictions for years and years. This great country must stop treating international students only as cash cows and instead learn to treat them respectfully as human beings with similar dreams and aspirations.

Changing Positionality—From a Naive ESL Graduate Student to a Member of a “Model Minority” This arduous decade-long journey has changed my positionality and identity. The extent and degree of my being othered has changed, and I enjoy more privilege these days than I did when I began my graduate study in the United States. Though this could be true of all graduate students, that the degree of privilege changes with the change in one’s position, my case was drastically different than most of my cohorts and other fellow graduate students. I had done very well on the GRE and TOEFL tests, and had earned a place on the dean’s list upon completion of my master’s degree in English in my home country. I was also offered a teaching assistantship and assigned classes at a US university while I was still in Nepal. I started teaching regular first-year English classes as soon as I started attending classes as a graduate student at Syracuse University, but the English as a second language program on campus conducted multiple tests on my

Worlds Apart  147 English proficiency with tape recordings, interviews, and written exams. I obviously did well on written exams, but machine testing did not certify me as a fluent English speaker. What could be more ironic than this: a college English instructor can’t be certified as a proficient English speaker on the campus where he works. I was put through an English Conversations class before my accent was somewhat remedied. I don’t mean to downplay the importance of English Conversations classes; rather, I want to point out how the system quarantines and purges othered individuals and forces them to assimilate to the dominant norms. Once I completed this requirement, I began to research in the areas of intercultural communication, World Englishes, globalization, and other related areas of multiple literacies— a framework first introduced by a group of scholars collectively known as New London Group in 1996. In my dissertation work, I synthesized these fields with interconnected areas of rhetoric and composition, thereby theorizing a multiliterate composition framework, which I now regularly use to teach graduate and undergraduate courses. I published multiple journal articles based on that research and soon after also co-edited two collections on multimodality: Bridging Multimodal Gap: From Theory to Practice (University of Colorado Press, 2018) and Designing and Implementing Multimodal Programs and Curricula (Routledge, 2018). I am now an active scholar and teacher in the field, and I must acknowledge that my identity and standing has changed both here in the United States and back in Nepal. When I visit Nepal periodically, my friends and former mentors invite me for lectures, conversations, and workshops. The major university administrators and foreign educational foundations also extend invitations for talks and interactions. I feel a similar change in my standing in the United States, even though the general American public outside of my institution still can’t believe that a Nepali native can teach English at a major American university, my colleagues, friends, and students interact with me as respectfully as I do with them.

Typical Story of International Graduate Students in the United States As I described in a post for Transnational Composition Standing Group’s official website (2016), I should mention here that my story is not unique in any sense of the term. Like me, many international students struggle to actively participate in class discussions and group work not because they are incapable or deficient, but because the activity-based classroom in the United States is different than that of their home countries. Many students are systematically discouraged from speaking up in classes. In lecture-based British model classes, particularly in Asian and African countries, speaking up or expressing different viewpoints in the class is often interpreted as a disruption or, even worse, as a challenge to the teacher’s authority; therefore, maintaining silence in the class is seen as a virtue.

148  Santosh Khadka Like me, many international students struggle to complete assignments in the style expected in the US academy. I had done a number of term papers and an independent study in my master’s degree in Nepal, but those projects were not necessarily thesis driven and based on appropriate source use. So when I was required to produce thesis-driven argumentative essays with proper source documentation all at once, I struggled to meet the demands. It took a few years of training and immersion in the American academic system before I could compose something close to what professors saw as persuasive academic writing. In addition to various challenges of crossacademic adaptations, a whole lot of international students, scholars, workers, visitors, and their spouses and dependents have to tackle similar visa issues that we faced in our transition from being students and dependents to being permanent residents of this country. As such, my cross-border academic journey has been characterized by learning from trial and error, and by frequent intercultural, interlinguistic, and interacademic adaptations. I believe that my positionality speaks particularly to the position of many international students and foreign workers in American higher education. My double vision—as an outsider and an insider in relation to the American academy—can inform the struggles and challenges of members of many marginalized communities who dream of making America home for them and their loved ones.

References Bhabha, H. K. (1984). Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, 28, 125–133. The GDP per capita. (2017). The World Bank. Retrieved from https://data.worldbank. org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD Increasing number of deaths among Nepali workers. (2016, December 21). Al Jazeera. Retrieved from www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/12/increasing-numberdeaths-nepali-workers-161221093347701.html Kafle, A. (2013, May 9). Qatar jails a Nepali teacher on charges of insulting Islam. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/news/ worldviews/wp/2013/05/09/qatar-jails-a-nepali-teacher-on-charges-of-insultingislam/?utm_term=.4c0ec36a5982 Khadka, S. (2016). Navigating US academy. Transnational Writing. Transnational Composition Standing Group. Retrieved from https://transnationalwriting.wordpress. com/2015/01/26/navigating-us-academy/ Study in the USA: Introduction. (n.d.). The United States Educational Foundation in Nepal. Retrieved from http://usefnepal.org/eac-pages-24.html. “We’re cheated, first in India, then in Qatar”: How world cup workers are deceived. (2017, March 19). The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/ world/2017/mar/19/qatar-world-cup-workers-india-nepal-cheated-deceived

12 An Academic Imposter From the Working Class Emotional Labor and FirstGeneration College Students Nancy Mack “Hello. Dean’s office.” I was momentarily startled by how quickly the businesslike voice had responded. “Yes, umm . . . I would like to make an appointment to speak with the dean,” I stated as calmly as I could muster. “Please tell me who you are and what this is in regards to.” “I am Nancy Mack, a graduate student, and I need to know what my rights are because a faculty member has published some of my work in a textbook.” My pause was abruptly filled with a blunt, aggressive response from the receptionist, “Just who do you think that you are? You cannot make an appointment with the dean. The dean would never speak with you.” Who do you think that you are? echoed over and over in my mind. Someone finally said the words that I secretly feared almost every time I walked onto campus. I was stunned; I must have hung up the phone, but I have no memory of what I did next. It took several hours to recover and get some sense of why I had overstepped my place. I naively assumed that the graduate school would protect me or at least provide information about my rights. My only saving grace was that my humiliating mistake had happened over the phone rather than in person. I knew very well that I was unlike my fellow graduate students who were younger, drove expensive cars, and had parents with college degrees. I was working class, female, and a mother. Even my advisor who had children himself asked me if I was going to continue having babies or finish the PhD. The whole fiasco started while walking to my car after a graduate class one night, chatting with a public school teacher. She was participating in a grant headed by a faculty member in the department where I was a teaching assistant (TA). My friend opened her trunk and showed me the textbooks created by my faculty supervisor. I casually flipped through the pages, wondering why my supervisor had not mentioned the grant to me because I had been a public school teacher for ten years. I was shocked to see some of my writing inserted early in the volume. I really did not know what to do, so I did nothing. In the weeks that followed, I mentioned this problem to a few graduate students, one of whom must have told a senior professor.

150  Nancy Mack To my complete surprise, this full professor came to my home over the holiday break and convinced me that it was in my best interest to contact the dean. This powerful faculty member wanted to thwart the promotion of the junior faculty member who put the textbook together. The work in question was paltry—maybe a few paragraphs with an illustration that I had drawn about the composing process—not a grand scientific discovery with national import. The junior faculty member had excerpted part of a chapter that I had written for an in-house textbook for our basic writing courses. The professor, who was a respected scholar, revealed that the junior faculty member had met with publishers to market the textbook nationally. On the first day of the next semester, an administrative assistant tracked me down in the TA offices and insisted that the chair of the department had instructed him to escort me across campus to his office, which was located in the stately main quad. We took the elevator to the top floor and entered the expansive department office. The chair’s inner office was located in the dark back corner. The high ceilings and large doors made me feel very small and insignificant as I was ushered inside. I was directed to take a seat in front of an overly large wooden desk where the chair of the department sat, wearing a dark suit and tie. Without making eye contact, he crossed the room to the door, closed it, and positioned his chair to block the only exit. “Tell me about this phone call to the graduate office.” How did he know about that humiliating phone call? I had not told anyone. I needed to explain why I had called? Time was passing, and the exit was blocked. Defending myself, I started telling him about the in-house textbook that I had created for the remedial writing program. He listened impatiently for only a moment until he leaned forward and interrupted my bumbling explanation with an angry face and raised voice. “You were given a course release to create that textbook; therefore, the university owns all that material.” I was trapped in his menacing gaze. Frightened and intimidated, I was cornered mere inches from this powerful aggressor. For several moments, I sat in silence, hoping to somehow be spared from further attack. I was only a spectator to what would happen next. “You are never to speak of this matter again.” This whole experience felt surreal. Was I being assailed for making a single telephone call? Could a department chair really terminate my ability to speak about what had happened? “Do you understand?” My predator broke the silence, demanding my complete surrender. I meekly nodded in agreement. “You will never speak of this matter ever again,” he repeated his edict; then he leaned back, satisfied that this problem had been vanquished. He removed his chair from the door and returned to his seat behind the desk. I was escorted back across campus in silenced shame.

An Academic Imposter From the Working Class  151 Now, as a full professor with over 25 years of experience, I marvel at my naïveté. I ignorantly placed myself in between two warring faculty members. I knew nothing about the skirmishes that go on in tenure meetings. I was a peon in the world of academe. I knew nothing about pursuing a PhD. As a public school teacher, I enjoyed teaching and decided to continue taking courses after a master’s degree. I had grown up in a Midwestern, blue-collar, manufacturing town. My father was the son of immigrants; my mother was the daughter of an Appalachian widow, and both had never attended high school. Just prior to WWII, my family moved farther north when my father lost his job at a gas station. Barely surviving the Great Depression, my family forever lived as if we were destitute in preparation for future catastrophes. As the youngest child by over a decade from my brother, things were much better by the time that I started school in the 1950s. My greatest privilege was that my parents viewed education as a necessity—even for a girl—mainly because they reasoned that I might need to support myself if I ever got divorced. I attended the poorest white high school in the city. The teachers put great effort into bringing elite culture to their Appalachian and Eastern European students. They created cultural requirements for students to pass in order to graduate. We memorized and recited passages from Shakespeare and identified the artists of classic paintings. We were reminded almost daily that we had no “culture.” Not only were we uncultured but also we were deemed unclean. In elementary school, we endured inspections for dirty fingernails and grimy necks, and in high school, the male teachers related melodramatic tales of being attracted to women who appeared beautiful from a distance until a smile disclosed bad teeth or closer inspection revealed run-down shoes. I was one of the very few from my school to enter college. Being a firstgeneration college student left me clueless in an alienating academic world. Owning the label of working class came much later after reading texts in graduate school. I read sociological studies such as The Hidden Injuries of Class (Sennett & Cobb, 1972), Blue Collar Aristocrats (LeMasters, 1975), and Worlds of Pain (Rubin, 1976), and I also found the works of Tillie Olsen. Soon after, I read everything that I could find by Paulo Freire, Antonio Gramsci, and Ira Shor. Reading theoretical texts about emotion as well as the narratives of working-class academics continues to be very helpful both personally and professionally (Dews & Law, 1995; Oldfield & Johnson, 2009; Muzzatti & Samarco, 2006; Tokarczyk & Fay, 1993; Welsch, 2005). Marginalized academics often relish texts and critical concepts that help to process the emotions that make us rage in indignation or cower in shame as entitled colleagues discount our scholarship, demean our work with students, and ignore our service. Studying the imposter phenomenon has helped me to understand the emotional labor of being rejected by the academy. Beginning with an examination of the imposter phenomenon, this chapter discusses six strategies for developing agency in academic identity

152  Nancy Mack formation: perception, memory, thinking, emotion, imagination, and will. These six psychological processes interconnect to offer marginalized teachers and students hope for survival in the academy.

The Imposter Phenomenon and Self-Regulation Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes (1978) first studied the imposter phenomenon (IP) of female students and career women. Since that time, there have been several studies about IP in clinical psychology and social work, primarily involving self-assessment questionnaires. Subsequent studies found that men were equally vulnerable to feelings of fraudulence with more correlation for blacks, working-class, first-generation, and international students. In academic settings, those new to their positions tend to be more prone to IP: first-year undergraduates, graduate students, pre-tenure, and assistant professors with the intensity possibly increasing with higher achievement. Feeling like an imposter can provoke a number of contradictory fears ranging from a fear of failure to a fear of success. Fearing exposure from failure can manifest in workaholic tendencies, perfectionism, saying yes to all opportunities, pleasing superiors, being overly affable, status seeking, gaining more awards and degrees, or applying for more prestigious positions. Fearing exposure through success may lead to self-doubt, procrastination, avoiding risk, attributing success to hard work and luck, refusing to share, avoiding attention, not applying for advancement, or dropping out. Laboring in fear is a daily experience for both teachers and students who identify with groups that have been historically excluded from the university. A recent experience underscored how pervasive the fear of not being accepted is among working-class students. As part of a college readiness grant, I brought students from five school districts to campus to view multimedia research projects by college writers. The high school juniors were selected because they were at risk of not attending college because of poor grades and a lack of support at home. Most of their parents had never attended college and were working in factories or on farms and did not value higher education. When asked if they had questions, the students sat in silence after the first two presentations. When the third speaker asked them to raise their hands if they were afraid of going to college like he was, every hand went up, and the students finally felt safe enough to ask questions. Fear is a major barrier for students who do not feel entitled to a college education. First-generation college students often leave the university not because of a lack of funds, grades, or self-confidence but because of a fear that their language skills are viewed as deficient by their professors (Penrose, 2002; Adair, 2001). Understanding the emotional labor of marginalized students is important for getting them to campus and helping them to survive. Psychologists prefer the term imposter phenomenon to that of imposter syndrome because the term does not imply mental illness. Diane Zorn

An Academic Imposter From the Working Class  153 (2011) made the distinction that IP is not intra (individual) nor interpersonal (social) nor interactionist (fixed) but more of a dynamic, co-emergent phenomenon that is enacted (p. 264). Zorn studied graduate students who identified numerous factors for IP feelings. Taking a wider perspective, Zorn objects to separating the self from the environment, thus creating a false dichotomy. Instead, Zorn theorized IP as historical and embodied, formed in continuous, reciprocal interaction with the environment. Thus IP feelings accrue over time, leaving conscious and unconscious traces so that more than the immediate experience has influence. In academic settings, Zorn attributes IP feelings as emerging from affectively charged interrelationships such as “aggressive competitiveness, scholarly isolation, lack of mentoring, and valuing product over process” (p. 291). Zorn placed hope for changes in shared values, habits, and practices (p. 302). Although large-scale change takes time, those who self-identify with IP need more immediate strategies for survival. I would not frame these strategies as cures, because feelings of fraudulence or exclusion may never completely go away, especially if the person identifies with a group that has suffered long-term historical oppression such as in the case of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. Even direct evidence of success does not deter feelings of exclusion. In The Burden of Academic Success, Allison Hurst (2010) identified the psychological and social stresses that successful working-class students suffer when attending a middle-class public university. Based on extensive interviews, Hurst categorizes students’ feelings as being a loyalist, renegade, or double agent for their own class cultures, identities, and communities. Change may happen as more of us take root in the academic social system; however, sheer numbers are no guarantee that a marginalized group’s status will change. Those of us who do manage to make a career in academe need to put effort into helping others develop strategies for survival. Analyzing how to respond to IP necessitates understanding the mental processes for forming an academic identity. When I consider my survival in academe, I value being able to critique troubling experiences and developing into my own version of a working-class academic. I had to learn how to regulate emotional responses in order to take agency in my identity development. Agency is much more than learning to quash or control one’s emotions. Rather than self-control, I prefer self-regulation, a notion forwarded by Lev Vygotsky (1987), a cultural-historical psychologist. Vygotsky (1997) held self-regulation as the highest form of psychological development. Selfregulation happens when the learner regulates behavior through a dynamic process of education and self-reflection versus external or even internal control. The problem with viewing IP in terms of control is that any phenomenon that is co-emergent or co-created in a social/historical context has too many factors to be totally controlled. Vygotsky (1987) lectured about the processes of perception, memory, thinking, emotions, imagination, and will as significant for children to develop self-regulation. In the sections that follow, I draw parallels to these mental processes to describe the role of

154  Nancy Mack self-regulation in response to IP. Vygotsky’s project can be viewed as similar to the postmodern crisis of agency in subjectivity. I connect Vygotsky’s scholarship to current critical theories about emotion to consider how working-class teachers and students can gain emotional agency within a dynamic, hierarchical academic social system. Because the academy is both selective and competitive, those of us who belong to unentitled groups suffer even more stigmatization than we would in the larger society. Within the isolated ivory tower, difference stands out in stark contrast to the dominant majority. No wonder many of us vacillate between wanting to cry and feeling like punching someone. Critically analyzing emotion is essential for the health and well-being of those who are marginalized within the academy.

Critical Perception, Memory, and Thought Critical perception is an important step in the process of self-regulation. Naming IP feelings and self-identification with an oppressed group/s can be extremely meaningful for placing emotion within a larger social system rather than inflicting blame, shame, or guilt upon the individual person— much as I did in the discussion about the incident at the beginning of this chapter. Rather than beating myself up over what had happened, I needed to critically analyze the cultural and historical forces that influenced my emotional distress to best take agency to decide how to feel about the situation. When I have discussed IP with students and colleagues, many have been relieved that a name exists for feelings that previously were nameless. Naming is a powerful act akin to Paulo Freire’s (1973) conscientization in which literacy becomes more than learning words; it becomes a political act of understanding oppressive social dynamics and limited situations. I would never name students’ feelings or identities for them, because the act of naming can be a form of agency or self-identification. Each individual has the right to accept, disclose, or assert identification when, where, and how he or she chooses. A hurtful moment can be when another person labels someone and that label is a misrepresentation or has not been accepted by the person being labeled. Identify formation is a complex, developmental process. Cultural stereotypes make it difficult to accept a negatively portrayed identity. Paul Fussell (1984) maintained that most Americans would self-identify as middle class rather than working class. Becoming familiar with individuals who have struggled to create a more positive version of a reviled identity for themselves can be helpful. As part of a memoir writing, I presented several of my identities as overlapping circles. I am a first-generation, working-class person, teaching in my hometown. I also map out that I am a wife, mother, and stepmother, caretaker of ill relatives, academic, person with Parkinson’s, and so on. My goal is never to force students to share their identities but to open the door to thinking about identities as multiple, developing, conflicted processes. I introduce identity as a way to analyze experience critically (“Critical

An Academic Imposter From the Working Class  155 Memoir,” 2014). Applying critical thought to memory is easier than analyzing present conflicts. We can see connections and patterns from our current vantage point that were not apparent at the time. As part of revising their drafts, I have students consider their chosen event across time and space. Students list how they viewed the event at the time, how others viewed the experience, how previous generations might have responded to a similar experience, and how that experience connects to the present and foretells the future. Then students consider which local values influenced the event, how the event fits within American culture, and how the event relates to other cultures and global problems. Not all of these prompts provoke insight but some may. Memoir should be about assigning meaning to memory through critical analysis, thus bringing perception, memory, and thought together. Certainly, critical analysis involves thinking, but Vygotsky’s (1962) discussion of thinking centered on language and the interaction between thought and words. For Vygotsky, studying inner speech or inner thinking is crucial. Vygotsky described the process of thinking turning into speech as a movement through a series of planes in which the thought developed as words and syntax add form and shape to create meaning. This process begins with volition or some type of disequilibrium that is described as affective: desires, needs, interests, problems, and emotions. This impetus may not make it through this inner process and may remain unformed and unspoken. Vygotsky (1962) included a poem by Mandlestam as an epigraph to a chapter about inner speech that described voiceless thoughts as returning to the shadows’ chamber (p. 210). Perhaps, this is what happens with some of the embodied feelings that Zorn (2011) described. We feel the unease and anxiety, maybe even the anger or frustration, but cannot put these feelings into words or fully comprehend them. Vygotsky (1962) referenced goaldirected consciousness as mainly a language process. We have to think with words and their meanings that come from culture, never being free of the ideology that preserves the status quo. Understanding how ideology inhabits language helps to explain why it is such a Herculean task to think ourselves out of the stereotypes that are bestowed upon us by a dynamic culture that is always changing to support the hierarchy of the status quo. Academic concepts and analysis do have a crucial role in helping students think about and process the feelings that they have always wanted to put into words, but it is not the only source of wisdom. Working-class students are not empty vessels when they enter the academy; they already think critically about their daily lives. Seeking a higher education does not necessarily give them a way of thinking that they previously did not possess. Education can build on existing critical analysis abilities, but it may also reinforce stereotypes that obfuscate oppression. Academics should always be mindful of the wisdom of others, including those who staff or clean departmental offices. Separating perception, memory, and thinking happens only in analysis and not in actual practice. Along with naming, narrating, and analyzing

156  Nancy Mack memory, the psychological processes of emotion, imagination, and will help us to self-regulate emotions, imagine alternative possibilities, and take agency in our lives.

Emotion and Imagination Emotion is central to understanding the feelings associated with IP. Emotions are connected to perception, memory, and thinking. Notably, Vygotsky (1997) categorized emotions as intellectual and rational, versus discounting emotion as irrational, something to be neutralized and kept out of the classroom. Vygotsky (1997) emphasized that the education of emotion is no less important than thinking (p. 106–107). Vygotsky always characterized emotions as developmental. The key point here is that emotion is not fixed and can be informed through education both inside and outside of school. We are all educated by cultural expectations for emotional labor that reflect socio-historical norms that might have us all perform pleasant, untroubled emotions much like the fictional Stepford Wives. Sociologist Burton Clark (1960) marveled that the cooling-out function of higher education could socialize working-class students to drop out of the university, blaming themselves for their failure to fit in. To some extent troubling emotional responses such as anger, indignation, or even confusion can be viewed as an early warning system that indicates a need to examine critically the conditions that may not be easily identifiable. Feminist scholar, Alison Jaggar (1992) defined troubling emotions as “outlaw emotions”: Conventionally unexpected or inappropriate emotions may precede our conscious recognition that accepted descriptions and justifications often conceal as much as reveal the prevailing site of affairs. Only when we reflect on our initially puzzling irritability, revulsion, anger, or fear may we bring to consciousness our “gut-level” awareness that we are in a situation of coercion, cruelty, injustice, or danger. (p. 161) A critical analysis of emotional labor from the past or the present must be connected to future acts in order to foster emotional agency. Imagination can propose alternatives for hurtful or alienating emotional responses. It takes a great deal of creative imagination to feel differently. Micalinos Zembylas (2005), an educational theorist, proposed that the cultural normalization of emotion could be resisted by increasing critical awareness of emotional labor for the purpose of gaining agency. Zembylas envisioned emotional labor as potentially positive or negative depending on how emotion is used to negotiate subjectivity. Instead of viewing emotions as springing from individual personality or dominant ideology, Zembylas (2005) forwarded that the critical analysis of emotion brings the potential “to think, feel, and act differently” (emphasis p. 22).

An Academic Imposter From the Working Class  157 In an academic environment, the agency to act differently necessitates creating a space where survival is possible. My colleague James Zebroski (2011) cited Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and social anti-structure in his discussion of the social formation of gay authorship. The idea is that one can exist betwixt and between, not totally outside the institution or on its edges but in the cracks within that social structure itself. The unentitled can exist both individually and collectively. To do so, one has to learn a great deal about the institutional structure of the academy and how it supports the larger social structure. The existing academic structure reproduces elite scholars who start off in wealthy homes with parents who went to good schools and provide guidance to help their children succeed. My awareness of being less than others grew incrementally from examining how my school experiences differed from those more privileged. Our school gym was so small that players had to turn their feet sideways to throw the ball back inbounds. We were shocked to find that a suburban school had multiple gyms and a pool. I remember entering their spacious locker room and being angered to the point of wanting to violate its pristine beauty. Decades later, after finding out more about other graduate programs, I realized that my advisor had accepted far too many students from marginalized groups, so this meant that we were never coached for conference presentations, publications, or the job market. My dissertation and books have no acknowledgments pages—at one point, I considered having a “no thanks” page where I listed all those who placed barriers in my way. However, this would only personalize limitations that were inevitable parts of the social structure. Like other marginalized academics, I have had to struggle to understand the system and my response to it in order inhabit a place to survive and flourish. More than simply opposing, resisting, or accommodating the forces that work against me, I have to create a fertile crack in the institutional concrete in which to take root, blossom, and bear fruit. Being ruled by angry or depressed emotions negates my ability to have positive feelings about my work or myself. Vygotsky (1987) made an interesting connection between emotion and imagination. Differing from realistic thinking, Vygotsky proposed that imagination uses thinking to serve emotional interests. Vygotsky illuminated emotion’s connection to both thought and imagination as essential for the highest psychological function: that of will. Imagination makes possible the ability to think, feel, and act differently. In the next section, the decision to act differently is connected to willful agency; however, before getting to that point, I want to digress in order to imagine how some aspects of IP might be viewed positively. Imagine for a moment that some of the behaviors associated with IP have benefits. Characterizing IP as entirely negative can serve to heap more shame upon those who brave places like academe where they represent groups who are not entirely welcome. Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld (2014) analyzed the rise and fall of cultural groups in America for three traits that they believe are necessary for a group’s success: a superiority complex, insecurity, and

158  Nancy Mack impulse control. Their book, The Triple Package, provides both statistics and individual cases to support the claim that these combined traits are necessary for group success. The narratives of group superiority foretell a legacy of hard work, perseverance, intelligence, or other positive traits that lead to success. Insecurity is explained in terms of self-consciousness motivated by scorn from other groups, fear for survival, and family sacrifice or expectations. Impulse control is discussed as willpower and perseverance, even when there is repeated failure. The authors also point out the negative extremes of such traits but maintain that together the traits permit individuals to rise to a place where they can break free of constraint. I do not believe that there is a place that is totally free of limitations, but I agree that certain narratives of success through perseverance and hard work can sustain those from marginalized groups. Working-class students tend to believe in the efficacy of effort and hard work. In response to my scholarly productivity, a colleague attributed my success to “a good work ethic” rather than intelligence. Without the entitlement of a more prestigious university, advisor, or family legacy, I do rely on hard work—with the knowledge that hard work can never open some doors. Success narratives of hard work, rugged individualism, and meritocracy should not be unilaterally condemned as naive. Janet Bean (2003) explained that a closer examination of how workingclass students make use of these narratives may reveal a different function. Platitudes about success may be consciously constructed and intentionally revived in times of stress and despair. Hope is an enabling fiction. Teachers and students alike want to believe that getting a college education will make things better in large and small ways. Imagining a hopeful future must be tempered with critical thought that does not overly glorify the struggle. As university student services coordinator Sheltreese McCoy (2015) emphasized, hope should be balanced with truth about the struggle: We, as student advisers, often play the game of it-will-get-better for first gen, students of color, queer and trans students of color, homeless and poverty-stricken students, because they have that degree. And we do this without providing the facts—the balance—about how difficult it can be to make it better when you come from a place of no safety net of family support. That diploma is not a panacea and creates lots of cognitive dissonance. I know it still does for me, and I am over a decade past my undergraduate years. My hope and call to all who work with students, particularly minoritized students, is to balance the hopeful messages with the unadulterated honest messages that will truly show students the journey before them—and that class struggle never stops. (n.p.) For teachers, the hard part is knowing how to deliver both messages: how to authorize students to write their own narratives while at the same time

An Academic Imposter From the Working Class  159 revealing that those scripts have already been written by an oppressive social system.

Will and Emotional Agency Beverly Skeggs (1997) traced how the working-class label originated in early nineteenth-century England as the middle class was rising (p. 36). The middle class needed a way to differentiate themselves from those who were not gaining economic ground, so the group one step lower was demonized as immoral, dirty, and degenerate. Awareness of the social forces that inscribe subjectivity problematizes agency. We need more scholarship about agency to help working-class students create an academic identity as other than imposter, traitor, or conflicted between both groups. Vygotsky (1987) wrote about will rather than agency; however, his discussion of will interconnected the mental processes of perception, memory, emotion, thinking, and imagination that generate willful action. Vygotsky’s lectures on these six mental processes revealed the trajectory of his intellectual project: the role of consciousness in self-regulation. The last section of Vygotsky’s (1997) book on educational psychology is titled “Life as Creation.” The chapter argued for subject formation as an ongoing life process that requires active, willful participation. Vygotsky (1997) ended his textbook for teachers with an analogy for life as a creative work of art (p. 350). Returning to emotion in the last sentence, Vygotsky (1997) suggested that humans should lift instincts to the heights of consciousness, stretching will into what is concealed (p. 351). Vygotsky turned to consciousness, reinforcing that emotions can be consciously intellectualized into willful selfregulation. Thus it is no surprise that for Vygotsky, self-regulation is about the development of metacognitive thinking versus controlling discrete behaviors. Self-regulation is about self-formation and becoming the person one wants to be. I interpret this whole last section as a call for what might currently be described as critical agency in one’s own subject formation. Similar to Vygotsky’s interest in self-regulation, a contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin (1995) delineated the role of the other to ethical answerability for one’s deeds. Empathizing with the exclusion of others can inspire acts of ethical social justice for the wrongs done to so many. Most of my ethical deeds are small daily acts with only the rare opportunity to perform larger ones. As Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner (1969) suggested, teaching can be a subversive activity that disrupts the status quo. Even as I struggle to survive within the hierarchical university, there are opportunities to help others who share a similar history of exclusion. As a teacher, I have developed a writing assignment that asks students to interview family or community members who have experienced life challenges so that these research projects are grounded in social issues from their daily lives. As an academic, I search for opportunities like this one to write about working-class academic identity and pedagogy. In brief moments of allegiance to my roots, I often include a vernacular phrase or profanity in academic presentations

160  Nancy Mack to emphasize my point or ground my claim. As a university partner working with a state grant, I sat through hours of meetings, watching funding being allotted to ineffective test preparation until I could suggest that we pay for buses for an inexpensive one-day field trip to a local university where one nontraditional student asked just the right question that allowed workingclass students to face their fears about attending college. Make no mistake, the results for such actions cannot be predicted and may take years to materialize. Initiatives geared toward education as the great equalizer can turn out to be a horrible waste of time—if not inadvertently hurtful. Administrative policies usually privilege cost cutting or may promote innovations that generate new barriers for marginalized faculty and students. Committees come with institutional constraints, and state mandates make it nearly impossible to derail draconian policies. Academic publishing favors those who come from elite universities and recycle the scholarship of their mentors. For these reasons and many more, the hope of agency requires perceptive awareness, reflective memory, critical thought, self-regulation of emotions, creative imagination, and conscious will to discover when, where, and how to take action.

References Adair, V. C. (2001). Poverty and the (broken) promise of higher education. Harvard Educational Review, 71(2), 217–239. Bakhtin, M. M., Holquist, M., & Liapunov, V. (1995). Art and answerability: Early philosophical essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bean, J. (2003). Manufacturing emotions: Tactical resistance in the narratives of working class students. In J. Dale & L. R. Micciche (Eds.), A way to move: Rhetorics of emotion & composition studies (pp. 101–112). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/ Cook. Chua, A., & Rubenfeld, J. (2014). The triple package: How three unlikely traits explain the rise and fall of cultural groups in America. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247. Clark, B. R. (1960). The “cooling-out” function in higher education. American Journal of Sociology, 65(6), 569–576. Dews, C. L. B., & Law, C. L. (1995). This fine place so far from home: Voices of academics from the working class. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Freire, P. (1973). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Fussell, P. (1984). Class. New York, NY: Ballantine. Hurst, A. L. (2010). The burden of academic success: Loyalists, renegades, and double agents. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Jaggar, A. M., & Bordo, S. R. (1992). Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology. In A. M. Jaggar & S. R. Bordo (Eds.), Gender/body/knowledge: Feminist reconstruction of being and knowing (pp. 145–171). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

An Academic Imposter From the Working Class  161 LeMasters, E. E. (1975). Blue-collar aristocrats: Life-styles at a working-class tavern. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Mack, N. (2014). Critical memoir and identity formation: Being, belonging, becoming. In R. Gatto & T. Roeder (Eds.), Critical expressivist practices in the college writing classroom (pp. 55–68). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. McCoy, S. (2015, September 14). To advisors of first gen students: Tell the truth. Classism. [Blog post]. Retrieved from www.classism.org Muzzatti, S. L., & Samarco, C. V. (2006). Reflections from the wrong side of the tracks: Class, identity, and the working class experience in academe. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Oldfield, K., & Johnson, R. G. (2009). Resilience: Queer professors from the working class. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Penrose, A. M. (2002). Academic literacy perceptions and performance: Comparing first-generation and continuing-generation college students. Research in the Teaching of English, 36(4), 437–461. Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. New York, NY: Delacorte Press. Rubin, L. B. (1976). Worlds of pain: Life in the working-class family. New York, NY: Basic Books. Sennett, R., & Cobb, J. (1972). The hidden injuries of class. New York, NY: Knopf. Skeggs, B. (1997). Classifying practices: Representations, capitals and recognitions. In P. Mahony & C. Zmroczek (Eds.), Class matters “working-class” women’s perspectives on social class (pp. 123–139). Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis. Tokarczyk, M. M., & Fay, E. A. (1993). Working-class women in the academy: Laborers in the knowledge factory. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Problems of general psychology. New York, NY: Plenum. Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). Educational psychology. Boca Raton, FL: St. Lucie Press. Welsch, K. A. (2005). Those winter sundays: Female academics and their workingclass parents. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Zebroski, J. (2011). Rhetoric, anti-structure, and the social formation of authorship. In C. Meyer & F. Girke (Eds.), The rhetorical emergence of culture (pp. 264–281). New York, NY: Berghan Books. Zembylas, M. (2005). Teaching with emotion: A postmodern enactment. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Pub. Zorn, D. M. (2011). Enactive education: Dynamic co-emergence, complexity, experience, and the embodied mind. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

13 An Academic From Behind the Iron Curtain Ligia A. Mihut

In the late 1980s, a visitor from England remarked in awe: “Romania is a surrealist country. You have nothing to eat but you wait in line for hours to buy books. What are books good for now?” “Survival,” I answered. —Carmen Firan, “Survival Through Culture in a Surreal Romania”

Unlike race, gender, or ethnicity, the category of social class poses problems since, as Julie Lindquist (2004) argues, it is challenging to define it with precision particularly when experiences marking a certain social status seem to be quite diverse. Despite this difficulty, the field of rhetoric and composition continues to be intricately tied to issues of class, explains James T. Zebroski (2006), and in our writing courses, we are tied to particular discourses in academic and professional spheres. Zebroski (2006) further explains that writing becomes “a vehicle for class mobility” with every instance when we bring into the conversation academic and specialized discourse (p. 515). My narrative proposes an analysis of class and literacy through the lens of an international scholar. I envision the category of class as a “contact zone”—as a site “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (Pratt, 1991, p. 34). To this end, I examine class through a series of polarized discourses—religious versus academic, working class versus academic, emotional versus rational or critical—that are often in conflict with each other and whose socio-political conditions need further unpacking. In this literacy narrative, I am concerned with class for the paradox that it presents—that is, of being both conspicuously visible and rather invisible in the field of rhetoric and composition. Lindquist (2004) explains that although writing studies have been preoccupied with adult literacy and gatekeepers to higher education, class has been “absent in conversations about teaching and learning in composition studies” (p. 189). Informed by recent studies on class and affective discourses, Lindquist (2004) also notes composition studies’ failure to understand class as an affective experience that leads to “actionable beliefs” (p. 191). Class has thus emerged

An Academic From Behind the Iron Curtain  163 in highly polarized discourses, casting academia against working-class students (Lecourt, 2006) and rational discourse against emotional language and experiences (Lindquist, 2004). Although the idiosyncrasy of my identity—low socio-economic status, international, multilingual, and blacklisted and prohibited to attend college on religious grounds during Romania’s communist regime—is evident, my narrative intersects on many levels with two group identities that have been rarely paired together: working-class academics (e.g., Rose, Sullivan, Villanueva) and international scholars’, often invisible, life histories (see Pandey; Sharma). There are places where the experiences I describe, from the marginalized status in school, to weariness of deciphering academic and cultural conventions, to financial difficulties resonate well with working-class scholars mentioned earlier. Yet my narrative also underlines in-between spaces and instability of socio-economic taxonomies across national and cultural spheres. What is coded as working class or professional class in one culture may not be in another so that international scholars may have their class status misread, or simply ignored because it cannot be interpreted well by people in the culture to which they have moved. This contingency on cultural and national contexts should also unveil that asymmetric power relations and categories of difference are bound and fluid. One’s marginal status in one context may translate differently in another setting, and class culture’s connectivity to other categories of difference, such as religion, political affiliation, race, gender, ethnicity, or citizenship, may have potential to make visible factors that shape academic and public discourses.

Little Narratives and the Politics of Disclosure In “Narratives of Literacy: Connecting Composition to Culture,” Beth Daniell (1999) traces a detailed history of composition with attention to the “social” orientation of scholarship and its role in shaping our understanding of literacy. Juxtaposing the grand narratives that moved our field toward more ethnographic and power-oriented studies of literacy with the little narratives, Daniell (1999) contends that the latter conceive literacy as “multiple, contextual, and ideological” (p. 403). Despite lacking the impact of generalizable theories, little narratives expose power relationships through “thick descriptions” (p. 403). Although still contested for their personal and presumably limited theoretical value, literacy memoirs are the little narratives. Literacy memoirs have permeated our field (e.g., Victor Villanueva, Richard Rodriguez, Morris Young) either in published theoretical scholarship or as pedagogical tools, but the social contexts that they index are crosscultural, yet rarely global. A few recent studies by Santosh Khadka (2013) and Ghanashyam Sharma (2015) address aspects of international scholars’ personal narratives in their studies. Khadka’s (2013) study illuminates the methodological choices of multilingual, transnational scholars who tend

164  Ligia A. Mihut to include personal narratives and often anecdotal evidence as legitimate sources of information in their work. Sharma’s (2015) study, featuring the literacy narratives of seven Nepalese scholars, advocates valorizing these social literacies not only for their diverse quality but also for the rich semiotic message that they carry. Bringing to focus the issue of technology in transnational contexts, Iswary Pandey’s (2006) “Literate Lives Across the Digital Divide” illustrates the severe discrepancy in access to literacy and technology despite individual ability to overcome limitations: “After all, the village I was born and raised in still has no electricity in 2005, let alone computer or Internet access” (p. 252). Coincidentally or not, the literacy narratives of transnational scholars are often steeped in political events that have critically altered the reality of those involved: Sharma (2015) mentioned his family’s refugee experience from Nepal to India because of an ethnic clash; Pandey documents his activism as a teacher in pre-democratic Nepal, and the political insurgencies and their effect on literacy education and technologies. Similarly, my story is deeply entrenched in the political events of the 1980s and 1990s in Romania behind the Iron Curtain. President Ronald Reagan’s charge “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” marks a powerful historical moment in the Cold War period. What is less known are decades following the official breakdown of walls in Eastern Europe, decades marked by day-to-day, week-to-week wrestling with social insecurities and fears between people, between family members, between neighbors, and, certainly, between citizens and their government. That past immobilized my ability to write and make sense of my literacy history. Dictatorship in Romania was built upon a social experiment that made communication between people dysfunctional. Surveillance strategies, and the recruitment of anyone willing to cooperate with the secret police in exchange for favors, turned real communication into whisper, silence, and/ or self-censorship. These unofficial communication strategies—similar to Lisa Lowe’s (1996) discussion of gossip as a “popular discourse that . . . displaces official representational regimes” (p. 113)—may be disruptive and possible oppositional to but not necessarily parallel to official forms of discourse. Thus my literacy history is filled with episodes of stifled communication and (self)censorship.

Behind the Iron Curtain My literacy education starts in Romania in the 1980s. I was 11 years old when official dictatorships ended in December 1989. Yet an empire of fear, surveillance, and 40 years of indoctrination did not disintegrate in a day, a week, or even in a decade. As a child, I came to understand political matters and class identification through the ways in which schools were used to social engineer the “new man”: a product of the anti-Christian, anti-religion, Marxist ideology. My parents’ profession seemed to determine the course of my life, my professional goals and all aspects of the social life. My father was a pastor in a Reformed Protestant church, and being

An Academic From Behind the Iron Curtain  165

Figure 13.1 The Romanian flag, 1989 Revolution. The hole in the center is the result of cutting out the old Romania coat of arms. It has become of sign of protest and solidarity against an oppressive regime

the daughter of clergy had severe implications for my education. A public religious identity—especially one affiliated with a church different from and seemingly antagonistic to the de facto church of Romania, the Eastern Orthodox church—posed lots of problems. Our family was blacklisted, resulting in stricter surveillance of phone conversations, interactions, and our family’s weekly mobility. Unlike other families who resorted to alternative news such as Radio Free Europe, our home had to be sterile to safeguard our lives. As the Romanian dictatorship allegedly strove for communist ideals, socio-economic elites and other nonconformists had to be monitored and, if necessary, eliminated. Our family tried to remain apolitical in order to preserve our safety. Unfortunately, our middle ground was shaky because certain groups, such as clergy, intellectual elites, political figures outside the Communist party, and particular ethnic groups were by the nature of their identification designated “enemies of the state.” To render this socio-political experiment successful, data about each citizen were harvested through formal and informal avenues. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery (1996) reported on Romanian political prisoner Herbert Zilber’s mention of the socialist system’s “production of files” that contained “real and falsified histories” (p. 24). These files turned into a forceful form of control of the regime that constructed “political subjects,” enemies of the state, and people’s lives were shaped by the production of these secret police files (Verdery, 1996). While indeed that was the Romanian government’s intention to document everything and indoctrinate everyone, in reality,

166  Ligia A. Mihut people developed tactics of survival through books, invisible networks, and alternative institutions, such as churches, literary societies, and foreign news outlets that allowed alternative voices to emerge even in the form of a whisper. In schools, teachers had specific mechanisms through which they gathered data for political purposes and official reports. In addition to the parents’ profession, political and religious affiliations were recorded in the official record book of each class, appropriately called the catalog. The catalog helped teachers classify their students into privileged and less-privileged slots. Because my religious affiliation overpowered the socio-economic status, the path to education was scripted. My siblings and I were prohibited from going to college and choosing professions that could influence others, such as teaching. We were considered dangerous—a threat to the homogenous class identity that the socialist regime tried to build. Thus our access to higher education was perceived as detrimental to the society at large. As a first grader, I noticed my teacher, who was otherwise a good neighbor, directing her attention to the children of doctors, of militia, and of other economically or politically privileged classes. With a child’s eyes, I saw preferential systems unfold before me. I learned that irrespective of my efforts to succeed in school, there had already been set a pre-established ceiling, and irrespective of my grades, I could only advance to an average position. The top positions had already been secured for the children of influential political subjects. Disheartened, I asked my parents about the length of studies they expected me to complete, since in first grade I was ready to quit school. School was a poorly orchestrated performance with empty recitation of chants and poems for the Communist party and its “beloved” leader with all the drills, dictation, and compositions about the joys of the socialist life. In French Lessons: A Memoir, Alice Kaplan (1993) recounts her French phonetician’s view of language and dictation: “Dictation is a police state . . . with grammar as the law. Dictation can ruin a child’s relationship to language” (p. 99). Even free-style compositions were a form of dictation. It was expected that our compositions would capture the so-called golden age of childhood, the sunny and unspoiled nature of our summer trips, and the perfection of the socialist life. The nights without electricity when we would do homework by candlelight, the empty stores, the scarcity of books, the rationed staples, and the hypocrisy and masquerade of TV programs reduced to two hours per day, of which at least one hour was dedicated to the praise of the Communist Party, constituted the real socialist life. This life, however, remained hidden yet engraved for a lifetime in our minds. Dictation as formal authoritarian discourse indeed altered my relationship with language. Dictation, formal discourses, and memorization drilled patterns of communication that would take years to undo. To this day, I weigh words. I examine them from every angle, before I decide whether I can adopt

An Academic From Behind the Iron Curtain  167 them as my own. I still resent language drills and standardized expressions, and often in order to grasp the meaning of certain words, I translated them in different languages as a means to recapture the nuances of particular words. I relearned words from my early education by consulting etymology dictionaries and the thesaurus. At times, I fear that I write in drills of language, that I regiment my words in patterns of discourse that are not my own. Nervously, at times, I still thirst for words, for an authentic voice of my own.

The Church and the Religious Community Despite the school’s encroachment on my life and its effort to subdue my identity, another site—the church and religious community—became a location for nurturing my incipient literacy education. In many ways, my church friends and the Bible became the first real teachers. Since many of my church friends were older, they were more knowledgeable about school subjects such as philosophy, psychology, and logic. These were required courses in high school curriculum, and my friends would have extensive discussions outside the confines of school. To a certain extent, they modeled and performed a culture of learning wherein one had to be well-read and able to engage in conversations on a variety of topics. I still remember my frustration upon hearing my friends talk about the four temperaments—choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic—and the embarrassment I felt about not knowing what those meant. As an 11-year-old, I felt the pressure to develop a vast knowledge about the world through reading and discussion of various texts. A memorable incident in my literacy education marks my first attempt to conduct a discussion derived from a close reading of a Biblical text. This would take place at church where, under the supervision of a seasoned woman leader, our groups of teens would gather weekly to read, interpret, and discuss passages from the Bible. Panic hit as I foresaw my potential failure in facilitating an intellectually stimulating conversation. Feeling resourceful, I thought I would resort to my father’s help for guidance. Yet the alternative of being exposed was more terrifying, so I decided to rely on my reading and interpretative skills, and, of course, on divine intervention. First, I selected a passage from my own weekly meditations. I read the text multiple times and focused on keywords. Connecting and meditating on the keywords, eventually, led me to discover a coherent frame and a fresh interpretation that I had not seen at my first reading of the text. As my first test as a rhetorician and rhetor was approaching, I was hoping for a less challenging audience. Despite my fear of teaching a group of 20–30 teens, older and well versed in critical thinking, philosophy, and pertinent interrogations, my first experience as a literacy coach was successful, or at least, our leader’s encouragement made me think so. Although I am convinced that she commended me for the spiritual value of my performance,

168  Ligia A. Mihut this experience represents a critical landmark, for it put me in direct contact with a text whose meaning I sought to uncover through deep analysis and textual cues. The church—as marginalized institution in Romanian society and in academia—and the Bible, a mocked and banned book of knowledge, created a space of legitimation where my inquiry of a Biblical text was allowed to thrive. This marginalization of churches and religious literacy is not new in US academia. Most notably, Beverly J. Moss (2003) remarks on the ways in which scholars have neglected “rich, complex literacy and language skills in use” in African-American churches (p. 3). In “Re-envisioning Religious Discourses as Rhetorical Resources in Composition Teaching,” MichaelJohn DePalma (2011) complicates the polarized, almost exclusionary, relationship established between religious discourse and academic inquiry. The problem, DePalma explains, is conceiving religious discourses as fixed and anti-intellectual and impossible to reconcile within the inquiry-based academic discourse. This category of difference—religious identity and discourse—becomes increasingly troublesome when, as Williams (2015) notes, popular representations of the Christian right in the media and political discourses—such as commodified Christian fundamentalists—become a synecdoche for the wide range of religious discourses and practices. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for students, faculty, and administrators in academia to express a Judeo-Christian affiliation without being slotted as homophobic, anti-intellectual, and, perhaps, anti-academic. If nothing else, perhaps as scholars committed to the making of new knowledge and discourses, we can question the generalizability force of certain so-called iconic discourses of the Christian Right and undo the antithetical categories of religious and academic discourses.

Beyond the Iron Curtain Following my move to the United States, my nationality and language became marked categories of difference, while religious and political affiliation, which were central in Romania, became less visible. Perhaps, a word of caution on categories of difference is necessary. As a transnational scholar, I note the easiness in which we rely on pre-set categories of difference when it comes to identifying experiences unbeknownst to us, despite the fact that, at least in academia, inquiry and disruption of pre-established discourses are at the core of our practice. These labels, including international versus US student, native versus non-native, religious versus academic, and working class (generally designating students) versus middle class (generally, academics), polarize our understanding of otherness and the ensuing actions and discourses. While such categories of difference cannot be completely removed, questioning the basis for their establishment should be a continuous effort.

An Academic From Behind the Iron Curtain  169 At the center of my transition to the United States, and my academic experience as a graduate student was the issue of money. I situate this discussion of money—an intentional terminology choice—in what James T. Zebroski (2006) calls discourses of position that define one’s social class based on income, education, and profession. That I arrived from a Third World country was most evidently revealed in the shock of receiving my first bill from the university. After covering school fees from my month’s stipend, I was left with $200. This sum had to cover room and board, meals, transportation, and all other necessities. The shock was unexplainable. Fortunately, this was due to an error in the system, and in the subsequent months, I received a slightly higher stipend. Nevertheless, my memories of my first few years in the United States are filled with many peanut and jelly sandwiches, sustained efforts to carpool for a 10-mile commute beyond the city limits, and prayers that I would stay healthy. Certainly, as an international student from Romania, a former Communist country, I was delighted to study at a prominent research university in the United States. But I lacked the socio-economic means and fluency of discourse at US institutions that could have facilitated my understanding of US academia. Prior to 1989, most Romanians did not and could not obtain a passport. Although after 1989 passports (Figure 13.2) were issued effortlessly, without a guide and maps, without a car and fuel, and without some understanding of the countries we wished to visit, our passports were pointless. Likewise, as a freshoff-the-boat graduate student, I had the passport—which afforded me the privilege of mobility—but I lacked a guide, a discursive map, and the social resources to navigate the US academia.

Figure 13.2 My Romanian passports documenting visas and all entries and departures in and from the United States over the course of 14 years. All information is necessary, even after passports have expired

170  Ligia A. Mihut

Opening and Closing Doors in the US Academia To illustrate how money can open or close doors in academia, I will recount the stages of my acceptance into the MA TESOL program in the United States. I had visited the United States before and was familiar with the US consulate and the visa procedures, although it was my first time to apply for an F1-student visa. In my selection of the school, I was assisted by an American friend who was volunteering in Romania at the time. Prior to this, I had done research on US universities online, but I lacked the necessary knowledge to make an informed decision. At the time of the application, I was a teacher of English at a public school in Romania. With my parents’ support, I was able to save one year’s teacher salary to cover the application process for graduate school in the United States. This included the TOEFL test fee, trips to Bucharest and the test site, application fees, F1-student visa application fee, travel to the US consulate, and the airfare to the United States. Additional expenses such as lodging in Bucharest, airport drop-off, or pickup were covered by friends or family. Despite this rather manageable list of expenses, I still used 12 months’ full salary to cover all the costs. An additional speaking test was required for consideration for a teaching assistantship. Unfortunately, the cost exceeded my budget, and taking a trip to Budapest, Hungary, the test location, was not feasible. Since I could cover neither the fee nor the travel expenses, I sent the application for financial aid without the score without knowing how significant this test was for obtaining a teaching assistantship and the much-needed tuition waiver. Needless to say, without an assistantship, it was impossible to enroll in the graduate program and provide the financial documentation for the US consulate. Fortunately, the department was able to offer me a different assistantship that did not require the speaking assessment. Like me, many other international scholars wrestled with economic scarcity. In “Literate Lives Across the Digital Divide,” Pandey (2006) writes about a similar financial difficulty in acquiring a desktop computer in Nepal. Pandey (2006) explains that in the 1990s, to purchase a desktop computer, it would have taken him an entire year’s salary. Owning a computer at the time was indicative of significant wealth. As outsiders to the US academe, a crucial test, owning a computer, or knowing who and when to ask about money issues, are critical hurdles that can only be overcome through insider’s knowledge. The international poor certainly hold an ambiguous position in US academe. By the capitalist logic, they cannot contribute to the US economy, and, most disturbingly, they are considered a liability. The problem with the international poor is that when joining the US academia, a shrouding silence about money creates the impression that everyone is middle class, that money is not an issue, and that everyone has equal access to similar resources. Points of access, differentiated access, and the cost of professional training, conferences and/ or journal subscriptions are simply routinely taken for granted in terms of affordability. In discussing his strategic path

An Academic From Behind the Iron Curtain  171 toward publication as a graduate student, Paul K. Matsuda (2003) narrates the process of engaging in academic discourse, including on a listserv, but also the necessity of building one’s academic resources independent of the university library. As a graduate student, I found Matsuda’s strategy inspiring but impractical for me since I had neither the money to purchase books nor the physical space to afford the luxury of a personal library. In the same vein, attending conferences was a difficult investment. While I valued my professionalization and opportunities to share my work and learn from others, it seems that I was one of the few who questioned the high cost of conference participation. Inability to cover the conference cost was rarely (or never) discussed, not even among graduate peers, and hence I remained silent. For several years, I resorted to my network of friends to avoid hotel costs at the risk of missing important activities and events in the evenings, including special interest groups. In the advent of Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) 2016 in Houston, Texas, scholars raised the problem of affordability. A thread on “crowd-sourcing ideas for cost issues” on the Writing Program Administrators (WPA) listserv around that time produced not only extensive conversations on the actual cost for CCCC but also much-needed discussions about labor, budget cuts, potential development of regional conferences, and collaborative actions to support those who cannot afford conference costs. Conversations such as these are long overdue. Whether locally or transnationally, our field needs to address more directly the issue of money and its capacious power to limit or facilitate access. Although I focused on the issue of money as a category of difference, and to a certain extent as a marker of class, I do not wish to equate social class with income. In resorting to Zebroski’s definition to frame my discussion of money, I employ one of the six discourses of social class that he surveys as he discusses social class, discourse, and values in writing courses. After offering an overview of six types of discourses that mark social class (discourses of position such as income, education, and profession discourses of social relations, of work and the workplace, of individual affiliation, and discourses of witness), Zebroski (2006) further proposes an examination of class through the lens of values embedded in language use and discourses. Among others, he references Larry Smith’s list of positive values of the working class, such as community, work ethic, and family/flood connections, among other things. What is striking to me is the persistent framing of these values as “conflicting” with academic discourses. Basically, working-class students as well as academics are uniformly categorized as belonging to either academic or to working-class discourses based on their experiences and socioeconomic status. Since Zebroski (2006) had offered an extensive overview of various definitions and versions of discourses of social class, a persistent dichotomic approach of working class set in opposition to academia reduces both academic and working-class discourses to contained monolithic units. Such an approach precludes an understanding of social class discourses as

172  Ligia A. Mihut contingent, varied, and, most importantly, fluid. It contravenes with previous acknowledgments that social class, particularly the category of working class, is elusive. Lindquist (2004) captured this difficulty to produce exact definitions of working-class experiences when she started her piece with anecdotes of academics’ controversial reactions to those who identify as working class or adopt the markers for working-class experiences in academic venues and presentations. Based on these observations of the construction of social class in US academia, and reliance on my experiences, I propose we adopt a definition of class that is more fluid and flexible, and, most importantly, one that allows for the contradiction, indeterminacy, and paradox to coexist. A complex conception of class needs to take into account the fact that income, education, and values are shaped by social and cultural experiences across communities and national boundaries. This means that certain values associated with certain experiences may not be coded and translated with accuracy because they lack the frames where those experiences developed. When US academia projects itself as the voice of rationality, it risks assuming a universal function. In doing so, it disregards and marginally recognizes academic discourses and other educational traditions from around the world. Returning back to my literacy history, I ask, where do I belong when one parent did not go to college and the other attended theological seminary (a disputable college degree according to US academia’s devaluation of religious discourses and affiliation)? How do I measure the values I have for community and family affiliation against the pursuit of a college degree when my experiences stretch across national contexts? How are my investments—financial, social, and emotional—quantified given different value systems in Romania and in the US, in my family and in academia? Where do I belong if prior to 1989 we were economically middle class but we had nothing to buy? How do I categorize myself and anyone who has the curiosity and intellectual desire to learn but is limited by financial means, lack of social capital, and other structural obstacles? Julie Lindquist (2004) proposes a closer focus on students’ affective experiences used as a springboard for developing a critical stance of larger structures shaping their identity formations. In suggesting that the classroom becomes a space where emotions can be unveiled without setting them in opposition to rationality, I believe we are taking steps toward a more complex view of class difference. At the same time, we must allow for various types of experiences, even those that might create ambiguity within clearly established categories of difference. If in Romania my literacy experience was prescribed by my socialeconomic class and my socio-economic status was determined by my parents’ profession, implicitly religious affiliation, in the United States, my parents’ professional status and educational background has been rather insignificant in creating or obstructing opportunities. As my narrative shows, values and new experiences shape my social class, but there are other larger events and circumstances that can determine the extent to which I value academic discourse and implications of my assessment.

An Academic From Behind the Iron Curtain  173 With immigration and migration patterns, many people’s literate experiences implicate the mobility of family through reconfiguration of family ties and global citizenship. A parent who is a doctor or teacher in one part of the globe might arrive in the United States and start working in a blue-collar job. At the same time, one’s excellent liberal arts education obtained in one context may be rendered valueless in another socio-economic system. For many world citizens, although their values and experiences could be aligned with academic tenets, the realities of war, of displacement, of natural disasters may push them to certain immediate remedies, such as low-skill jobs. Furthermore, many citizens, in particular those from Third World countries, are already slotted in a certain class given their citizenship affiliation. In my personal experience, after the disintegration of the Communist bloc, I faced the prejudice and stigma placed on a Third World citizen. Neither my college degree (which had been previously denied to me and I henceforth valued tremendously) nor my passport, also a treasured asset given previous censorship, was valuable in a capitalist global economy. Like many others, Romanian citizens continue to be controlled through visa regulations, and the economic gaps have not been breached much in the last 26 years since the fall of the communist dictatorship. I offered this series of examples related to status and money concerns to show the need for a more complex understanding of little narratives. As mentioned earlier, Daniell (1999) explained that little narratives are contingent, localized literacy experiences that reveal aspects about reading and writing but rarely can be used to formulate larger theoretical positions. Their value comes from revealing multiple versions of literacy and the cultural contexts where they emerge. While personal narratives do have limited generalizability force of personal narratives, they have the capacity, like my literacy memoir, to reveal hidden experiences and social structures that have not been considered extensively in our academic discourses. The provocation that I launch here is to grapple with those discourses of in-betweeness and those experiences that are hard to translate from one cultural context to another. Certainly, even a highly contingent literacy narrative like mine can establish points of connectivity with other experiences. As an international student, I relate with ease to international student experiences in the United States; as a Romanian native with a marked religious identity, I have been more attuned to the working-class experiences and religious discourses in the US academia. Also, my understanding of political and economic developments that shaped my individual literacy in Romania and the United States contributed to developing a sense of identification with other scholars whose literacy were affected by significant political and economic hardships (e.g., Pandey, Sharma). Yet the challenge is to give equal attention to shared experiences as well as dissonance—those discourses and structures that fail to be properly understood and escape our categorization into pre-established slots. In the contact zone, cultures “clash” and “grapple.” Similarly, in approaching class cultures, we first need to acknowledge the limitedness of our categories of difference, along with the binaries that

174  Ligia A. Mihut shape our practice and intellectual processes. Only in so doing can we make more visible “difference” and engage with it in an ethical and transformative manner.

References Daniell, B. (1999). Narratives of literacy: Connecting composition to culture. CCC, 50(3), 393–410. DePalma, M-J. (2011). Re-envisioning religious discourses as rhetorical resources in composition teaching: A pragmatic response to the challenge of belief. CCC, 63(2), 219–243. Kaplan, A. (1993). French lessons: A memoir. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Khadka, S. (2013). In/variability in research methods/ methodologies of transnational compositionists. Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies, 1(2), 71–88. LeCourt, D. (2006). Performing working-class identity in composition: Toward a pedagogy of textual practice. College English, 69(1), 30–51. Lindquist, J. (2004). Class affects, classroom affectations: Working through the paradoxes of strategic empathy. College English, 67(2), 187–209. Lowe, L. (1996). Immigrant acts: On Asian-American cultural politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Matsuda, P. K. (2003). Coming to voice: Publishing as a graduate student. In C. Pearson Casanave & S. Vandrick (Eds.), Writing for publication: Behind the scenes in language education (pp. 39–51). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Moss, B. J. (2003). A community text arises: A literate text and a literacy tradition in African-American churches. New York, NY: Hampton Press. Pandey, I. P. (2006). Literate lives across the digital divide. Computers and Composition, 23, 246–257. Pratt, M. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 33–40. Retrieved from http:// www.jstor.org/stable/25595469 Sharma, G. (2013). Third eye: An exhibit of literacy narratives from Nepal. In H. L. Ulman, S. L. DeWitt, & C. L. Selfe (Eds.), Stories that speak to us: Exhibits from the digital archive of literacy narratives. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/ stories Sharma, G. (2015). Cultural schemas and pedagogical uses of literacy narratives: A reflection on my own journey with reading and writing. CCC, 67(1), 104–110. Verdery, K. (1996). What was socialism and what comes next. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Williams, M. A. (2015). Transformations: Locating agency and difference in student accounts of religious experience. College English, 77(4), 338–363. Zebroski, J. T. (2006). Social class as discourse: Mapping the landscape of class in rhetoric and composition. JAC, 26(3–4), 514–583.

14 Living as the Other in Japan A Joint Autoethnography of Two Expatriate Academics in the Academy Theron Muller and John Adamson Introduction In this joint autoethnography (Allen-Collinson, 2013; Bochner & Ellis, 1995), we explore our othered experiences as academics, originally from the United States and the United Kingdom, who have each spent more than 15 years living in Japan. Reluctant to embrace the label “outsiders,” we position ourselves on the periphery of academia geographically (Canagarajah, 1996), working in the marginalized field of language education within the academy (Turner, 2011) and in our adopted country, Japan, as part of the linguistic and ethnic minority. We share our reflections on our respective stories of living and working in Japan and how we have reacted to “critical incidents” (Butterfield, Borgen, Amundson, & Maglio, 2005, p. 480) in the course of our careers. Such conversational narrative (Ochs & Capps, 2001) offers us a reflective and developmental space (Baker & Johnson, 1998) from which to view our “teacher landscapes” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999, p. 2) over time as academics in Japanese education, including how we engage in research activities and other academic work in and across the different work cultures we interact with. Our respective journeys share similarities and experiences unique to just one of us. In the chapter that follows, we highlight aspects of our respective narratives that we feel are important to understanding how we view ourselves and how academia generally and Japanese academia, more specifically, view us. As the reflective narrative process that underlies this chapter sought to implement a self-aware, reflexive methodology (Richardson, 2000), we feel it important to acknowledge our backgrounds as white Anglophone English speaking males are in some ways preferred and possibly privileged within Japan, as discussed in earlier literature (Hall, 1998; Seargeant, 2009; McVeigh, 2002). We raise this here to acknowledge our race and ethnicity as potentially relevant to our narratives and to note that had we emphasized these elements of our identities in our narrative process, they would likely have featured more prominently in the discussion that follows. However, in this chapter, we explore the themes that emerged from our process of joint

176  Theron Muller and John Adamson narrative construction of our lived experiences of working within Japanese higher education, as outlined briefly next. Adamson and Muller (2017) includes a more comprehensive summary of the reflective narrative process we used for the research underpinning this chapter. A reflexive stance toward research acknowledges that questions naturally influence subsequent answers (Richardson, 2000). As the questions in our reflective narratives addressed episodes of othering in our experiences within Japanese academia, the following discussion explores those themes. While this chapter does not capture all the aspects of our respective identities, we would argue that no text could or should seek such comprehensiveness. Rather, we posit that the following discussion offers a window into a specific aspect of our experience—one of potential relevance and importance to others working in academia in potentially similar circumstances. Although our journeys cannot be “generalizable,” we feel we present an honest account of our experience of otherness living and working as academics in Japan. We furthermore hope our account will have some resonance with other experiences of otherness in Japan and in other expatriate contexts where local demand for academic labor leads to inflows of an international workforce.

A Narrative Account of Our Stories Our stories as outsiders in Japanese academia are presented here as interwoven narratives, showing “collaborative” or “joint” narrativization in which, inspired by our reflective methodology, we prompt one another to clarify or delve more deeply into a theme. In this space, we seek to explore details particular to one or the other of us along with areas of commonality. In terms of process, on Skype and Google Drive, we formulated a rough plan of themes to explore, initially reflecting on when we first came to Japan and then moving forward in time from there. We framed our conversation around the following explicit categories: our initial identities, how they shifted, community participation, professional agency, and our changing work circumstances. The flow of themes did admittedly jump back and forth between topics and chronologically on many occasions, reflective of natural dialog, and part of the process of composing this chapter involved reformulating and interpreting our initial unfiltered discussion into a narrative for presentation here. As there are two authors and two perspectives represented in the discussion that follows, we intentionally use the third person to avoid confusion regarding whose perspective is being referred to. Initial Senses of Identity When we first came to Japan, we had different initial senses of identity as teachers and researchers, which are interesting in terms of how we identified them together and how they developed over time. Here we explain these

Living as the Other in Japan  177 initial identities and then in the sections that follow, we describe how they changed and transformed. John had several years’ experience working in business and had done some teaching in the United Kingdom and other countries before coming to Japan, so he felt his identity upon arrival was that of a “teacher-researcher” who researched his own teaching to feedback findings into his teaching practice. He was surprised by decisions made by Japanese middle managers in his first workplaces who based decisions about teaching and curricula less on evidence from research and more on their own “feelings.” In contrast, Theron came to Japan straight from university and was a few years younger than John when he started teaching, so he did not have such a fully formed sense of identity as a teacher or researcher. His main intention was to see the world and to not completely “fail” at his first full-time employment. John asked Theron at what time he felt he had succeeded, or, better put, not failed, as it appeared to represent an interesting contrast to John’s sense of identity. Theron’s first notion of success came after he had been self-employed for more than a year teaching part-time at a number of different language schools and colleges. This led to financial self-sufficiency that allowed him to support his family. In terms of language work in the academy, part of its marginalized positioning at the periphery of power centers (Turner, 2011) has been attributed to the relatively low bar for entry into the field (Ferguson & Donno, 2003). This mirrors Theron’s move to Japan immediately after university without language teaching qualifications. That he subsequently acquired such qualifications can often be masked by the kinds of questions he is asked, such as what his initial work was when he first came to Japan. On the other hand, while John was relatively well qualified upon his arrival in Japan, his qualifications did not necessarily endear him to colleagues who were less well informed regarding issues of syllabus planning and pedagogy, but who often held more power, leading to situations where he felt incorrect decisions were made in some cases. Shifting Identities and Positionalities in Community Participation We also explored how our identities shifted over time through our experiences of living and working here. The following six subsections explore key themes from those shifts. From Teacher to Businessperson Theron’s first shift came when he went from teaching full-time for language schools to doing freelance teaching work. This was a shift from teacher to businessperson and teacher, as he was responsible for both family income and teaching outcomes (and later business performance). John commented that such a move was similar to his own. John recalled that his first experience of

178  Theron Muller and John Adamson teaching college-level students in Japan entailed a slightly problematic shift of identity away from that of private language school teacher, as private language school students generally see themselves as primarily consumers of education, while college-level students are not necessarily interested in mandatory language study. Theron too noticed student motivation differences in his shift to teaching college students. Increasing Academic Participation John noted how his academic activities became diverse as he moved from adjunct to full-time faculty work. After teaching part time for a year after arriving in Japan, he got a (soon to be phased out) full-time college position and became involved in committee work in teaching associations. He organized conferences and was busy every weekend at committee meetings and workshops, in addition to taking on editorial duties with international journals and setting up a regional research support group. He had an explosion of intellectual energy and enthusiasm to network that partly compensated for his precarious workplace positioning. This resonates with Gaillet and Guglielmo’s (2014) advice for non-contingent faculty (those in part-time or limited contract full-time positions) seeking more secure employment. John felt empowered through non-workplace activities since his participation in these communities moved him from the dejection of an outsider at work to an insider in other contexts. In this respect, he had multiple identities—at work at the periphery but outside more toward the core—meaning there existed a potentially unsettling dichotomy between these two “spaces.” John stressed the value of the role played by his family and friends as counterbalances to such instability. Theron concurred with this sentiment, expressing the view that he did not have a sense of belonging in his current university for his first stressful six months of employment starting in 2011, as he was living apart from family during that period. Another identity shift for Theron followed the completion of his MA in 2004. As he finished, he realized the study time could be used for learning and research activities. He felt receiving a degree with no follow-up would lead to minimal benefit, so he committed to further professional development by volunteering at Japan- and Asia-based academic publications. This represented an identity shift from teacher to emerging multiple identities including teacher-researcher, teacher trainer, reviewer, and editor. In a similar manner to John’s experience, Theron’s volunteer editing work led to a feeling of core membership of a professional community. The downside was that, despite being proud of this contribution, he gradually realized his efforts contributed little toward securing stable employment. Conflict Arising Through Contingent Status Theron was uninterested in full-time employment until two colleges where he worked part time cut his working hours by half after it was too late to

Living as the Other in Japan  179 search for other part-time college work to compensate for the loss. This led to a year of low income for his family, but high research productivity. It also led him to start to seek full-time employment because of the instability of his contingent status. Recognizing this critical incident, John commented that others may have fallen into despair at such a time and asked whether this time researching helped Theron secure full-time employment. Theron concurred but noted he was simply doing what he enjoyed and felt that he was a respected member of those research communities. In fact, he felt much more satisfaction in that aspect of his identity than from his contingent and precarious part-time teaching. Around the same time, another community Theron was participating in, working part time for the university he received his MA from, also experienced some upheaval, where again his contingent status was made explicit when he received negative feedback on his marking, clearly demonstrating the precariousness of his position. As a result of this experience, he no longer considers that work as central to his professional identity. Referring back to Gaillet and Guglielmo (2014), John commented that the feeling of dispensability is common among contingent faculty. He too is engaged in part-time online MA tutoring and marking, and finds the precariousness of our part-time status hits home even though we give a standard of tutoring equivalent to full-time faculty. Becoming Full-Time University Faculty As Theron began applying for full-time work and interviewing for positions, he quickly realized that steering committees undervalued his volunteer editorial work and concentrated on other aspects of his professional experience. Gaillet and Guglielmo (2015) see this as pragmatically gearing our academic and teaching life toward the expectations of future employers. However, this was a sign to Theron of how academic work is valued in the academy, particularly by university management (Lillis, 2012), and perhaps shows some of the particular priorities of the Japanese academy, such as regarding non-Japanese faculty as temporary (Hall, 1998; Whitsed & Wright, 2011). Regarding Theron’s recent shift to full-time university work (albeit on a limited contract) and starting his PhD studies, a gradual identity shift began when he joined his current faculty as a full-time associate professor, which allowed for the emergence of multiple complex identities. After commencing his PhD studies, there was a surprising step backward to a beginning researcher, as the university at which he studies assumes students are relative novices to academic writing and research, and the university’s support system is largely designed for full-time students rather than parttime, distance students like Theron. One example of Theron’s transition back into a student role is the contrast in approaches to research interviewing between what John and Theron have discussed previously, based on John’s own doctoral studies and that of one of Theron’s PhD supervisors. John’s approach sees interviewing as joint development between interviewer

180  Theron Muller and John Adamson and interviewee; however, Theron’s supervisor views it more as a one-way, investigative exchange of information from interviewee to interviewer. John opposes this neutral stance to collecting data (outlined in Adamson, 2004), seeing interviewing as investigative and developmental—a point Theron agrees with. Although John and Theron have conducted interviews together in the past, as a student Theron has had to adjust his orientation to interviewing to meet his supervisor’s expectations. One consequence of this difference in epistemological beliefs results in Theron feeling his PhD study is separate from his identity as a teacher. He’s not sure at this point whether those two identities will re-merge, stay separate, or if a third identity will emerge to synthesize both. Challenges to Developing Identities Another critical incident concerning research for Theron occurred during his MA studies. After he had moved jobs to a private language school working with several teachers who held MAs, Theron tended to mention his studies. Eventually, the head teacher at the school explained that he was an obnoxious know-it-all and not to mention anything related to his studies at work. This was Theron’s first experience of conflict between teaching and research. John responded by turning to issues of workplace communication in committee and administrative work in Japan. Such non-teaching and nonresearch activities are important but also time consuming and frequently in Japanese, so John’s less than perfect Japanese language skills hold him back. He accepts this shortcoming but feels other foreigners with higher Japanese proficiency speak to empower themselves. John is comfortable making occasional strategic contributions (in broken Japanese) as a useful “broker” on the periphery of committee communities. Theron’s experiences in workplace contexts have been less comfortable. One critical incident was emotionally shocking and contrary to his values. In one department meeting, a Japanese faculty member said in English that Theron did not understand Japanese—a rhetorical effort to minimize his contribution to the discussion. Theron replied, in Japanese, that he had been in Japan for more than 14 years and so he could communicate in Japanese. The Japanese faculty member replied, in English, “You are a foreign barbarian,” indicating directly to Theron that, despite his length of time in Japan, otherness is just below the surface. Subsequently, other faculty implied they accepted the separation of labor between Japanese and non-Japanese faculty as a non-problematic status quo. This means that Theron’s status is as a largely outsider exception—an identity termed as “marked” by Piazza and Fasulo (2015). This stigmatized position was also reinforced officially by his university, which concluded in the “foreign barbarian” and other related incidents where something inappropriate was said that this did not constitute a violation of university policy. The separation of foreign faculty in Japan is a theme taken up by Hall (1998) and reflects a desire by the

Living as the Other in Japan  181 Japanese faculty generally to remain “closed” to influences originating from outside Japan, and even from outside of the Japanese faculty, as evidenced by resistance to the Japan Ministry of Education’s historically unsuccessful efforts to internationalize Japanese universities (Burgess, Gibson, Klaphake, & Selzer, 2010). Final Reflections on Our Identities: Linking Who We Are Now to Who We Once Were Here we reflect more broadly on our identities and examine their underpinning influences. John feels that in language schools, his primary identity was as a classroom practitioner. The ability to research during his studies caused that identity to shift to teacher-researcher after moving to Japan. Theron feels his identity as “teacher” is the most mature of his multiple professional identities, illustrating this by noting that 2014 was his most productive year for teaching. However, one threat to this identity that also reconfirmed its importance for Theron was a combative English faculty member who brought Theron to tears by saying, “Students don’t want to enroll in your classes because your teaching and your syllabus isn’t good.” That incident showed the pride he has in his teaching and how that makes him sensitive to such criticisms. In terms of historical influences on our identity, John looked back at his undergraduate experiences at business schools in Europe in the 1980s. These memories stirred mixed feelings as his classmates were interested in getting rich, whereas he was motivated to study human resources management, which represented a marked clash of cultures. His sense of who he was at that time was challenged when he was 18 in Europe and still is at 56 in Japan. Theron’s recollections were mostly of frustrations during his undergraduate studies, where he was disappointed with the university education he received, as he was disillusioned with the content taught, which tended to take a very narrow view of the world, and he subsequently did not feel passionate about what he studied. The result was that he feels very much an outsider to the US academy, despite having completed his undergraduate education there. Perceptions of Community: Before and Now We have both together and separately researched various themes related to the academic “community,” so, perhaps naturally, we discussed how our own individual experiences as foreigners in Japanese academia shape our perceptions of it. John focused his thoughts on the frames of “before” and “now.” Before, his perception of “community” was based on private language school work, which was limited to internal communities—small, highly politicized, and

182  Theron Muller and John Adamson focused on winning contracts to assure the school’s (and his) continued employment. That community looked upon local university faculty as out of touch. Upon entering tertiary work, he realized how unuseful that polarized view was. Now he has hybrid views. He visualizes his own “INoP” (Individual Network of Practice, from Zappa-Hollman & Duff, 2014, p. 2), which maps all the people (brokers) and resources he is networked with. His INoP places him in the center, transcending the idea of “community of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 42), which focuses more on the mechanics and politics of communities (also Wenger, 1998). Theron relates to the idea of people moving within and between multiple communities. His issue with community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) research is that it occludes issues of who has the right to wield power, how power is distributed unequally, and the processes that create unequal distributions of power and authority. Experts at the community center invite newcomers from outside, but the community of practice frame does not ask how those experts came to be there or whether the community is just in terms of who represents the centers of influence. This becomes important when thinking about his PhD topic of writing for academic publication, because not questioning the current power differential propagates imbalances. Now Theron thinks more in terms of “speech communities” (Hymes, 1972, p. 59) as Hymes was conducting research in multicultural cities, which Theron feels exhibit more complex identities among individual members than Lave and Wenger’s (1991) and Wenger’s (1998) research into individual business communities. Theron believes the speech community metaphor allows for people to move between and within different communities, fulfilling different roles, and accommodating different kinds of community membership. Professional Agency Turning to our respective professional agencies, John notes awareness of the research literature is quite important to him, with his sense of agency shaped by awareness of and contributions to it. He maintains that without this aspect of his agency, he would struggle to justify his sense of belonging to multiple groups. A problematic aspect of agency for John is his limited Japanese ability, especially with respect to university committee work. He feels the acquisition of high-level Japanese language proficiency would come at the price of neglecting his research, and that if he’s going to be remembered, he wants it to be for his research, not his Japanese proficiency. He believes that after investing so much into his postgraduate studies, it would be a shame not to prioritize research. He realizes this may result in his being “othered” in local faculty meetings, but feels doing research is simply more interesting than discussing in Japanese what color the university should paint on signs. Theron feels that currently, because of his part-time PhD studies, he has had to limit the breadth of his research, although as a full-time faculty

Living as the Other in Japan  183 member, he has access to many more resources than he did previously, as he has the same research allowance as other faculty at his university. In terms of teaching, he feels the situation is similar, as when working for himself, he taught all ages and levels of students. Now his university students fall within a narrower band, and he teaches fewer classes per semester, so he has more time for his research and more material support. Theron was asked to join committees in his second year as a full-time faculty member, which helped him to feel that his agency was expanding. This was followed by his becoming the head of one committee in 2015. Labor Flows, Migration, and Border Crossings Regarding issues of immigration and migration, John sees parallels in his experiences in Japanese academia with immigrants’ narratives of feeling “othered” in a new environment. This is seen in historical labor flows to the USA and Europe, and the frustrations felt and discrimination experienced by migrants (Diez Guardia & Pichelmann, 2006). The story of immigration to Japan is less well researched, partly because of strict restrictions on immigration into the country, although the general trend has been for Japan to treat incoming international workers as itinerant, and the country has pursued policies that encourage migrants to not stay long term (Douglass & Roberts, 2000). John also sees himself as moving across disciplinary fields in addition to national boundaries, such as from business into education. He feels both involve a kind of border crossing, from one national or disciplinary culture to another, which requires shifting one’s cultural and disciplinary norms. In terms of working in Japanese academia, he negotiates a personal “third space” (Gutierrez, 2008, p. 148): a middle ground between the first space academic norms from his UK origins and the second space norms of Japanese academia. In practice, his third space is one in which people he comes into contact with realize and come to accept his strengths and weaknesses across his professional, language, and social skills in the Japanese context. In terms of labor flow, the demand for English expertise brought Theron to Japan initially, and the relatively higher salary and standard of living compared to the United State has kept him here. However, despite being a “permanent resident” of the country, there have been constant reminders that the assumption in Japanese society is that one is a traveler who will eventually “go home.” One such incident involved when he was first trying to buy a house, where he was told by the bank that unless he had permanent residency, he wasn’t eligible for a loan, and then after getting permanent residency, the bank still refused to extend him a mortgage. This was quite a shock, coming from a country where emigration is the norm, and such discrimination is, at least technically, illegal. Problems registering his son’s birth, restrictions until very recently prohibiting him from being the head of his household, a university office member’s surprise seeing he possessed a

184  Theron Muller and John Adamson personal seal, and the head of his college’s lack of awareness of who he was after two years of employment, are just some of the experiences that highlight his status as (at least assumed to be) marginal and itinerant, in addition to some of the critical incidents explored previously. Contingent Status of Work John noted that the idea of being contingent faculty—the insecure status of working as non-tenured, part-time or fixed-contract faculty—in working life is a growing trend in education worldwide (Gaillet & Guglielmo, 2014). He feels seeking securer positions entails publishing and raising one’s academic profile, which is difficult, as contingent faculty may be encouraged to only teach and to not spend time on conducting research and writing for publication (see commentary in Talandis & Muller, 2016). He finds Gaillet and Guglielmo’s (2014) ideas on changing one’s “academic landscape” (p. 10) inspiring, as discouraging contingent faculty to research seems counter-productive. For Theron, his contingent status was highlighted when his classes were cut without warning when he was working part time, although the situation led him to start the process of finding full-time employment, which eventually led to his current position. His current contract is limited term, and the head of his department has reminded him of this, concerned he would plan to stay, but not wanting him to leave before his contract finishes. On another occasion, one member of the faculty asked whether limited-term contract employees should have the same say in meetings as non-contingent, full-time faculty. Similar to the commentary in Gaillet and Guglielmo (2014), upon beginning the contract renewal process, Theron was told that while the local faculty he works with were impressed with his contribution to the university, the only terms outlined in his contract regard teaching, and so as far as the university’s executive branch was concerned, that was the only criteria upon which the contract renewal decision should be based. This means that while the faculty locally appreciate his committee work and writing for publication efforts, the contribution these will make to his contract renewal status was unclear.

Final Reflections The themes that emerge from our joint narrative delve into issues of identity and shifts in identity over time, personal and professional agency, how these relate to our outsider status, consideration of the concept of community, and what it means to us in terms of conceptual frameworks such as Lave and Wenger’s (1991) “community of practice” (p. 29), Hymes’ (1972) “speech community” (p. 59), Swales’ “discourse community” (1990, p. 24), and Wellman’s (1988) “social network” (p. 22), issues of labor flow and border crossing within and between other countries’ academies, and, more

Living as the Other in Japan  185 generally, our experience of otherness in the academy in Japan. This experience of cultural, disciplinary, and linguistic border crossing, negotiation, and renegotiation of our identities is seen as creating our own “third space” (Gutiérrez, 2008, p. 148) as outsiders active on the periphery. In this chapter, we have explored our respective professional identities and how those have shaped, and been shaped by, our experiences, delving into key critical incidents that we feel are particularly informative regarding our experiences of working as language teachers in the academy in Japan. We have also tried to highlight how our experiences are similar and different, with reference to the literature on professional development, community, and intellectual migration and border crossings. While this represents our specific experiences and so cannot be generalized to all non-Japanese working in the academy in Japan, we hope there are similarities between our various contingent and non-contingent career positionings and experiences, and those of others in similar situations, both within and outside Japan. We feel one interesting aspect of our experience is that we have moved from cultures where we would traditionally be placed as among the insider class to a context, the Japanese academy, where we both position ourselves strategically as outsiders on some occasions, such as John’s acceptance of the limitation of his Japanese abilities, and are also placed by others as outsiders on other occasions, such as Theron’s interactions with a belligerent member of his university’s faculty. These strategic positionings and repositionings, both agentive when we make a strategic decision regarding where to position ourselves and objective when others seek to place us in a particular outsider orientation, demonstrate how the concept of outsiderness is a dynamic one constantly negotiated and renegotiated based on particular circumstances, contexts, and motivations intrinsic to ourselves and extrinsic to us in our universities’ faculties, our field, and the larger Japanese and international society.

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15 Unclassifiable Outsiders Eastern European Women, Transnational Whiteness, and Solidarity1 Voichita Nachescu Early in the winter of 2001, less than four months after arriving in the United States as a graduate student pursuing a doctorate in women’s studies, I stood in a line of women protesters, all clad in black, at the busy intersection between Bidwell Parkway and Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, New York. If anything distinguished our protest, it was the lack of signs and our overall silence. We stood there, not moving, not speaking, for one hour every Saturday. There were candles on the ground. We were a local group of Women in Black. I was familiar with Women in Black from back home in Eastern Europe, where Women in Black were known for their resistance to the nationalismfueled Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. I knew that Women in Black had started in Jerusalem in 1988, when women protested Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and soon created a loose network of activists around the globe. It was exhilarating to find out that a group had started in Buffalo, New York, in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Years later, writing about Women in Black, Joan Scott (2011) claims, “The mute, nonviolent witness signifies powerlessness while it offers the message of peace as the only alternative to catastrophe” (p. 23). Indeed, we were powerless, first, as women, second, because many of us were in the United States only provisionally as international students and visitors. Needless to say, not everyone in Buffalo, New York, agreed with our message. A counter demonstration usually occurred across the street from our protest. One day, a middle-aged white man came to us and screamed in my face, “Go back to India!,” before abruptly leaving. The incident made me laugh: India? What would I do there? Why not somewhere else? It felt easy to dismiss him as not speaking to me really, but to some figment of his imagination, some product of an arbitrary racial, ethnic classification system in which I failed to recognize myself. Did middle-aged white Americans simply imagine that anyone looking vaguely foreign, with dark hair and eyes came from . . . India? Or was it that I simply didn’t fit any of his preexisting categories, and he fell on a default answer instead of recognizing me as foreign and unclassifiable?

Unclassifiable Outsiders  189 Yet I found it ironic that at the very moment when I, together with activists from around the world, stood silently against war and implicitly against nationalism, the cause of war in modern times, I was being told that, first, I did not belong in the country in which I had just arrived, and second, that I should “go back” to a country I had never visited. In the aftermath of the Patriot Act, I learned to fear for my safety, and I stopped going to the protests. In this chapter, I explore the position of unclassifiable outsider that defines my experience as a Romanian/Eastern European immigrant woman living in the United States, as a feminist, and as a professional educator, who, 12 years after acquiring my PhD, am still in the job market, still pursuing the elusive dream of a full-time teaching job. In telling this story, I move between personal experience, transnational feminist theory, and the history of immigration to the United States. While I find transnational feminism inspirational in my work, I point out its limitations: in their commitment to deconstructing the First World/Third World divide, transnational feminist theory has almost nothing to say about the so-called Second World, or the former socialist countries in Eastern Europe. This oversight limits the potential of transnational feminist theory, because in spite of their entrance into the circuit of transnational capital and their partial integration into the European Union, the countries of the former Soviet Bloc still occupy a marginal position in the European Union and are often treated, in their relationship with Western countries, as unequal, lesser partners. As the transition to capitalism has failed to create economic prosperity in Eastern Europe while dismantling social safety nets, immigration from Eastern Europe has increased in the United States and elsewhere. My experience is very similar to that of large numbers of migrants who have arrived in the United States after the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe. But how can one claim some sort of regional specificity for an area of the globe known for its economic and cultural fragmentation and diversity? I argue that there are three coordinates of this essentially Eastern European experience: the inheritance of the communist regimes and of the painful transition to a capitalist economy, which has led to economic deprivation experienced by all; the marginalization we experience in Europe and in the world—even as citizens of countries that have joined the European Union— and our racialization in the United States, where on census forms and job applications we can only identify as white, which contributes to our invisibility and precludes the emergence of a collective discourse that is critical of racial formations in the United States. Having no other identification option but white comes at the price of denying and erasing our experiences. Our accents and foreign ways mark us as different, and, in a culture where immigrants are constantly vilified for taking jobs and resources from native-born citizens, this difference brings marginalization and exploitation. I argue that we might be better off if we

190  Voichita Nachescu refuse to identify with the white hegemonic position and instead build coalitions with other minority groups with whom Eastern European immigrants, given their experiences both in their countries of origin and in the United States, might have more in common. As an academic off the tenure track, 12 years after completing my PhD, I find that the adjunctification of teaching has amplified this process of marginalization. Nativist fears point out immigrants’ potential to take “our” jobs, and academic jobs are no exception. As pursuing a tenure track (or at least a full-time) academic position requires performing all sorts of unpaid tasks in addition to the underpaid work of teaching, such as mentoring students and organizing events on campus, I feel pressured to keep generating more and more value for educational institutions, while the hope for promotion, recognition, or compensation is deferred indefinitely. These new circumstances guarantee the exploitation experienced by academic workers with unpronounceable names, with unclassifiable subject positions, who are not viewed as minorities, even though we are.

Unclassifiable Outsiders The incident at the Women in Black protest was the first one in a long series of casual encounters that made me aware of a visual and aural economy in which I was constantly misread: as being from India or from South America or from the Middle East or, more rarely, from Greece—never from Eastern Europe or Romania, my country of origin. In one way, my interlocutors were right: I was a foreigner, not born here, and even after I became a resident alien, then a naturalized American citizen, I was never allowed to forget it. The question “where are you from?” doesn’t accept an answer such as New Jersey or Michigan. I’m always asked, “But where are you really from?,” and sometimes, this second question is asked in a harsher tone, as if in an effort to extract a truth that I’ve been hiding an essence of my being (my real origin, who I really am) that indelibly marks me as foreign. This experience is best explained by Katarzyna Marciniak’s concept of alienhood (2006, p. xiii), defined as a highly radicalized rhetorical and disciplinary apparatus that classifies immigrants, refugees, and border crossers, in relation to the U.S. territory. The notion of aliens has a bifold, palimpsestic signification in American culture—meaning both foreigner and extraterrestrial creature. The notion of the alien brands exiles as outsiders: the ones who do not and will not fully belong, and may only aspire to provisional belonging. While the reminders that belonging here, in the United States, is only provisional abound in my everyday experience, my racial categorization as

Unclassifiable Outsiders  191 white erases this experience of marginality. I first encountered this puzzling phenomenon on the affirmative action forms that I dutifully completed as soon as I went on the academic job market. I never tried to avoid such forms: in an era when affirmative action was gradually being dismantled, aware of racism and sexism, I kept trying to answer truthfully. Yet how could I do that? The only category I could legitimately check was “white: a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa” (US Census). There was no option that attested to my foreign born status, so for all intents and purposes, I was declaring myself a white, American-born woman. It felt like a lie. While white women in the United States have a wide range of experiences, I doubt many spent their childhood and teenage years under a communist dictatorship and participating in a bloody revolution that upended that dictatorship. I also don’t think many white American women spent their 20s collecting undergraduate and master’s diplomas while witnessing a chaotic transition to capitalism that created record inequalities and triggered an inflation that devalued the national currency 10,000 times, pauperizing large swaths of the population, young people especially. Yet, in spite of my misgivings about its categories, I wanted to support affirmative action, and I wanted to be truthful. Once I checked the box Other, and then specified: Romanian. It felt needlessly patriotic. Other times, I wrote Other: immigrant, or Other: Eastern-European immigrant. Or, simply, Other: other. It felt silly, as if I was adding an unnecessary layer of complexity to an already crowded space of confusing categories with competing demands. At the same time, I was aware that in many ways, I was privileged in multiple ways: being able-bodied, accessing spaces rarely represented a challenge. My ability to remain legally in the United States felt like an enormous chance. Heterosexual privilege guaranteed that my choice of partner was unlikely to work against me, while cisgender privilege protected me from the violence that trans women experience daily. I was also aware of white privilege at times—for example, not being exposed to police brutality; however, I soon learned that behind any police officer’s initial courtesy, there were other exclusions and threats stemming from my immigrant background, easily detected as soon as I opened my mouth. Trying to make some sense of my experience, both in graduate school and afterward, I turned to transnational feminist writings. They seemed like a natural home for my experience, but to my surprise, I could not find any reference to Eastern Europe. As I was teaching women’s studies introductory level courses, I was looking for articles that would explain my history to my students. In both introductory and advanced textbooks, a plethora of essays and personal narratives explored how ethnicity or race, in addition to gender, shaped women’s experiences in the United States and abroad. Yet in 14 years of teaching introductory women’s studies courses in the United States, I have seen exactly one article about Eastern European women in all the major textbooks currently in use.

192  Voichita Nachescu In her work on alienhood, Marciniak (2006) notes that transnational feminists have been busy deconstructing the third world, first world dichotomy, but have nothing to say about “the murky territory of the so-called second world” (p. 16). While the idea of a world divided into first, second, and third is an ideological construct harking back to the aftermath of the Second World War, this division, nevertheless, refers to historically determined power relations and experiences that continue in today’s transnational world: Central and Eastern European regions, for a long time placed in the Western imagination “behind the wall” have been consistently treated as the “other” Europe, the impoverished cousin to the “real” thing, a treatment that has consolidated the identity of “true Europeans,” who see themselves as legitimately and purely Western. (Marciniak, 2006, p. 55) In the European Union, for example, this dissociation has centered on workers from former socialist member states, whose presence in large numbers in Western Europe has triggered economic and cultural anxieties: During the entire period from the formal “accession” of the eight erstwhile-state-socialist states to the EU on May 1, 2004 . . . to the “Brexit” vote of June 23, 2016, the increasingly demonized figure of the east-European-worker dominated discursive space about labor policy, social rights, and eventually, European Union membership. (Borocz & Sarkar, 2017, p. 311) This outsider status implicitly granted Eastern European workers, in spite of a European Union that was supposed to guarantee the free movement of people within its borders, reinforces the distinction, never completely erased, between Eastern and Western Europe. While there is little doubt about Eastern Europe’s difference from Western Europe, the absence of Eastern European women from transnational and global feminist studies remains puzzling. In one of a handful of articles published in the American academic media about Eastern European women, Jennifer Suchland (2011) claims that the three world metageography has its antecedent in area studies knowledge production and Cold War ideological production, which “have framed the second world as uncritical of, and the third world as critical of, the West” (p. 838). In other words, the common assumption guiding transnational feminist scholars is that the second world is pro-Western, lacking critical theory, while the third world, associated with anti-colonial movements, is perceived as the source of critical theory. “With the end of the Cold War,” states Suchland (2011), “and the elimination of capitalism’s other, postcolonial and third world critiques were left to challenge neoliberal globalization while the former Soviet Union

Unclassifiable Outsiders  193 and Eastern bloc were left to the normalizing processes of democratization and Europeanization” (p. 839). Although these processes have been incomplete, and Eastern European feminist intellectuals have been critical of a wide range of issues, from the disappearance of the social safety net to anti-Roma racism, Eastern European feminisms are still unrecognized in transnational feminism. This silence is unjustified, especially given the recent phenomenon of migration from Eastern Europe to the United States, which has dramatically increased since the collapse of the former Soviet bloc in 1990, the number of immigrants reaching 2.1 million in 2014. According to the US census, the number of European immigrants has steadily declined from nearly 75% of all immigrants in 1960 to about 12% in 2010; however, the share of Eastern European immigrants has steadily increased to 44% of European immigrants, the highest percentage among European regions included in the census—more specifically Western, Southern, and Northern Europe, with, respectively, 20%, 16%, and 19% of the total number of European immigrants (Zong & Batalova, 2015). Immigration from Eastern Europe has especially accelerated in the years following the fall of socialism. Compared with other nations, the number of immigrants from Eastern Europe (2.1 million) is slightly higher than the number of immigrants from India (2.035 million in 2013) or China (2.018 million in 2013), the second and third, respectively, largest foreignborn groups by national origin—after Mexico—living in the United States. Eastern European immigrants have come to the United States mostly as refugees from the Balkan Wars or as immigrants from highly skilled professions, which accounts for rather large disparities in education, English proficiency, and income among immigrants (Robila, 2007). There are commonalities of experience among Eastern European immigrants, and they have to do less with nationality than with a common regional identity that I suggest we can claim. In her famous essay “Genealogies of Community, Home, and Nation,” Chandra Mohanty (2003) advocates for a regional (South Asian) identity instead of the national identities such as Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, or Burmese, thus increasing their numbers and hence their power within the United States. While this collective identity does not account for specific national identities, “regional differences among those from different . . . countries are often less relevant than the commonalities based on our experiences and histories of immigration, treatment, and location in the United States” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 127). I suggest we claim a similar Eastern European identity. For Eastern Europeans, these commonalities of experience include marginalization and unbelonging within Europe, poverty and the erosion of social safety nets at home, and, in the United States, the experience of alienhood and our racialization as white, which renders invisible the exploitation we share with other marginalized groups. Obviously, I did not identify as Eastern European in Romania: I identified as Romanian, feminist, and passionately critical of nationalism. What

194  Voichita Nachescu else could one be at a time when a successful revolution had given birth to a new democracy, whose promises were soon choked in the political contest between a left intent on preserving the privileges of the corrupt socialist bureaucracy and a right that was neoliberal, religious, anti-feminist, and anti-Semitic? I was part of a group of four women who started a Feminist Studies Center at my alma mater, the University of the West, Timisoara, in 1998. For a while, I was the resource director of the center. My volunteer work involved organizing events in which we discussed feminist books, few and far between, that were being translated into Romanian for the first time. Trying to fill that vacuum, we applied for and were awarded a small grant by the Soros Foundation, and we established the first feminist library in the region. In my work with the Feminist Studies Center, I also collaborated with a local non-profit, the Association for the Promotion of Women in Romania, on a project that aimed to create the blueprint for a domestic violence law, which was adopted in the Romanian Parliament in 2003. As dedicated as I was to my work in Romania, I wanted to learn more. I was adamant: I wanted to enroll in a women’s studies doctoral program, and I was committed to interdisciplinary work. When an acceptance letter and a teaching assistantship offer arrived from a women’s studies program, I didn’t hesitate one moment.

A History of Eastern European Migration to the United States What does it really mean to be “Eastern European” in the United States today? How do we, new immigrants from the bad neighborhoods of Europe, enter a longer history of immigration preceding our arrival here? How do we account for the way poverty and exploitation within Europe shape the identities and dreams we carry with us when we cross the ocean and become a new, unnamed hybrid? What is our place in this multicultural society, whose dreams and nightmares precede us, and what role are we going to play here? In order to answer these questions, I turn to the history of Eastern European migration to the United States. Such a history is possible, first of all, because Eastern Europe is not, in fact, a recently conceptualized geographical region. On the contrary, as Larry Wolff shows, the map of the Enlightenment shifted the separation axis between a civilized Southern Europe and its barbaric, northern counterpart, a mental map dating back to the Renaissance, to imagining Eastern Europe as a particular region, which “defined Western Europe by contrast.” Eastern Europe, for Enlightenment philosophers, enjoyed an ambiguous location, within Europe, but “not fully European, that called for such notions as backwardness and development to mediate between the poles of civilization and barbarism. In fact, Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century provided western Europe with its first model of underdevelopment” (Wolff, 1994, p. 9). This understanding

Unclassifiable Outsiders  195 of Eastern Europe as uncivilized and backward was perpetuated into the nineteenth century during the large wave of immigration from Europe that reshaped the American citizenry. A history of migration to the United States, of course, cannot be discussed outside of a historical examination of race, which shaped, from the very beginning, the body politic of the United States, through the “institutionalization of a racial order that drew a color line around rather than within Europe” (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 6). Yet for the Eastern Europeans arriving in the United States, especially from the mid-nineteenth century on, their whiteness was subject to intense debates. During the period of mass immigration from Europe, from the 1840s until 1924, when restrictive legislation based on national quotas was put into place, debates arose about the ability for self-government of the new immigrants, many of whom were peasants and laborers from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe. These immigrants were classified in a variety of subcategories, such as Celt, Slav, Hebrew, Iberic, and Mediterranean, among others, all defined in opposition to the Anglo-Saxon background, which politicians and intellectuals found a lot more desirable (Jacobson, 1998). According to Francis A. Walker, superintendent of the 1892 and 1896 censuses, professor of political economy at Yale, and president of the American Statistical Association, the new immigrants, “Hungarians, Bohemians, Poles, south Italians, and Russian Jews,” came from “every foul and stagnant pool of population of Europe” and were “degraded below our utmost conceptions” (Painter, 2010, p. 210). Eastern Europeans’ position as undesirable Europeans can be better understood from the debates over naturalization occurring after 1870, when African-Americans became eligible for citizenship, while Asians were deliberately excluded. Two overlapping sets of discourses emerged, pitting new immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe against Asian immigrants already living in the United States and petitioning for naturalization through the courts. In 1891, Henry Cabot Lodge claimed that Slovak immigrants were not a “good acquisition,” since “they appear to have so many items in common with the Chinese” and both represented “races most alien to the body of American people” (Jacobson, 1998, p. 42). In the 1890s, according to Jacobson, the ascending view among native-born Americans was that “Southern European, Semitic, and Slavic immigrants held as poor a claim to the color ‘white’ as the Japanese, and therefore ought to be turned away at once.” These overlapping debates over immigration (from the undesirable areas of Europe) on the one hand and naturalization (of Asians already living in the United States) on the other hand positioned immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe at the bottom of the white racial order, yet, nevertheless, within whiteness. As Jacobson (1998) claims, “Slavs were becoming less and less white in debates over who should be allowed to disembark on American shores, and yet were becoming whiter and whiter in debates over who should be granted the full rights of citizenship” (p. 77).

196  Voichita Nachescu As the twentieth century advanced, these concerns gradually lost their salience. Between the 1920s and 1960s, Caucasian became the preferred term for people of European descent. After the Second World War, the descendants of European immigrants moved from inner city ghettos into white middle-class suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, and it seemed that the new immigrants had successfully assimilated into American whiteness. The 1960s brought with them a new emphasis on ethnic identity, under the influence of Black Power and Civil Rights movement, as American whites adopted a new language of identity that reclaimed Italianness, Greekness, Jewishness, and Irishness (Jacobson, 2006). These new identities did not challenge whiteness as a fundamental aspect of American power relations, yet they did relocate “that normative whiteness from what might be called Plymouth Rock whiteness to Ellis Island whiteness” (Jacobson, 2006, p. 7). Thus for the last 40 years or so, white Americans have been busy creating new ethnic identifications for themselves, such as Polish-Americans or Italian-Americans, hyphenated identities that on the surface seem similar to those of African-American or Asian-American yet do not question the privilege of whiteness. The myth of Ellis Island immigrants, hardworking and able to become successful in American society, obscures government support (as expressed through laws such as the GI Bill) and white privilege. But not all hyphenated identities are created equal, as Mary Waters (1996/2013) shows in her famous essay “Optional Ethnicities: For Whites Only.” According to Waters, when contemporary white Americans identify as Irish-, Italian-, or Polish-American, they maintain “symbolic identities,” identities that are “individualistic in nature and without any real social cost for the individual. These symbolic identities are essentially leisure time activities.” In contrast, those who our society defines racially “are contained to identify with the part of their ancestry that has been socially defined as the ‘essential’ part” (p. 142). For example, for Asian-Americans and AfricanAmericans, ethnicity, even many generations after their ancestors’ arrival, forced or not, in the United States, is anything but optional. I would like to add that ethnicity is anything but optional for recent immigrants from Eastern Europe as well. According to Robila (2007), during the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, immigration to the United States was extremely limited, because of travel restrictions within the Eastern bloc. Things changed dramatically after the fall of socialism; the number of Eastern Europeans admitted yearly for legal residence in the United States multiplied many times. Yet the fact that immigration from Eastern Europe is a relatively new phenomenon means that most recent Eastern European immigrants have been living in the United States for a relatively short period of time (less than 15 years) and are likely to be non-citizens. In addition, their English proficiency varies highly depending on their country of origin: a study of Eastern European immigrant population revealed that the percentage speaking English “less than very well” ranged from 30.7% and 31.8% for immigrants from Estonia and Hungary, respectively, to as high as

Unclassifiable Outsiders  197 66.1% and 65.7% for immigrants from Belarus and Ukraine, respectively. Whether understood in terms of citizenship, language, or culture, for the new immigrants from Eastern Europe, “ethnicity” is anything but optional. Although Waters and Jacobson are convincing in their assessment of optional ethnicities as ways of denying systemic racism and the treatment of racial minorities as second-class citizens, there are exceptional cases when assuming hyphenated identities can lead to more progressive outcomes. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowicz (1992/2006), who after her father’s death reclaimed the Jewish name he had abandoned in the 1940s, narrates the rediscovery of her Jewish roots as part of a process of political awakening. For her, reclaiming Jewishness became part of an identity that included lesbian activism and antiracist work. If casting aside the specific Jewish difference and embracing American whiteness, Kaye/Kantrowicz (1992/2006) states, has come at the cost of losing her cultural identity and sense of community, then reclaiming Jewishness, just like coming out of the closet, has brought her to “solidarity, the opposite of whiteness” (p. 137). Perhaps for Eastern European immigrants, the issue is less about whether, how, or at what point we become categorized as white Americans and more about how we relate to whiteness, and what it takes to recognize whiteness as an identity based on the systematic discrimination of others. Baldwin (1984/1998) writes that becoming white has meant, for immigrant groups adopting whiteness in the past, “persuading themselves that a Black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life” (p. 178). If Baldwin refers to the history of immigration, for us, these are not historical questions: we have to ask ourselves these questions, now, and the answers we give can influence not only our identities and prospects but also affect the future of American racial formations as well.

Intersectional Eastern European Feminism Recent years have put to rest the assumption that Eastern Europe, left to the processes of democratization, and under the more or less direct influence of the European Union, would find some sort of a belonging in the first world. The absence of an Eastern European viewpoint from transnational feminism remains puzzling, however. What could feminism, as rooted in the historical experience of Eastern Europe, and especially in its current circumstances, bring to transnational conversations about the world? In fact, there has never been a more exciting time to study Eastern Europe. The reemergence of far-right politics in the region has in many ways stimulated more radical, democratic, antiracist, and socialist feminist discourses that for the first time enjoy a degree of mainstream support. For example, a slew of social movements throughout Eastern Europe have been trying to pass, with international support, referenda to modify national constitutions to define marriage as being between a man and a woman—a preemptive strike against same sex marriage. In reaction, LGBTQ social movements

198  Voichita Nachescu have received more attention and public support than in previous years (Nachescu & Viski, 2017; Nachescu, 2005). Eastern European feminism has to be intersectional. While often Eastern European societies are assumed to be racially and ethnically homogenous, the opposite is true, and contemporary feminists need to address a wide range of issues, from long-standing historic anti-Semitism and anti-Roma racism, to a recognition of Muslim minorities’ history and contributions to the region. In addition, the xenophobic discourses against Eastern European workers, as developed in the European Union, have often acquired a racial tinge. Finally, in what ways can Eastern European women’s and men’s investment in whiteness and Europeanness be challenged, and what other possible alliances and solidarities can emerge? In the past two years, prompted by Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, socialism has become, especially for the millennial generation, a valid political term. Yet many studies find that millennials’ understanding of socialism is rather limited. Eastern European feminist histories focused on the experiences of living in a state socialist society have many valuable lessons to offer, as does the experience of witnessing the postsocialist transition to capitalism. Intersectional, transnational Eastern European feminist studies can contribute valuable knowledge to our understanding of the contemporary world. . . . . . Nevertheless, this increased visibility of Eastern Europe in transnational feminism is still far from being a reality. Over the years, I have found that the absence of Eastern Europe as a theoretical and scholarly space has affected my ability to secure a permanent academic position, although I have published research on both US intersectional feminist history and gender and sexuality in Eastern Europe. Right after finishing my doctorate, I received a prestigious fellowship in women’s and gender studies, followed by a visiting assistant professorship. At the height of the economic recession, in response to the applications I religiously sent out for positions for which I was even remotely qualified, I received invitations for several campus interviews, followed by what I came to see as the inevitable rejections. Interestingly enough, the same rejections do not apply when I try to find courses to teach part time in more than seven years of adjunct life. I enjoy teaching, very much, which is often reflected in my student evaluations. I have continued to publish my research and survive economically, barely, by teaching four or five courses every semester, one or even two summer sessions, at up to three different institutions. I have performed every task a full-time instructor usually does, from course development to mentoring students and organizing events on campus, but while a certain sense of accumulation is supposed to mark an academic career, this does not happen for adjuncts, whose professional lives seem to magically begin anew every

Unclassifiable Outsiders  199 semester, although institutions of higher learning benefit from our underpaid work in the classroom and unpaid service to the institution. “You’re just not one of the minorities we want to see on campus,” a white American, tenured professor said to me, in a moment of honesty. I wanted to thank her for her frankness, yet I felt that speaking acts are performative ones and that the moment she uttered the words, she, once again, made a decision that my background wasn’t desirable, that my expertise and interdisciplinary research weren’t really needed, and that, from the comfort of her inalienable privilege—as white American, as tenured professor—she could simply look at the world map, choose what was exciting and what wasn’t, and decide whose work and lives mattered. Eons separated her from the white American man who had told me 16 years earlier to go back to India. Unlike him, she was polished and educated, an academic, a feminist whose work I respected, and she spoke in a soft voice, unlike the man, who had screamed in my face. Yet in the end, I felt that the message, although delivered infinitely more gently, was similar: the message of unbelonging, or only provisional and temporary belonging, as second-class citizen—an already made decision that rendered insignificant my experience, my difference, and all the stories I could tell about it.

Note 1 I want to thank Alla Invanchikova for allowing me to borrow the concept of “unclassifiable outsider,” which she used in a conversation about our status as Eastern European feminists, and Carl Linskoog for his comments on the immigration history section.

References Baldwin, J. (1984/1998). On being ‘white’ and other lies . . . In D. R. Roediger (Ed.), Black on White: Black writers on what it means to be White (pp. 177–180). New York, NY: Schocken Books. Borocz, J., & Sarkar, M. (2017, Summer). The unbearable Whiteness of the polish plumber and the Hungarian peacock dance around “race”. Slavic Review, 76(2), 307–314. Frye Jacobson, M. (1998). Whiteness of different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Frye Jacobson, M. (2006). Roots too: White ethnic revival in post-civil rights America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Irvin Painter, N. (2010). The history of White people. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Kaye/Kantrowicz, M. (1992/2006). The rising cost of Whiteness. In G. Kirk & M. O. Rey (Eds.), Women’s lives: Multicultural perspectives (6th ed., pp. 131–137). New York, NY: McGraw Hill. Marciniak, K. (2006). Alienhood: Citizenship, exile, and the logic of difference. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nachescu, V. (2005). Hierarchies of difference: National identity, gay and lesbian rights, and the church in post-communist Romania. In A. Stulhofer (Ed.),

200  Voichita Nachescu Sexuality and gender in postcommunist Eastern Europe and Russia (pp. 57–790). Binghampton: The Haworth Press. Nachescu, V., & Viski, V. (2017, January 17). Americans are trying to poison Romania with homophobia. The Advocate. Retrieved from www.advocate.com/ commentary/2017/1/17/americans-are-trying-poison-romania-homophobia Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formations in the United States (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Robila, M. (2007). Eastern European immigrants in the United States: A sociodemographic profile. The Social Science Journal, 44, 113–125. Scott, J. (2011). The fantasy of feminist history. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Suchland, J. (2011). Is postsocialism transnational? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36(4), 836–862. Talpade Mohanty, C. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Waters, M. (1996/2013). Optional ethnicities: For Whites only? In G. Kirk & M. O. Rey (Eds.), Women’s lives: Multicultural perspectives (6th ed., pp. 138–144). New York, NY: McGraw Hill. Wolff, L. (1994). Inventing Eastern Europe: The map of civilization on the mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zong, J., & Batalova, J. (2015). European immigrants to the United States. Migration Policy Institute. Retrieved from www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ european-immigrants-united-states

16 (In)visible Dis/abilities, Teaching Writing, and Affective Whiteness Or, What Literally Floored Me Today Jenn Polish Morning. I am what people would call a morning person. I perform the role well, and I always have. Saying that I teach freshmen writing at 8:00 a.m. always elicits a sharp intake of breath from the sympathetic lips of colleagues and friends who don’t want to imagine trying to engage themselves, let alone 20 teenagers, at that time of morning. But I remind myself of Anna from Frozen, crawling on top of my groggy girlfriend as Anna crawls on top of her sleeping sister, and—ever so dramatically performing the role of neglected, eager, adorable other half flawlessly—sighing, “The sky’s awake. So I’m awake! So we hafta play!” And by play, I mean, you know, draft new chapters and edit papers. Joyfully. I am “manic.” Morning. I am twitching uncontrollably on my mattress in the corner of my room. Or maybe I’ve made it out of bed, but I’ve wound up back on the floor, my clothes functioning as a vacuum cleaner, collecting dust off the floor, because even though my forehead is starting to hurt from the hardwood, I can’t lift up off of it. Light is beginning to peak through my window, the sharp stabs of panic screwdriving themselves into my stomach and that sensitive dip in the front of my neck. I try to refuse to give in. I try to refuse to curl into a ball. I try to refuse to panic. I try to refuse to forget that I will probably wind up having a relatively enjoyable day if I can only uncurl my clenched, trembling body. I try. Often, I fail. I am “depressed.” I carry these characteristics everywhere. I carry them into classrooms, and I carry them into my office: which, every single time I think about turning the key to open its door, I have to brace myself for the possibility of a panic attack. I like my office mates perfectly well, but there is a series of what ifs that accompany me, always: what if I go in for my office hours and I have to share close space with a fellow adjunct, a fellow person that I have to exchange pleasantries with? What if somehow I’m bothering her and what if I annoy her (by existing? My logic asks me) and what if . . .? But we are academics. We are judged on collegiality. I smile, and I try to mean it. Well, I say that I carry them, these characteristics. But often it feels decidedly as though they carry me. Whatever distinctions there are between “me” and “them,” anyway.

202  Jenn Polish Like the times—it happens often—when I walk into a classroom unwilling to meet anyone’s eye because I have no energy for conversation. My jaw feels fused, as though I will fall through a screaming abyss if I even attempt to open my mouth. And then I do, because I must, and then I switch, and I energetically greet my freshmen writing students and jot down the day’s journaling prompt on the board: they don’t call it borderline for nothing. Sometimes, this BPD thing congeals with my anxiety, conspires with my depression, and beats the living daylights out of me. Other times it feels like a superpower: I can swing higher than you can possibly imagine, dip lower than you’ve ever been, and not even feel the drop or the rise in the middle. Betcha can’t do that. Unless you can. Unless you, too, have a (not so) secret superpower. Unless you, too, hide it more often than not because really, who wants to be known as the supposedly unstable one on campus? . . . . . Academic discourse operates not just to omit, but to abhor mental disability—to reject it, to stifle and expel it. —Margaret Price, Mad at School (2011, 8) More often than not, when you take three or four classes a term—ah, that grad school life—you’re expected to churn out three or four seminar papers a term. More often than not, when you teach freshmen composition (alongside your three or four classes, perhaps), you’re preparing all your lessons, reading your students’ work, meeting with students (avoiding?), interacting with colleagues, trying to remember just how that professor used to teach this article, because it really helped you and you’d love it if you could replicate that illuminating strategy for your own students now. More often than not, when you have publication deadlines and conferences to prepare for (emotionally and otherwise), you are reading more than you know what to do with and, whatever your process is for whittling it down and getting it onto the page, deciding how in the hell you can possibly say anything different. Anything that matters. More often than not, you—me, we—are struggling to be composed. We must compose our compositions, and we must compose ourselves. Robert McRuer, in his intersectional queer and dis/ability-based1 analysis of teaching college composition, argues, despite teacher-scholars’ efforts throughout the decades to emphasize process over product, The finished heterosexual product is so fetishized [by the corporate university] that the composition process cannot be acknowledged; the institutions that compose straightness thus simultaneously produce ideologies that render the process itself virtually unthinkable. (2004, 51)

(In)visible Dis/abilities  203 In other words, the glorification of and constant demand for the final, handed-in-to-teacher, ready-for-publication product constitutes an institutional mandate for the individualized performance of heteronormative (re) production. This demand for only what is perceived as whole and complete renders the process of creating—the messiness of composition—as unintelligible. Whether McRuer’s fetishized final product is the final paper, the seminar paper, the successfully passed exam, the ultra lab report, or the peerreviewed article, we are, indeed, demanded to constantly churn out polished products. McRuer further argues that compulsory heterosexuality (the heteronormative assumption/demand that everyone must be straight and cisgender) is “thoroughly interwoven” with what he calls compulsory able-bodiedness (the ableist assumption/demand that everyone must be non-disabled). These two structurally imposed compulsions are mutually constitutive of each other: because of their interlinked nature, the fetishized final product constructs able-bodiedness as well, literally composing bodies as able to produce a hegemonically approved text (2004, 51). In order to fulfill the demands of the academy to compose finished products, then, one must compose oneself as non-disabled. While McRuer leaves untouched the racialized implications of either compulsory heterosexuality or compulsory able-bodiedness—in which the unthinkable norm must be straightness and able-bodiedness—it is precisely this glamorized emphasis on product that squelches mental difference in the academy. Assuming neurotypical capacities for all professors and all students (as though there is only one way to be neurotypical), the constant prioritization of scholarly output gravely disadvantages those with mental/ physical differences that might make these normativized products particularly difficult (if not impossible) to produce. In addition, this demanding academic expectation of constant mental labor and “original” production dramatically reinforces the notion that one’s self-worth is dependent upon one’s ability to generate passable and publishable academic texts. And, certainly, this self-worth crisis becomes tangible in the threat of losing employment opportunities, health insurance, etc., if these demands cannot be met. Getting into and keeping afloat in the academic job market involves a plethora of sociable, personal interactions that demands of us a very particular kind of composure. Of this composure, Margaret Price has asked, “Are you coming across as a reliable person? . . . Are you making sense?” (2011, 26, emphasis in original). Indeed, we are in the business of “making sense.” We are meant to convey to our students various methods of this sense making, this literal making, as in producing, of something we come to register as sensible. We construct what sense is. Like standards of composure are intimately tied to composition, standards of sense making are intimately tied to sensibility. Sensible: an intangible ideal, something that does not register at all—or only registers intellectually but maybe not emotionally, or registers sometimes but not others, or some

204  Jenn Polish squishy combination thereof—for the throngs of us stealthing through the academy with various mental dis/abilities. And what happens to those of us with bodies, with minds, with both, that refuse to be composed, that cannot or will not make sense? What happens when the public (de)composition of our unruly bodies and minds threaten the assumptions of what we are supposed to teach our students to compose (and compose ourselves)? In other words, what happens when we are dis/ abled rhetorically by nature of social interpretations and treatments of our bodies as being Other? Given the supposedly not readily apparent nature of many dis/abilities, the presence of generalized anxiety, depression, and borderline personality dis/order in lecture halls and writing centers across the academy demands that the academy at large recognizes the materiality of oppression (2004, 62). If we recognize the bodies/minds of the actual people who comprise the corporate university, it might be possible to transform the fundamental goings-on of daily classroom experiences. Upon reflecting on her own regular experiences as a Black queer woman whose body is an “embodied text”2 in the classrooms in which she teaches, Mel Michelle Lewis writes, “Asserting the personal and invoking the body in the classroom, which is traditionally conceived of as a neutral, cerebral location, void of bodies and identities, can be professionally (and emotionally) dangerous” (2012, 36, emphasis added). Here Lewis keenly critiques the artificial construction of the mind/body split that is popular in many discourses about teaching. The supposed mind/body split can be found in the pervasive notion that if a piece of writing is deeply personal, it is somehow less academic, less serious, less publishable, and that if a person is clearly impassioned about what they are engaging with, their perspective is somehow less rational, less objective, less authoritative. This split locates forcibly disembodied “neutral” (read: hegemonic/dominant) cerebral processes as central to academic processes which professors are supposed to transmit to students. While she firmly re-locates emotions into the classroom when she acknowledges the emotional risks we take when we “assert the personal and invoke the body in the classroom,” Lewis also implicitly acknowledges (through her use of parentheticals, like this) the ways in which the emotions are expected to be separate from the professional goings-on of scholarly classroom endeavors. The violent separation of mind from body actively squelches any expressions of non-normative affect. Postcolonial, critical race, feminist, and queer theorist Sara Ahmed offers particularly illuminating understandings of the effects of the severing of body from mind. This suppression has made Ahmed-esque isolated “affect aliens” out of many of us, including “unhappy queers,” “melancholic migrants,” “feminist killjoys,” and, to be sure, “angry Black women” (2010). Academic policing of “civility” and “standard English” style in our classrooms and in our writing actively threatens the

(In)visible Dis/abilities  205 ability of those of us already perceived as less able to participate in, access, and transform academic conventions (Smitherman, 1983, p. 16). As such, academic regulations of affective expression and language particularly target the plethora of affective registers of people of color, queers, and people with dis/abilities (and those of us who share more than one of these identities). As Barbara Tomlinson argues, “Civility is used not to have equal dialog but to justify inequality and manage subordinate groups” (2010, p. 58). Among these subordinate groups are those of us who, because of mental dis/ abilities, often struggle to access the affective registers both appropriate and necessary to succeed in the academy. From filling out new hire forms in a timely fashion to navigating daysand-days-long academic conferences, it often falls on those of us with mental dis/abilities to navigate our own needs in the academy while avoiding (or embracing) the stigma that comes with outing ourselves as not only academics but also fleshy beings. Simultaneously, it often falls on us to figure out how to make the classrooms where we are the professors accessible to those who, like us, may need breaks from constant sensorial and social stimulation, who cannot or will not be “present” in class in ways that match standard participation rubrics, who truly could not complete their final paper, even though they were not feverish or nauseous. Like the default white subject, the default able-bodied white subject shapes what it means to have access to classrooms, to tenure-track jobs, to the production of publications at light speed. So often, “access” is referred to in faculty meetings, in guidelines that we are emailed by our universities, in academic discourse, and is perceived as an equality-driven move toward increasing physical access to an otherwise unchanging space. If the dominant space remains mostly unchanged with increased “access” to it, however, then what is achieved by access in the larger scheme of structural oppressions? What am I actually trying to access as a dis/abled other in the academy? Do I desire to access academic space as it is? Is that the goal? Is that what I want for my students? To make “adjustments” and “accommodations” for them instead of fundamentally changing the way I structure my classroom teaching so that it is a more welcome space for as many learning styles and needs as I can currently make it? Certainly not. When I am—when my students are—offered “access” to the academy, we are asked to contort ourselves to the least inconvenient modes of being. We are asked to still perform academically enough that we do not threaten the able-bodied supremacy of the institution. If this is the case, perhaps I want to remain stridently “Other” within the academy. How can my and others’ dis/abilities—and my/our refusal to render them invisible dis/ abilities—alter the intellectual space of the classrooms we work in and the academy more broadly? Quite possibly, it can crack open the possibility of transforming the power structures of the space (physical and intellectual). . . . . .

206  Jenn Polish A roundtable conversation with colleagues. My body is entrapping the rest of me, a shell malleable enough to congeal like cooking magma on the inside, strong enough to guard my unmoving, mechanical casing—which I am so aware of, so connected with (it is me, maybe)—keeping a welded shut lid on the hurricane brewing on the bloodied undersides of my skin. I am a pressure cooker. The things we discuss with our students, he is saying— Why is it always “we” versus “them,” I am thinking— has a tremendous emotional impact on them, and what’s going to affect them is unpredictable, he explains. He is exactly right about that. His words are so true: we do have a huge impact on our students, and they on us. We can’t ever know how these impacts are going to play out. It is, overall, an excellent point. Except, all that runs through my mind is, Mm, like the effects you’re having on me right now, making “them” the ones with “unpredictable” emotions, “us” the “rational” ones? This is not what he means. Part of me knows this. But it doesn’t matter right now. I am screaming, slouched deeply into my chair, rigid, still. I know from studied practice that my exterior looks calm, looks impassive. Screaming, but only in my mind. Because I could raise my hand—or really, lift my wrist off the table in front of me, index finger up, like I tend to do instead, because the full-on raising of my arm is often too much, too hard, too exposing—and intellectually trouble the false binary he is drawing between us versus them, teacher versus student, holder of reason and stable power versus passive receptacles and unstable emotions. I could challenge the us/them approach he is inadvertently promoting upon the minds he is discussing. I could deconstruct the assumptions of control, of authority, of the uni-directionality of audience. I could comment wryly on the irony of how strongly his words are affecting me, unexpectedly to him, when he is addressing precisely that topic. I could do those things, but I do not. I do not, because I cannot. Not right now. Perhaps I slump a little in my seat. Perhaps I check my phone under the table to diffuse the stress building, the sweat pooling under my arms. Because I cannot say, “Stop. Please. I was already in excruciating pain, but I showed up. And now you’re hurting me.” Later, when people are thinking up different strategies of delivering information to our classes, someone says, Putting exact reflections of what you’re saying on the board isn’t necessary—it’s kind of redundant, like ‘ok, why on earth are you doing that when you just said it?’ On other days, I’d look up, look around to catch other people’s reactions. Check to see if other people detect what I detected in that statement, check to see if other people were bothered.

(In)visible Dis/abilities  207 Today, though, I can see nothing but my hands, the way my T-shirt hugs my newly bulging biceps in a way I’ve been working hard for. In a way I’m proud of. I need to feel proud of something right now. If my biceps are rounded, are chiseled, maybe it means I’m not weak for having such strong reactions to such passing comments. But when my friend, sitting across the table from me, starts speaking with the skin behind her eyes pinched with irritation, I know what she’s going to say. I want to trouble that, because I think that’s a really abelist way of thinking. Other times, my mouth would twist up into a smile. I often admire the way my friend boldly refuses to mince her words. But today, this moment, my shell won’t let me smirk. So I just look at her and move my head up and down. She explains. There are lots of students and lots of us here who actually really benefit from multiple forms of representation. Students who are hard of hearing or who function in neurodiverse ways— And ELL students, and students who need different things to help keep their attention. It’s my voice, this time, and I blink in surprise. She thrusts her hand toward me, palm up, essentially: What she said. I realize that I’m leaning forward, that I can open my mouth (that I just did open my mouth). That it’s not impossible to open my mouth. She keeps explaining. We tag team the rest of our thoughts—a skill honed through long night classes of explaining white supremacy to my fellow white people who really ought to know by now. Some classmates-cum-teachers scribble down what we’re saying. Others blink. Maybe they’re shut down too. We are directed to change the topic by moving on to discussing a new question—and now for a commercial break, my brain buzzes—pretty much as soon as we begin to draw breath and quell our shaking hands. We grimace across the table at each other. Thank you. I sit back again. I attempt to disappear again. . . . . . Professors swap tales of students asking for deadline extensions all the time. It’s a typical story (isn’t it)? A student sends a hasty email to a professor at the very last moment, punctuation all askew, invoking a family emergency and begging forgiveness for missing class, for handing in that superimportant-it’s-definitely-due-today-no-exceptions assignment. Sometimes that family emergency is a family emergency per se. Sometimes your dad has cancer or your cat is coughing up blood. And sometimes, it’s a white lie. Because sometimes, the family emergency is you, because you can’t get out of bed; you can’t get off the floor, because you had an anxiety attack and don’t know how to stop feeling terrified and guilty long enough to even think about something as irrelevant as a paper for school that no

208  Jenn Polish one’s going to read except your professor and maybe a couple classmates anyway. As Margaret Price asks, “What does ‘participation’ in a class mean for a student who is undergoing a deep depression and cannot get out of bed?” (2011, pp. 5–6). The question here is not only how do we accommodate this particular student. The question is—and Price spends a good deal of energy parsing this out—how do we redefine “participation” as much as we can within the confines of corporatized, product-oriented universities so that “access” is more about structural transformation than small adjustments that place high burdens on individuals to demand what they need? How do we ensure that “access” is not limited to piecemeal adjustments for individuals who must have the health insurance and time and co-pays and know-how and energy and willingness to get poked, prodded, and diagnosed in order to produce the required documentation of dis/ability for the necessary authorities at school? This redefinition can only occur if we redefine “access” so that the term fundamentally transforms how we operate in our classrooms? Robert McRuer argues that a piecemeal approach to “access” cannot be used if one seriously considers the bodies—like mentally dis/abled bodies— that refuse to be composed and/or, sometimes, that cannot be composed. He writes, De-composition ultimately is inimical to “nuts and bolts” approaches that somehow streamline the process of composition instruction through manuals, teaching “strategies” exchanged like recipes, and the like. Such streamlining removes composition and composition theory from the realm of critical thought and secures its place in the well-run corporate university. De-composition does result, however, from ongoing attentiveness to how a given composition class will intersect with local or national issues. (2004, p. 66, emphasis in original) If my mental dis/abilities are illegible in a classroom—precisely because they/I refuse to be reasonable, cannot make sense, don’t know how to privilege the rational to the exclusion of the lived materiality of the emotional (and, in the many moments that I do know how to, choose not to in favor of challenging the whitewashed, ableist notions we have of what rationality is, anyway)—then perhaps the ways that we teach must, too, be illegible. Perhaps we cannot, should not, simply write down and swap strategies.3 But discussing why we can’t might be a mighty fine place to engage. . . . . . I am entitled to my anxiety (sort of. Usually. It depends. But for the most part, yep).

(In)visible Dis/abilities  209 I am even entitled to my rage (informed by many things, many violences, and many loves, all desires . . . but also informed by my biopolar, which is how I like to think of it: my borderline, mine, only ascribed to me because of how I choose to internalize it and be comforted by it and reject it in turn and all at once). I am entitled to my rage, because mine will not be ascribed to all neurotypical-passing white women. I am permitted my panic, my fury, my depression, my occasional-frequent (depends on the day, on the week, on the moment-to-moment) loss of touch with what is hegemonically considered “reality.” I do not have to worry that my students will forever associate people who look like me—white women, basically (I’m usually femme-presenting in the classroom, so I might in those contexts pass as straight if students willfully forget, as we are all trained to do, that I’ve already claimed myself as queer)—with being mentally unstable, even if I come out to them as dis/ abled in these ways. Which I am quite discouraged from doing. “Those of us who do function successfully in academe tend to pass much of the time,” Price writes (2011, p. 6). I’m displeased by passing as straight (I’m constantly coming out when I’m femme), and I often choose not to pass as able-bodied. This latter form of coming out is harder. And infinitely scarier. For me, anyway. The chronic pains in various parts of my legs make me wince when I stand up in class, limp a little sometimes. People see it. I usually don’t leave room for comment. One time, a student asked me how my leg was feeling as part of a brief email to me, even though I’d said nothing about it. It was the one student email ever that I’ve not answered. The limping stuff? Not so much a choice. The painful pleasure I get when people sincerely try to tell me that no, I can’t possibly have extreme social anxiety or experience depression, I’m always so energetic and happy and friendly and outgoing kind of helps me sometimes. Until it irritates me when I realize that they might be on the edge of appropriating my own ironic, tongue-in-cheek framing of my “borderline superpowers” (which I tend not to reveal as such) and actually thinking of me as inspirational or some other ableist pornographic shit.4 Ick. Despite my conflicting feelings about passing in my queer life, I do tend to pass as able-bodied much of the time in the academy. And when I don’t? I just have to worry about me. Not about becoming somebody’s essentialist representation of an entire group of people they assume are like me. But if whites experienced black sadness . . . (Pause.) It would be too overwhelming for them. (Pause.) —Cornel West in Smith, cited in Cvetkovich (2012, p. 131)

210  Jenn Polish In his foreword to Price’s Mad at School, Tobin Siebers writes, “Higher education has a strong interest in purging people with mental disabilities” (2011, p. xi). Recently, a fellow student shook across the table from me and explained an intellectual point of hers by referring to her own experiences with depression. A deep silence followed, and another student picked up the conversation elsewhere, staying far away from where she’d strayed. I picked it back up and similarly outed myself in elaborating on the first student’s interpretation of that day’s shared text. On her way out of the classroom, I grinned at her, and she mouthed, silently, “Thanks.” We said nothing else about it. It felt like a secret. Because it does feel like being purged. Every bit of it, from casual dismissals of emotions as soft and detracting from intellect to hard and fast lines about incompletes. And yet. And yet. The ways that the academy deals with (and refuses to deal with) affect— the material effects of emotions and constructions of emotions on people’s everyday lives, outside of and along with theories of affect—is directly related to the ways that higher education purges those of us with mental dis/abilities from its proverbial walls. By dismissing non-normate affective registers— and states of “mania,” panic attacks, and the tangible impacts that being unable to get out of bed and shower has on one’s ability to write papers and produce, produce, produce—we are perpetuating the privilege and power associated with dominant modes of expressivity and communication. This ableist suppression cannot be unlinked from its fundamentally racist formation, in which, according to Josè Esteban Muñoz, “minoritarian affect is always, no matter what its register, partially illegible in relation to the normative affect performed by normative citizen subjects” (2006, p. 679). In other words, normative affective expressions—affective whiteness—intimately links racism and ableism because this regulation of affect particularly targets people of color and people with dis/abilities. Normate, expected modes of expression include a strict separation of emotion and intellect, which, among other things, disqualifies people who are oppressed from speaking about their oppression unless they do so in a way that makes dominant groups comfortable. Affective expressions that stretch these normate boundaries are considered inappropriate and largely rendered illegible/not understandable/not sensible. This partial illegibility is particularly (in)surmountable in composition classrooms, in which the entire thrust of the course is supposedly to usher students along into being able to write themselves—and the scholarly arguments they craft—into literal academic legibility. Paying attention to this legibility in terms of affect yields particular modes of attentiveness that are hinted at, but not fully explored, when examining the academy’s various mechanisms of suppressing different vernaculars and the code meshing of multiple Englishes (Canagarajah, 2006, p. 598). Students are actively discouraged from speaking and writing in vernacular Englishes that deviate from the “Standard” (read: white middle class)

(In)visible Dis/abilities  211 English in the academy. This is particularly clear in most freshmen writing requirements and discourses. By attending to the ways that this suppression dually squelches the expressions of non-normate affects themselves, the process of composing specifically white able-bodied subjects is exposed. Muñoz understands this whiteness as “a cultural logic that prescribes and regulates national feelings and comportment. White is thus an affective gauge that helps us understand some modes of emotional countenance and comportment as good or bad” (2006, p. 680). In other words, the norms of whiteness regulate what forms of emotional expression or comportment are considered appropriate. In this way, whiteness maps itself onto ablebodiedness by regulating what moods, feelings, and bodily movements are acceptable. Emotional countenances marked by whiteness are characterized, Muñoz further argues, by an immense dearth of affect such that “the affective performance of normative whiteness is minimalist to the point of emotional impoverishment” (2000, p. 70). Harkening back to this chapter’s earlier discussion of the supposed split between mind and body, Muñoz makes it clear that the minimalism of whiteness enforces the notion that emotionally impoverished “rationality” is more desirable and more intelligent than more embodied, felt methods of expression and reasoning. Performing normative whiteness in writing classrooms, then, involves composing both the self and the self’s worth (the “products” one is compelled to generate) in ways that deliberately avoid the alleged “excesses” of brownness, of the various aspects of “minoritarian affect[s]” (2000, p. 70). If we thus reconfigure our understandings of whiteness as the dominant affective composition, then it becomes clear that whiteness is encoded into expectations and definitions of able-bodiedness. In these ways, whiteness—at large and in the academy—has thus set the emotional rules into which we are supposed to contort our emotional expressivities. These hegemonic modes determine which forms of emotional performance are (in)visible as normate and which are (in)visible as unacceptably deviant. In this context, mental dis/ability is fundamentally shaped by whiteness and vice versa. Understanding whiteness as the cultural logics dictating which affective registers are “inappropriate” wrenches open the protective layers of depression’s presumably biological casing and exposes its innards as being fundamentally shaped and triggered by the various oppressions that surround it and shape its definition and treatment. Indeed, Ann Cvetokvich astutely highlights the ways that literature on depression “tends to presume a white and middle class subject for whom feeling bad is frequently a mystery because it does not seem to fit a life in which privilege and comfort make things seem fine on the surface” (2012, p. 132). This is a systemic and political, rather than individualized, medical understanding of depression, and it has far-reaching implications for how depression is perceived and treated. Within this logic, Muñoz’s conception of depressive stances—which, he notes, is not meant to call to mind what

212  Jenn Polish he refers to as clinical depression—sheds light on the ways that bodies rendered white (like mine) suffering through depressive states are understood in mainstream discourses as resulting from white fragility. This white fragility juxtaposes the presumed normate state of people of color, which is already labeled in white supremacist understandings as being that of excess and therefore inappropriate affective expression. In this way, when I write, speak, and think about being out as mentally dis/abled in the academy—which undoubtedly might make present and potential colleagues wonder if I am always faking it when I appear in bubbly white girl health, wondering when I will snap—I do not experience the risk of representing all white people. Whiteness—and we who are understood as possessing/embodying/being it—is the underlying, unstated affective register that the academy considers appropriate and uses as a barometer to judge everything from final papers to tenure to whether someone gets classified as having a mental illness. My breaking with the “appropriate” affective register is only ever going to be interpreted as the result of my dis/abilities (and, perhaps, because of my gender, my queerness). The rest of the academy was made to fit the affective registers I grew up conversant in. Materially, my own whiteness— my whiteness as embodied, my whiteness as the skin-hair-features-uniform shield that very tangibly keeps even my often dykey body unnoticed by cops, unnoticed as the default authority in freshmen writing classrooms that are dominated by women who look like me—my own material whiteness protects me from many of the same ableist strictures that cultural logics of whiteness create. So, if I’m “out” as all these essentializing things—borderline, yadda yadda—will it make any dents in the overall structural dominance of affective whiteness, of the affective regime that dictates how we must perform our anxieties and our pains? Probably not. But at least writing about it peeled me off the floor of my apartment (after the deadline to do so put me on it to begin with).

Notes 1 Throughout this chapter, I put a slash in dis/ability and dis/abled to constantly remind readers of the perpetually changing definitions and interpretations of impairment. In this way, I hope to persistently remind readers and myself to unsettle the medical model of dis/ability, which locates dis/ability as an inherent bodily flaw rather than as a socially mediated exchange. 2 In his investigation of “teachable moments”, Bryant Keith Alexander deploys the idea of students’ and professors’ own “embodied texts” existing alongside and within (and modifying) the content “proper” of course material. 3 Notably, Price does make several non-prescriptive suggestions in Mad at School, and Bruce Horner et al. and Amy Winans do similarly non-prescriptive work on translingual and queer approaches to teaching, all of which enrich the ability of professors to effectively work with an expanding array of learning styles. 4 Eli Clare writes beautifully and powerfully against inspiration porn, even as he writes about literally climbing mountains.

(In)visible Dis/abilities  213

References Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alexander, B. K. (2005). Embracing the teachable moment: The Black gay body in the classroom as embodied text. In E. P. Johnson & M. G. Henderson (Eds.), Black queer studies: A critical anthology (pp. 249–265). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Canagarajah, A. S. (2006). The place of world Englishes in composition: Pluralization continued. College Composition and Communication, 57(4), 586–619. Clare, E. (1999). Exile and pride. Boston, MA: South End Press. Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression is ordinary: Public feelings and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother. Feminist Theory, 13(2), 131–146. Horner, B., Royser, J. J., Lu, M-Z., & Trimbur, J. (2011). Language difference in writing: Towards a translingual approach. College English, 73(3), 303–321. Lewis, M. M. (2012). Pedagogy and the sista’ professor: Teaching Black queer feminist studies through the self. In E. R. Meiners & T. Quinn (Eds.), Sexualities in education: A reader (pp. 33–40). Bern: Peter Lang, Inc. McRuer, R. (2004). Composing bodies: Or, de-composition: Queer theory, disability studies, and alternative corporealities. JAC, 24(1), 47–78. Muñoz, J. E. (2000). Feeling brown: Ethnicity and affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs). Theatre Journal, 52(1), 67–79. Muñoz, J. E. (2006). Feeling brown, feeling down: Latina affect, the performativity of race, and the depressive position. Signs, 31(3), 675–688. Price, M. (2011). Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Smitherman, G. (1983). Language and liberation. Journal of Negro Education, 52(1), 15–23. Tomlinson, B. (2010). Feminism and affect at the scene of argument: Beyond the trope of the angry feminist. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Winans, A. E. (2006). Queering pedagogy in the English classroom: Engaging with the places where thinking stops. Pedagogy, 6(1), 103–122.

17 A Mottled Minority Asian-American in the Whitening Academy John Streamas

The Whiteness of Two Dimensions Once, decades ago, a TV weathercaster compared weather in the United States to a first-generation waterbed. Cold and wet conditions in the West meant warm and dry conditions in the East, and vice versa, just as a person lying on one side of an old waterbed would cause the opposite side to rise. Lying in the center would cause the margins to rise. Something similar is happening in the political and cultural life of college campuses in the twenty-first century. A half-century after a civil rights movement that delivered laws striving for racial justice everywhere and the teaching of ethnic studies in college classrooms, three decades after a backlash in the first “culture wars,” and a quarter-century before demographic shifts transform the United States into a white-minority nation, paranoid and overcautious university administrators aim blindly for a “safe” middle ground from which they may disavow political interests and appear neutral and fair. But in a nation historically beset with inequality and injustice, to be neutral is not to be fair. Neutrality merely sustains a racist status quo. As if lying on an old waterbed, administrators’ rare turns to the left, in support of programs for students and faculty of color, raise protests from the right. Leftward turns are rare because of the residual pressures of those first culture wars and the consequent corporatizing of campus. Charged with raising funds, administrator-CEOs prop up diversity programs aimed at attracting tuition dollars from students of color—customers—even as they promote profitable programs and lavish facilities aimed at attracting huge donations from conservative philanthrocapitalists. Yet even if this were truly the middle ground that administrators seek, the margins, as on the old waterbed, are sure to rise in protest. My aim here is first to provide examples from cultural sites—contemporary literature, environmentalism, stand-up comedy—that, while seeming to lean toward racial justice too often give rise to the opposite. These are sites of study for many scholars of color, who do not always account for the undependable racial politics. Then, drawing on my experience as an immigrant Japanese American, I will situate myself in the new culture wars, pushed

A Mottled Minority  215 into margins. Finally, I will urge fellow faculty of color toward a new resistance. One solution to the “waterbed effect” is to reduce the bed to two dimensions, to flatten its entire surface. This is exactly what administrator-CEOs attempt as they aim for a racial middle ground. But flattened, those old waterbeds leaked or burst. For administrators, there can be no racial middle ground that does not exacerbate inequalities. Like color-blind racisms, their protocols of flattening are doomed to burst.

The Whiteness of Grief Memoirs and Environmentalism In her creative nonfiction essay “Required Reading,” Rachel Beanland (2015) expresses gratitude for a literature of grieving that helped her survive the loss of her father to cancer. She says, “It was literature—not liturgy—that had always brought me comfort” (p. 67). She found what she sought. She cites several books that comforted her: books by Gail Caldwell, Ann Hood, Meghan O’Rourke, and Joan Didion. “I felt acutely aware of how differently we approached our grief,” Beanland writes, adding that the grief memoirs became for her a map, their authors her guides (p. 67). Yet with one exception, the authors she names are white, and they are probably much more alike than different. The exception is Sonali Deraniyagala,1 whose 2013 book Wave recounts the loss of an entire family to the 2004 Pacific tsunami. The other books recount losses much more like Beanland’s own, and I am reminded that, during the Vietnam War, American stereotypes claimed that Asians approach death differently from “us,” that they do not share “our” reverence for life,2 and that one evening I watched news footage of an elderly Vietnamese woman kneeling alone in a vast field, wailing and chanting over the loss of her son to the war. Though I have not read all the grief memoirs Beanland read, I would guess that their authors’ approaches to their griefs are not at all like the approach of the elderly Vietnamese woman, or the approaches of survivors of desert migrations, genocide campaigns, tortures of refugees, or driving or walking while black. This is not to accuse Beanland of racism, or even of insensitivity. It is only to suggest she is ignorant of her privilege, of the extreme narrowness of her sense of difference. Elsewhere, Jedediah Purdy, in an online piece called “Environmentalism’s Racist History” (2015), recounts the history of American environmental activists such as Madison Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, for whom saving nature was an aristocratic ambition, the work of preserving “lordly” animals such as elk and buffalo, like the saving of the noblest and purest of humans. That many of these early environmentalists were involved in the eugenics movement is fairly well known (Purdy, 2015). Less known is their corollary contempt for inferior races. Even John Muir described “the laziness of ‘Sambos’ ” and suggested that indigenous peoples were “dead or

216  John Streamas civilized into useless innocence” (qtd. in Purdy, 2015). Purdy acknowledges that, though some environmental groups today work for racial justice, the legacy of racisms remains: The priorities of the old environmental movement limit the effective legal strategies for activists today. . . . [Mitch] Bernard [of the National Resources Defense Council] attributes some of the misgivings to environmentalism’s history as an elite, white movement. A 2014 study found that whites occupied eighty- nine per cent of leadership positions in environmental organizations. (2015)

The Whiteness of the Humanities Creative nonfiction and ecocriticism are among the few relatively thriving subfields in colleges of liberal arts that otherwise struggle for recognition and funding in American universities. They emerged alongside, or shortly after, the fields of ethnic studies and gender studies. The emergence of these latter fields has prompted administrators to boast of their institutions’ commitments to diversity, as if to say, Our university now houses a high-level office of diversity, and we require undergraduates to enroll in diversity courses, and we have committed resources to recruiting students in areas with heavy concentrations of people of color, so we are doing a good job. To be sure, here at this state university in eastern Washington, the percentage of students of color, many of them first generation, has more than doubled in my 17 years here, and though their retention rates are still lower than those of white students, still, quantitative progress has been real and noticeable. At the same time, this university, like others, diverts a disproportionate amount of resources to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields in which, as headlines announce, women and people of color are underrepresented.3 It is much easier for universities to divert resources to those fields than it is to recruit underrepresented groups to them. The “persistent mistrust” in environmental organizations that Jedediah Purdy notices in people of color is noticeable too in their attitudes to STEM fields. It is often the scientists and engineers in STEM fields who, for their roles in eugenics campaigns and the locating of toxic waste sites and nuclear dumpsites, construct the very environmental injustices that activists seek to dismantle. Because the double mistrusts of activists and scientists have not been adequately acknowledged, much less resolved, the wonder is that so many—not so few—people of color enter both science and environmental activism.4

A Mottled Minority  217 It is the liberal arts, with continuously underfunded programs, that still attract a significant percentage of students of color. And it is the liberal arts that still have most to offer teachers and scholars of color.

The Whiteness of the Social Sciences A friend, a brilliant young African-American social scientist, applied for a job here.5 He already had a position at a prestigious East Coast university where, though he was the only black member of his sizable department, he had ready access to a black community. His colleagues were generous and supportive, he assured me, but they just did not “get” him. Yet faculty in the same field here, though probably just as generous and supportive, were also just as white, and our small inland northwest town has almost no black community. The closest sizable black community in Seattle is 300 miles away. I would have been delighted if he had accepted an offer here, but he stayed where he was, and a few years later hired into another eastern school in another sizable city. Though happy for his apparent success, still, I wonder whether he feels better understood now than he did then. Most faculty of color, I believe, feel as misfit as my friend, as misfit as I feel as a Japanese American, even though I teach Asian-American studies in an ethnic studies department that, though small, has four other AsianAmerican faculty members. Texts in my field speak of the “model minority” stereotype, by which Asian-Americans are perceived as having “made it,” succeeded on white terms, partly by assimilating, partly by being “naturally” fitted to Western social and cultural standards. The field teaches that we are no better fitted to white standards than others of color, but that we are exploited as a wedging device, by which whites feel justified in complaining that blacks and Latinos can never succeed as long as they refuse to work as hard and as stoically as we do—that is, as long as they refuse to “white up” as we have. Moreover, the “model minority” applies only to earliest immigrant Asian groups, Chinese and Japanese Americans, and sometimes South Asian-Americans. The high unemployment rates of Cambodian immigrants, and the deportations of young Cambodian American men, are conveniently ignored by the stereotype. As for Japanese Americans, according to the stereotype, success can be measured not only in socioeconomic terms but also, maybe even especially, in outmarriage rates: we marry whites as often as each other. The paradigmatic “model minority” community thus achieves the ultimate American dream—marrying white.

The Whiteness of My Narrative I am an immigrant and hapa6—a white father and a Japanese mother—but, until I took my current job, I failed every qualifying standard of the “model minority.” My parents’ marriage ended when I was 5 years old, after which

218  John Streamas my mother, my brother, and I depended on welfare and food stamps. My mother was a tireless worker, but she had little education in Japan and had learned no English in school during the war, and so the little English she knew had been picked up on the run. She had no quantifiable job skills and little ability to articulate her industriousness. As a boy of 7, I accompanied her to welfare offices to intercede on her behalf as bureaucrats asked about her skills and finances. She struggled to understand, and as an interpreter, I struggled to clarify her explanations to them and their questions to her. Even in my father’s family, no one had come close to finishing high school. Though tracked in college-prep courses, I did not know how to apply to take admissions tests. One December day during my senior year, my guidance counselor took me into her office to be sure that I had applied for the tests and requested that my scores be sent to colleges to which I was applying. I confessed that I had not applied to colleges and had not taken the tests, but was too embarrassed to admit that I had no idea where and how to get application materials. The counselor sent me away and never spoke with me again. When students of color today tell me that their high school guidance counselors did not help them, I understand. By the time I knew how to apply for tests and how to apply to colleges, I had lost a year. I have learned, often at the cost of money and time, that any hope of attainment results not so much from asking questions but from knowing which questions to ask, and knowing whom to ask—results, that is, from having the head start of cultural capital. Even as a junior faculty member, I struggled to know what to ask, especially concerning expectations for service and scholarship. Most colleagues were also junior, and there was little mentoring to go around. For me, there was none. An interim chair assigned himself to mentor me and then ignored me for the rest of his term. And I was as helpless to ask for help as my mother had been all those decades before in the welfare offices. I would like to think, however, that I am, unlike Rachel Beanland, aware of my relative privileges. I am now, to some extent at least, part of a “model minority.” I am now a tenured faculty member of my department, and my salary, though far below national averages for my rank and field, is still astronomical compared to the highest salary my mother earned as a cafeteria cook and server in an urban, predominantly black elementary school. My mother made mistakes that, by most standards, seemed foolish and avoidable. At one point, she left her job and lost her seniority and ten years’ accrued benefits. When she returned to her job, she did not know how to apply to restore her benefits. Again, I tried to intercede on her behalf, but I did not know, and never learned, how to navigate the bureaucracy. Hamilton, the southwestern Ohio city to which my mother and I immigrated and in which I grew up, straddles a river that flows south into the Ohio River. For the first half of the twentieth century, it was a thriving industrial city with paper mills flanking the river and with steel mills, canning companies, breweries, and a Fisher Body plant scattered across its various industrial sectors. Many residents were transplants from Appalachia.

A Mottled Minority  219 My white grandmother moved up from the hills of southeastern Kentucky, and worked in a canning factory and an industrial laundry and as a domestic servant for a prosperous family. Some Hamiltonians, like my white grandfather, were children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and they worked in steel mills such as Niles and Hamilton Foundry. Most Hamiltonians were white. Most of the city’s poor were white. Poor blacks lived in the Knightsbridge neighborhood, a rural-looking area only blocks from several factories, or along the east side of the river, where my grandfather’s friend Frank caught turtles to turn into soup in his brother’s riverside pool hall and restaurant. A few Asians lived in Hamilton, almost all of them women who, like my mother, were war brides, and most were divorced and too poor and embarrassed to return to their home countries. They did not drive—many were so nerve-racking that they could not drive, even after splurging on driving lessons—and so depended on buses and, mostly, on walking. Because my mother could not afford babysitters, my brother and I accompanied her as she walked, for shopping, seeing friends, and meeting with those welfare bureaucrats. When I was 10, she married her second husband, mostly to get off welfare, and found a job in the school cafeteria. I moved into my grandparents’ house in the country and immediately joined the white rural working class. In these years of my childhood, the cultures around me were white. My mother taught me no Japanese and instructed me to tell schoolmates and teachers that I had been born in the United States. She feared that I would be racially harassed. Culturally, then, my upbringing was white. This is not the fault of my mother or my grandparents. They tried to protect me. If my high school guidance counselor was disgusted with me, it was probably because, even if she accessed records of my birth in Japan, I seemed so culturally white, like white friends who knew how to apply to college. I had assimilated without trying, and yet I suffered the small micro-marginalizations—having no one to tell me whom or what to ask about entrance tests, for example—of the unassimilated. The children of several of my mother’s Asian friends suffered similar micro-marginalizations, and were much less lucky than I was. They never applied to universities and joined Hamilton’s sinking working class.

The Whiteness of the University Introducing Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics, Bonnie TuSmith and Maureen T. Reddy (2002) say that race “is generally thought to be the special province of specific academic programs which are themselves usually relegated to the margins of the academy and easily avoided by students as well as faculty members” (p. 1). Significantly, they identify race—not diversity—as marginalized. For in fact, diversity is not marginalized, is even foregrounded. When in my first year here the white president announced a Diversity Celebration, students protested by walking peacefully out on the program. They said there was nothing to celebrate. When,

220  John Streamas four years later, the president created a well-funded Office of Equity and Diversity, many of us protested: diversity was being defined not by people who embody it but by a small group, mostly white, at the top of the institution. My department was not even consulted for ideas. Those of us in ethnic studies were marginalized out of the diversity bureaucracy. Bureaucrats’ celebrating of diversity was naively and dangerously premature, just as, a few years later, conservatives’ boasts of a post-racial America after the 2008 election of Barack Obama were disproven by the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and many others. The unfortunate difference is that, while few still speak of a post-racial America, administrators still, even more disingenuously, celebrate diversity. When the administration of the university’s black president quietly reduced by nearly one-third the core diversity requirement for undergraduates, only my department even noticed. Recently, students here, like students elsewhere, protested the racial climate of the nation and of campus. Wisely, they linked national and local concerns, and the first of their demands was a more diverse faculty. I have mentioned that the university has impressively boosted enrollment of students of color. But faculty remain nine-tenths white, and that seems doomed not to change. A few years ago administrators created the Association for Faculty Diversity (AFD), and, predictably, most meeting attendees are white. Speaking to students’ demands for a diverse faculty, the university’s black president hailed the existence of AFD. He did not tell them that AFD has no budget and that it seldom meets. The chair of AFD replied to my accusation of its uselessness by reminding me that Washington voters, having abolished affirmative action, rendered impossible any definition of “diversity” that acknowledges historical discriminations against targeted groups. “Diversity” is institutionally defined so bloodlessly that a Klansman would be as likely to benefit from it as a disabled black woman. One year, as a first-round reader for the university’s “diversity scholarship,” I counted 14 applicants who identified as white—from among the 17 applications randomly assigned to me. This is color blindness, and it is most usefully analyzed in the work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.7 When well-meaning white students claim “not to see race,” they think they are merely adopting the ethics of Martin Luther King Jr., who in his 1963 speech dreamed of a day when black children might be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. What these whites miss, of course, is that King spoke of his dream, not of anyone’s present lived reality. Everyone sees everyone else’s race. And that is not a bad thing. It is merely a recognition of difference. Whites who try not to see race are whitening people of color, forcing assimilation upon us. Then, if we deviate from standards of their white culture, they may feel justified in further marginalizing us. True diversity in hiring faculty would mean that, as long as differences exist, and as long as whites enjoy unearned privileges, color blindness must be supplanted by what they would call “preferential treatment,” except that these “preferences” would achieve fairness.

A Mottled Minority  221

The Whiteness of Standardization and Quantification I suggested earlier that quantification is an issue by which white standards are enforced and people of color are further marginalized. Even as many parents and teachers successfully challenge standardized testing in K–12 education, university faculty of all races are being increasingly judged by standards that translate into numbers. In the College of Arts and Sciences here, faculty are measured on a five-point scale. The online form on which we list a previous year’s achievements privileges work that is quantifiable, as in the math and science fields, and implicitly becomes punitive for faculty in art or creative writing. None of this is explicitly racialized, but since people of color are drawn to research that is not easily quantified, then I would suggest that faculty of color are disproportionately disadvantaged by the quantification of our work. Moreover, the disadvantages that faculty of color suffer even as we begin our careers, such as inadequate mentoring, suggest that we are likelier not to be promoted and tenured. We are measured by standards applicable to white faculty. In 2006, College Republicans formally, and falsely, accused me of uttering a racial slur against one of their leaders when I confronted their anti-immigrant demonstration on our campus mall. In his ruling, the director of the university’s Center for Human Rights completely ignored the question of whether anti-white slurs even exist and told me, “All hate speech is equally free speech.” By this logic, he dropped the charges against me, but he also equated my anti-racist protest with the racist xenophobia I was protesting. Thus flattened, I could be measured against the same scale he applied to racist whites. This is the racial logic of quantification.

The Whiteness of the Corporatized Campus Problems existed for faculty of color even before corporatization. With people of color occupying an increasing share of the national population, and with greater numbers of students of color becoming or aspiring to become faculty, existing problems would have compounded even without corporatization. But the timing of that corporatizing raises questions about its politics. In another context, Michelle Alexander links the rapid rise in numbers of imprisoned black and brown men to the launching of the War on Drugs.8 Both happened in the 1980s. Likewise, the corporatization afflicting faculty of color also happened in the 1980s. That decade’s “culture wars” embraced the conservative assumption that racial gains made since the 1960s had gone too far, that young black and brown men were getting “uppity” and Asian-Americans too numerous on campuses, that now whites were victims of a politics of “political correctness.” Emboldened conservatives recruited timid liberals to defend the free speech of even hateful bigots. Support for students and faculty of color diminished to a zero-sum game: quantitative

222  John Streamas gains in student enrollment were now offset by a refusal to punish whites’ racial bullying. And, just as the War on Drugs assured many white Americans that they would be safer, the newly corporatized campus promised diversity programs and upward mobilities for people of color, but these promises originated in a color blindness that reinforced white privilege by carefully controlling—quantifying—the number of steps “up the ladder” that faculty of color might climb. Three decades would pass before the drug war’s racism was acknowledged, and even more time will pass before universities confess to their color-blind racisms. Merely diversifying the student body will achieve no more justice than electing a black president. I offer two examples of the increasingly whitening effect of campus corporatization. My first example recalls the culture wars of the 1980s. Recently, a few American comedians such as Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld stopped performing on college campuses, claiming that “political correctness” stifled their creativities. In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan (2015) sympathizes, attributing the rise of “PC culture” to two sources, one of them bureaucratic: [I]t helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout. Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex. (p. 56) The other source is “identity politics,” by which students and staffers charged with programming events on campuses “see that there are huge incentives to join the ideological bandwagon and harsh penalties for questioning the platform’s core ideas” (Flanagan, 2015, p. 58). Flanagan thinks these two sources—the culture of commodification advanced by administrator-CEOs and the culture of identity politics embraced by programmers afraid of offending—are equal partners in repression. Yet after assailing identity politics, she acknowledges the irony of privileged right-wing reaction: Meanwhile—as obvious reaction to all of this—frat boys and other campus punksters regularly flout the thought police by staging events along elaborately racist themes, events that, while patently vile, are beginning to constitute the free-speech movement of our time. (Flanagan, 2015, p. 58) If Flanagan contextualized campus “PC culture” against university power structures, she would realize that, just as Barack Obama uttering the word “nigger” is different from Glenn Beck uttering the word, there is a difference between Chris Rock’s freedoms of speech and Jerry Seinfeld’s. Her failure to recognize this difference explains her failure to recognize and remark upon

A Mottled Minority  223 the significance of the fact that comedians “of Nigerian, Afghan Pakistani, Indian, Hispanic, and Korean-African American heritage” were considered too “politically incorrect” to be invited to perform in colleges (Flanagan, 2015, p. 57). Identity politics might not have overturned repression, might even be unwittingly complicit in some repression, but as a political mode of disempowered people, it is no partner of bureaucrats who censor. The white frat boys who host racist-themed parties share the values of the diversity bureaucracy—for if, in a color-blind world, color and difference have no value, then why not hurl slurs at the differently colored? Faculty of color must therefore be concerned not only with the obvious racism of the frat boys but also with the commoditized, benign-seeming color blindness in administrators’ apparent concessions to “political correctness.” The other example is, like the one with which I began, from creative writing. Introducing her anthology A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race, editor Laura McCullough (2015) twists Edward Said’s late-life acknowledgment of links between colonizers and the colonized: “It is both hard to be the Other and hard to hear the Other, and confronting this paradox leads to another one: we are all the Other” (p. 4; emphasis in original). But there is a huge difference between Said’s claim that “[s]urvival is in fact about the connections between things” (qtd. in McCullough, p. 2), or even a claim that after many generations of oppression victims sometimes become complicit in their own marginalizations and a claim that “we are all the Other.” McCullough is like well-meaning white allies who would replace “black lives matter” with “all lives matter”—of course all lives matter, but it is black lives that are being ended by police, and it is their losses that prompt protests and calls for justice. Edward Said would never agree with McCullough’s flattening of differences. Yet it is this flattening that defines institutional diversity programs, that motivates schemes to standardize measures of the work of faculty of color, that grants Flanagan’s frat boys a stage for racist exhibitionism, and that defines institutional racism on American campuses today. Such flattening, by presuming not to see race, compounds racism.

The Dimming Whiteness of the Foreseeable Future So is it any wonder that, just as a first generation of students of color promised to become a burgeoning first generation of faculty of color, universities not only transferred governance from faculty to administrators but also threatened faculty status by increasingly transferring the work of teaching to adjunct instructors who are poorly paid and have no job security? And is it any wonder that this time also witnessed the rise of the diversity bureaucracy with its feel-good, color-blind policies? My white grandfather, who never completed fifth grade, modeled social justice for me long before I entered ethnic studies. He knew the limitations of common sense—“The sun doesn’t rise in the east and set in the west,”

224  John Streamas he reminded me—and understood that equality is a goal, a dream, not a reality. He saw color. And he knew that when he ate soup in the restaurant and pool hall owned by the black brother of his black friend Frank, he had a privilege that they lacked, even if he was a farmer and turret lathe operator. Few diversity bureaucrats understand justice as he did—as an appreciation of difference. Institutional racism on campus flattens difference in the commoditized interest of standardization and quantification—in the interest, that is, of whitening. The claim of Vincent J. Roscigno (2015)—that universities embrace “a structure much like that of organized crime: It is bureaucratic and self-reproducing”—may seem exaggerated, but to faculty of color, it has become an increasingly suffocating truth. Yet it is a truth that will, soon, set us free. Administrator-CEOs regard all faculty as “hired hands,” a cost to be contained. But they cannot flatten us all alike, all at once, for as in an old waterbed, some corners and edges will rise. Student protestors increasingly demand more faculty of color, and diversity protocols are clearly failing even as demographics deliver the nation to a white-minority future. I tell students that the flattening into whiteness that makes Asian-Americans a “model minority” now afflicts faculty of color generally. The Japanese aphorism that says “the nail that sticks out will be hammered down” should serve not as a threat but as a new imperative: that we faculty of color become that nail, that we refuse administrators’ protocols of flattening, that we stick out farther and farther, and that we repel that hammer.

Notes 1 I realize that later in this paragraph I risk stereotyping, and also risk insensitivity to loss and grieving, yet my aim is not to profile Beanland but to suggest that differences she sees in grief memoirs are not so great as differences she would see if survivors of the many “disappeared” of the world had the privilege to write their own grief memoirs. Furthermore, the writer of color she names, Deraniyagala, enjoys considerable cultural capital. She vacationed with her family at a seaside Sri Lankan resort, employed servants, and was able to leave her job for many months to grieve. 2 In 1971, in the Yellow Power Movement publication GIDRA, Evelyn Yoshimura wrote, “[T]he phrase Asians have no value for human life has been used too often to detract from the horror of rumored and proven atrocities against Vietnamese civilians” (qtd. in Tchen and Yeats, 2014, p. 311). 3 Administrators have identified students as consumers and customers, as sources of income, and the tuition dollars of students of color spend no differently from the dollars of whites. As I note later, Caitlin Flanagan marshals this point to support a charge that universities capitulate to a “PC culture.” 4 Yet some of my very brightest students of color doubt climate change. A black student told me that, while he believes the climate may be warming, he also worries that white environmentalism and corporate science are financially invested in getting people to change their habits and cultures. He is no libertarian denialist. He knows history and shares the mistrust that Purdy sees in people of color. 5 I withhold his name and his university affiliations, both to protect his identity and to generalize from his experience.

A Mottled Minority  225 6 To Hawaiian friends who understandably resent the appropriation of “hapa” by mixed-race Asian Americans, I use it here with deep apologies. 7 See Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Inequality in America, a book widely taught in introductory ethnic studies (2013. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield). 8 See Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010. New York: New Press).

References Beanland, R. (2015, Summer). Required reading. Creative Nonfiction, 56, 66–68. Flanagan, C. (2015, September). That’s not funny. The Atlantic, 136(2), 54–58. McCullough, L. (2015). Introduction. In L. McCullough (Ed.), A sense of regard: Essays on poetry and race (pp. 1–6). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Purdy, J. (2015, August 13). Environmentalism’s racist history. The New Yorker. Retrieved from www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racisthistory Roscigno, V. J. (2015, August 4). University bureaucracy as organized crime. Counterpunch. Retrieved from www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/04/universitybureaucracy-as-organized-crime/ Tchen, J. K. W., & Yeats, D. (Eds.). (2014). Yellow peril! An archive of anti-Asian fear. New York, NY: Verso. TuSmith, B., & Reddy, M. T. (20002). Introduction: Race in the college classroom. In B. TuSmith & M. T. Reddy (Eds.), Race in the college classroom: Pedagogy and politics (pp. 1–3). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Afterword Eric Anthony Grollman

The contributors to this important anthology have provided a glimpse into the variety of experiences that share in common the status of “Other” in academia. A little piece of them—their soul, their pain, their hopes, and their journey—resides within the preceding pages. They have shared with the world their stories of discrimination, erasure, isolation, silence, fear, subordination, and stigmatization. Such frank discussions of academic injustice are uncommon. Rather, it is more common for the Other in the academy to feel that they are alone in being othered. Without easy access to stories like this in this anthology, it is all too easy for marginalized students and scholars to feel that they are somehow to blame for their own marginalization, or that they may be exaggerating its severity or misreading others’ intentions. Sadly, those who recognize marginalization are likely aware of the potential backlash they may face if they were to call attention to such injustice. Hierarchies in the academy ensure that those of us at the bottom—students, tenure-track faculty, contingent faculty, non-tenure-track academics (further compounded by marginalized social statuses such as race, gender, class, and sexuality)—are unable to adequately protect themselves from marginalization without consequences. But, here, we have several scholars who have bravely told their stories. And they are not alone.

Academia as an Oppressive Social Institution As a sociologist, I conceive of the academy as a social institution—just like medicine, government, military, labor, the family, law, the economy, and politics. These and other social institutions exist within larger social systems—namely, systems of oppression: racism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, classism, fatphobia, xenophobia, ableism, and religious intolerance. Sociologists Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (1997) and Barbara Risman (2004) offer useful conceptualizations of these systems of oppression. Their theoretical frameworks of racism and sexism, respectively, challenge the common individualistic perspective that focuses exclusively on individuals’ prejudice and discriminatory actions. Rather, racism and sexism operate as social systems that shape each level of society: micro (individual identities, sense of self,

Afterword  227 health, and well-being, self-esteem and self-worth; interactions among individuals), meso (social groups, organizations), and macro (social institutions like education, laws, policies). These systems of oppression entail an ideology (i.e., prejudice, stereotypes) that serve to either mask the systems or justify them if they become apparent. These frameworks help us to realize that racist and sexist injustice are not the products of a “few bad apples” who harbor old-fashioned racist and sexist prejudice; rather, they are actually embedded in our selves, interactions, organizations, and institutions, and the prejudice merely justifies the structure. Many young scholars, like myself, enter academia with dreams of making a difference in the world. They fall for the promise of free intellectual exchange, social justice advocacy, and holding class on the grassy quad and then heading to a local protest for labor rights. The reality that academia can be, and often is, an oppressive environment is quite a shock for those scholars who enter academic careers with such hopeful naiveté (again, myself included). Unfortunately, academia is like any other social institution. Not only is it situated within the various systems of oppression, these systems actually operate through academia. The selves and identities of academics, interactions among academics, and policies and practices of academic institutions are produced by and, in turn, reproduce racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression. Academia is not immune to oppression; it is actually home to it. And, worse, as Nancy Mack notes in her essay (pages 10–11), it might actually be worse because of the competitive and selective nature of admissions and hiring. We must not forget that academic institutions were neither built for nor by us—us being those who remain the Other today. In the United States, people with disabilities, women, and people of color have never been willfully and intentionally welcomed into the academy. Access, albeit still limited, had to be forced via protests and legal action. And, despite the widespread discourse of diversity in higher education, little attention is paid to the well-being, success, growth, and inclusion of marginalized students and scholars. Those of us who are even able to get into the door, and can afford to stay there, often serve as nothing more than colorful artwork on walls that remain white, and straight, and male, and cisgender, and middleclass, and able-bodied. That is, of course, only for the pleasure of those who take the time to notice the artwork, since we are not treated as central to universities’ operation and mission. “Other” students and academics are regularly reminded of their outsider status by those who feel and are treated as though they belong without question. Women’s ability to succeed, especially in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) remains doubted relative to men’s. And, when feminist academics are successful in challenging the woeful underrepresentation of women in these fields, both as students and faculty, sexist men draw upon sexist ideology—namely, notions of biological inferiority or greater commitment to family than work—to justify such

228  Eric Anthony Grollman gender inequity. Many Black students and faculty experience “racial battle fatigue” (Smith, Allen, & Danley, 2007), the exhaustion of facing racist microaggressions (Sue, 2010), discrimination, and violence all day long, on and off campus, as though one were on a battlefield. And, when their performance is hindered in the classroom, or lab, or in publishing, their lack of commitment and talent will be cited as explanations, but the violence of everyday racism will not. Othering occurs at the department, university, discipline, and profession levels, as well. For example, academia suffers from a “leaky pipeline,” wherein women scholars and scholars of color are less likely to advance to subsequent stages in academic careers than their men and white counterparts, respectively. These two groups face challenges in being admitted into graduate programs. Once admitted (if admitted), they have the unique challenges of microaggressions, discrimination, and harassment, on top of having too little to no community with other students, and finding few possible supportive mentors from which to choose. If they beat the odds— half of PhD students drop out, and the numbers are higher for women and people of color—and leave with a PhD, they then face the impossible odds of landing a tenure-track position. The “adjunctification” of higher education, wherein the majority of college instructors are in contingent or adjunct positions, has hit women and Black PhDs the hardest; much like the United States’ Great Recession of 2008, it was not a real crisis until white men were affected. As instructors, their ability to keep a position, earn tenure, and be promoted hinge upon their ability to publish and on teaching evaluations. Both of these metrics favor those who have never been seen as outsiders in the academe. It is no surprise that there are few full professors, administrators, and college presidents in the United States who are women, of color, disabled, LGBTQI+, first generation, or working class. But you are likely to hear that “women just aren’t as good at math,” or “Black students just aren’t interested in philosophy,” or “poor people just don’t value education,” rather than ways in which racism, sexism, and classism are built into the very operation of the institution. There are two powerful ideologies that mask, or even justify, othering in academia. The first, which is not unique to the academy, is the myth of meritocracy. Academic institutions rely on seemingly bias-free evaluation systems that rely on merit for admissions, hiring, promotion, and termination. Those who get ahead supposedly represent the best performers; those who do not represent the worst. Systems of oppression shape our opportunities to learn and grow. Standardized tests, for example, rely on a single standard: the privileged. In the academy, seemingly standard means of evaluating tenure cases tend to privilege those who do not struggle with isolation, lack of community, invisibility and silence, microaggressions, discrimination, and work-life balance issues. This, of course, produces vast disparities in tenure and promotion rates, as well as hiring and firing. Since academic institutions purport to operate as meritocratic entities, such disparities are

Afterword  229 justified as differences in performance or commitment rather than differences in opportunities. The other ideology, which is unique to academia, is the myth of objectivity— that researchers and teachers can, and should, be politically and emotionally detached from their work. Though strongest in the STEM fields and some social sciences (like my own field of sociology), this myth celebrates scholarship that exists only to advance new knowledge and devalues scholarship that appears to advance social justice causes. In my PhD program in sociology, I was quite explicitly veered away from research on my own communities—Black and LGBTQI+—and toward “legitimate” areas of study—health and social psychology. One adopts a subfield like medical sociology and just might happen to focus on the “case” of transgender Americans; one does not become a sociologist of gender identity and expression, and most certainly not a trans sociologist. Such work is often mocked as being “me-search,” too narrowly focused on one’s own community, while white heterosexual cisgender men’s research on phenomena that are dominated by them is seen as objective and, thus, more legitimate, believable, and valuable (see Nowakowski, Sumerau, & Mathers, 2016 for an important critique). Passion, concern, social justice, and activism are seen as suspect, even antithetical to academic inquiry. The myth of objectivity is arguably one major explanation for the exclusion of scholarship pertaining to the Other. Black, Latinx, Asian, and American Indian studies, women’s and gender studies, LGBTQI+, disability studies, and fat studies are not common programs in the academy. And where such programs do exist, universities tend to underfund, understaff, and undervalue them. The marginal status of such programs is reflected in barriers to obtaining grants and publishing research as well. Simply put, it seems success for outsiders in the academy hinges upon either being the Other or studying otherness, but not both. Othered scholars who attempt to make their otherness a legitimate area of scholarship and pedagogy—thereby challenging the status quo in academia—will find resistance throughout their careers.

The Toll of Otherness in Academia There are real costs to being othered in academia. Perhaps the most obvious is the harm to one’s academic career. Discrimination entails the actual denial of access to resources and services crucial to advancing professionally, not to mention for one’s livelihood. Exclusion may preclude outsiders from professional and social networks that aid in one’s success. The devaluing of scholarship on oppressed communities and other “controversial” subjects hinders one’s ability to reach their full potential as a research, teacher, and advocate. Discrimination and stigmatization threatens victims’ livelihood even beyond the obvious professional barriers. Discriminatory treatment directly

230  Eric Anthony Grollman harms victims’ health and well-being through chronic activation of one’s “fight or flight” response, depletion of their self-mastery, and use of unhealthy means of coping (e.g., smoking, drinking, drugging, overeating). Discrimination is a stressful experience and, as a stressor, it negatively affects victims’ health (Thoits, 2010). My research has documented that not only do multiple disadvantaged individuals—such as women of color— experience multiple forms of discrimination (e.g., race and gender discrimination), and experience discriminatory treatment more frequently, but also they bear a greater health burden as a consequence of these experiences (Grollman, 2012, 2014). The initial shock of discrimination—for example, harassment or being denied a promotion—is exacerbated by the victims’ ongoing rumination over the event (Hatzenbuehler, 2009). Was that discrimination? Was it my fault? Maybe they didn’t mean it that way. Or perhaps it is replaying the event, remaining stuck in the anger and hurt and, essentially, the sense of powerlessness. Discrimination and stigmatization can be particularly jarring and damaging to one’s health if one believes that academia is a just institution. Personally, I continue to work through complex trauma following my graduate studies and experiences that flipped my world upside down. The support of friends, family, and other positive relationships in one’s life can go a long way to buffer the ill effects of discrimination, as with any form of stress. Unfortunately, academia is structured in a way that undermines the building and maintenance of supportive relationships and community. Hierarchies and organization charts place colleagues in power-laden relationships in which support is perhaps not possible, limited, or even dangerous; indeed, those in power may play a key role in othering students and faculty. Even among equal-status colleagues, universities’ evaluation of individual academics serves as an obstacle to collaboration, especially across disciplinary boundaries. The devaluing of service, particularly beyond the ivory tower, also deters the building of relationships and community. And though devalued, some forms of service are “worse” than others, such as a queer scholar facilitating a support group for queer youth compared to writing an “objective” op-ed for the New York Times. For othered scholars, this duality of one’s personal needs and the criteria for success by narrow, normative academic standards presents yet another stressful challenge. Often, the othered are forced to choose between their own livelihood and their professional success in large part because what feeds one’s soul is devalued. One aspect of my training that contributed to an overall traumatic experience was being forced to forgo research on Black queer communities in order to be successful in the mainstream of the discipline (sociology). This choice—authenticity versus success—existed at every stage of my training. I chose sociology over gender studies for PhD programs, and then I was discouraged from pursuing the joint PhD. I chose a watered down quantitative alternative to my proposed master’s thesis

Afterword  231 ethnographic account of racism in queer communities. I chose a qualifying exam in social psychology rather than gender, sexualities, or gender/race/ class. I pursued a graduate minor in statistics because I could “just read a book” to learn about gender, as one sociologist of gender in my department told me. And, I skipped on the dissertation on transphobic discrimination and trans health because, I was told, such a topic would not land me a (legitimate, mainstream) job. Though these decisions did, in fact, help me land my tenure-track position, I remain feeling split—split from my communities, my politics, my activism—split from the very things that I wished to pursue in academe. I remain fearful that pursuing liberatory scholarship and intellectual activism will cost me tenure, or at least threaten my status at my university and in academe more generally. Arguably, we all lose out because of othering in academia. New, innovative, and critical perspectives are stifled, risk-taking and thinking outside of the box is discouraged, and some of our greatest thinkers of the day are excluded, forced out, undermined, and pushed to an early death. Science and higher education do not advance as far as they could because, for example, gender studies is not seen as a legitimate area of study, feminism is seen as antithetical to academics, women are not hired as tenure-track faculty, and girls and young women are not encouraged to enter masculinist and male-dominated fields. It is heartbreaking to even attempt to fathom how much creativity and knowledge has been denied to the world because of othering in academia.

Empowering Outsiders-Within I would be remiss to end this afterword on such a hopeless and powerless note. Rather, I wish to contribute to the empowerment of the Other within academia. I know well the feeling of being an outsider and the attendant fear, anger, and desire to be included fully (or at least to be left in peace as I do my job). Shortly after I graduated with my PhD, I launched a blog, ConditionallyAccepted.com—an online community for scholars on the margins of academia. The final straw of egregious acts of my professors and fellow students was withholding support for my decision to take my current position, at a liberal arts college—that is, after six years of “souling” out, forgoing research and advocacy that aligned with the very values and goals that brought me to the academy. I discovered that a friend at another school had been similarly undermined, told that they had supposedly wasted their professors’ investment in their careers by “giving up” the beloved job at a research-intensive university. Once again, I was not alone in being othered, marginalized, undermined, forced to conform or leave. But I had to navigate my own professors’ resistance on my own, finding few stories of scholars who pursued liberal arts careers. I made the leap, accepting my current position, knowing little about life at liberal arts colleges, but certain I never wanted to step foot on another research-intensive campus. And I decided to

232  Eric Anthony Grollman begin sharing my experiences publicly so that no future students would have to struggle without information again. Besides the obvious tongue-in-cheek reference that academics will understand, the name “conditionally accepted” came from my experience of coming out as queer to my parents late in my senior year of high school. As with many parents of their generation, more than a decade before same-gender marriage was legalized in the United States, they did not take the news of my public queer sexuality well initially. But, in subsequent years, their acceptance grew—in their own words, “because you were doing so well.” That is, I was doing well in my studies, generally healthy, and otherwise not fitting common stereotypes about gay men. They learned to accept my queer sexuality because I was not HIV-positive, a drug user, or suicidal; essentially, I was acceptable because I just happened to be queer, while otherwise normal (i.e., straight). Acceptance, then, came with certain conditions that had to be met and, the major condition is to minimize the extent to which one is the Other. I felt that same pressure to conform in my graduate training, and to the detriment of my health, I generally caved to those pressures. I learned to “play the game” in order to succeed. I entered the academy as a Black queer activist with the goal of studying racism in queer communities using qualitative methods. The academy chewed me up and spit me out as an “objective” and presumably apolitical quantitative medical sociologist who just happened to study the intersections among race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, and weight (and who just happened to be a fat Black nonbinary queer person). I published a solo-authored article in the top journal in my subfield before going on the academic job market, was able to finish grad school early, and had a few tenure-track job options from which to choose. Being accepted by the mainstream of sociology, with the condition of conformity, paid off professionally. But it was not worth it. It was not worth the complex trauma, generalized anxiety disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, and 15+ pounds of weight gain upon taking anti-anxiety medicine. It was not worth feeling I landed in a career that looked nothing like what I had intended or the exhausting mental and spiritual energy expended trying to undo the damage of my graduate training. Part of my healing has been to push the wrestling match between my radical activist spirit and the conforming R1 quantoid out of my own body and into the public—for I know I am not alone. I have reclaimed some of my own power by refusing to suffer silently by the conflict between activism and academia. Why should I keep to myself about broad professional and social forces that affect us all? My blog, Conditionally Accepted, has become quite visible as a resource for marginalized academics in part because of my willingness to discuss these matters publicly. And dozens of scholars have contributed to the blog, providing a variety of narratives of the Other in academia. It is now featured as a weekly career advice column for marginalized scholars on InsideHigherEd.com, a national higher education website:

Afterword  233 www.insidehighered.com/users/conditionally-accepted. Recently, I resigned after 4.5 years as the blog’s founding editor, passing the reins to my friend, colleague, and co-conspirator Dr. Victor Ray. I feel immense pride in having created a national platform for Other scholars—one that will exist even beyond my involvement. I must note, however, that this empowering initiative still reflects an obsession with belonging in mainstream academia. This is an interesting contrast to my unapologetic pride in being queer; I would smack the hand that offered me a pill to become heterosexual. Why, then, have I desired to be accepted within the narrowly defined values and norms of mainstream academe? Shortly after my birth, Black feminist sociologist and intellectual activist Patricia Hill Collins penned a piece on being an “outsider-within” in academia (1986). She argued that Black women scholars are treated as outsiders within sociology and struggle to reconcile their personal experiences, identities, and perspectives with those that dominate academia “to become sociological insiders, Black women must assimilate a standpoint that is quite different from their own” (p. 49). However, such a compromise—that is, professional conformity—is neither desired nor entirely possible. Collins suggested, Some outsiders within try to resolve the tension generated by their new status by leaving sociology and remaining sociological outsiders. Others choose to suppress their difference by striving to become bona fide, ‘thinking as usual’ sociological insiders. Both choices rob sociology of diversity and ultimately weaken the discipline. (p. 53) Instead, Collins calls for the recognition, celebration, and use of Black feminist approaches to sociological inquiry and pedagogy. The Other, by virtue of their outsider status, holds a unique perspective that stands to advance science and higher education. We should not be apologizing for being different. We should not be attempting to suppress our differences. We should cease attempting to conform, no matter the lure of belonging to a club that otherwise will not have us. A couple of years ago, I served on a panel on intellectual activism at Patricia Hill Collins’s school, University of Maryland. I was honored to meet her and have her hear me speak about my work on Conditionally Accepted. After the panel, she called me over to talk. I do not recall exactly how she did, but my memory recalls hearing, “come here, young man!” as though she were the high school vice principal, and I was a troubled student. She said matter-of-factly, “You need to stop with that.” “With what?” I asked. “With this ‘conditionally accepted’ stuff.” I held my breath. I had assumed she was telling me to stop blogging, to do “real” academic work like a good tenure-track professor. She explained

234  Eric Anthony Grollman further that she was concerned about my desire to be accepted in mainstream sociology. She advised me to stop focusing on what those people think of me, what they did to me in the past—to stop giving them power in defining my career. And she was absolutely right in her assessment. I have continued to let others shape my journey, even down to taking on the name that reflects their value of me and my work—“conditionally accepted.” As I have already noted, there are real costs to being othered. It is incredibly important that we name and ultimately end othering processes in academia. However, that is not the end of the road. We only contribute to our own losses by defining ourselves simply by how privileged scholars view us: as the Other, as outsiders, as foreigners, as impostors, as inferior, and so forth. Our otherness is as much a gift as it is a curse. We can find our own power by celebrating, rather than mourning, being the Other. We can harness our unique standpoint from the margins of the academy. We can ignore arbitrary academic values and norms to lean into our otherness rather than to hide it or apologize for it. We are insiders in spaces we create, not outsiders to those that exclude us.

References Bonilla-Silva, E. (1997). Rethinking racism: Toward a structural interpretation. American Sociological Review, 62(3), 465–480. Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning form the outsider within: The sociological significance of Black feminism. Social Problems, 33(6), S14–S32. Grollman, E. A. (2012). Multiple forms of perceived discrimination and health among adolescents and young adults. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 53(2), 199–214. Grollman, E. A. (2014). Multiple disadvantaged statuses and health: The role of multiple dimensions of discrimination. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 55(1), 3–19. Hatzenbuehler, M. (2009). How does sexual minority stigma “Get Under the Skin”? A psychological mediation framework. Psychological Bulletin, 135(5), 707–730. Nowakowski, A. C. H., Sumerau, J. E., & Mathers, L. A. B. (2016). None of the above: Strategies for inclusive teaching with “Representative” data. Teaching Sociology, 44(2), 96–105. Risman, B. J. (2004). Gender as a social structure: Theory wrestling with activism. Gender & Society, 18(4), 429–450. Smith, W. A., Allen, W. R., & Danley, L. L. (2007). ‘Assume the position . . . you fit the description’: Psychosocial experiences and racial battle fatigue among AfricanAmerican male college students. American Behavioral Scientist, 51(4), 551–578. Sue, D. (2010). Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Thoits, P. A. (2010). Stress and health: Major findings and policy implications. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 51(1), S41–S53.

Contributors’ Biographies

John Adamson is a professor at the University of Niigata Prefecture in Japan. As chief editor of Asian EFL Journal, he is active in editorial work. He received his EdD from Leicester University in the United Kingdom. Currently, he is interested in EAP provision at the university level, interdisciplinarity, and developing journal editorial systems. Michael Borgstrom is associate professor and Chair of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. He teaches and writes about American literature, sexuality, gender studies, African-American literature, and critical race theory—interests that inform his book Minority Reports: Identity and Social Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Additional work has appeared in journals such as PMLA, African American Review, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Journal of Homosexuality, and Pedagogy. Bridgette Coble earned her doctorate degree in higher education at the University of Denver. She is currently employed at Metropolitan State University of Denver as the director of career services. The African American Knowledge Community of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators awarded Dr. Coble the “NIA” Award for MidLevel Professionals in 2013–2014. Her research interests include strategies for achieving Inclusive Excellence in Higher Education, Mentoring Programs for Students of Color and African American College Student Experiences. Coble contributed to a book chapter entitled, “Navigating the Space in Between: Obama and the Post-Racial Myth” in the book Contesting the Myth of a ‘Post Racial’ Era: The Continued Significance of Race in U.S. Education and contributed to the summary in the book entitled Standing on the Outside Looking In: Underrepresented Students Experiences in Advanced Degree Programs. Equity minded practice, critical race theory, and race conscious praxis have become key frameworks that guide her work. Joanna Davis-McElligatt is an associate professor of ethnic studies in the Department of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

236  Contributors’ Biographies She is co-editor of the collections Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy; Narrating History, Home and Nation: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat; and POW! Splat! @*#%: Critical Essays on Comics and Violence. Her scholarship appears in The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, Critical Insights: American Multicultural Identity, The Pedagogy of Pop: Theoretical and Practical Strategies for Success, Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults, The Comics Journal, and Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television. She is currently at work on a monograph entitled Black and Immigrant: The New African Diaspora in American Literature after 1945, an examination of the historical, cultural, and literary representations of immigrants of African descent to the United States. More recently, she has begun work on a project exploring the construction of radical futurity in black feminist speculative fiction. Katelynn DeLuca received her PhD in English from St. John’s University in Queens, New York, and her master’s in English from Stony Brook University. She is currently assistant professor of English Composition at Farmingdale State College where she teaches a variety of composition courses. Katelynn’s work can be defined as emphasizing collaboration and helping students gain voice and agency through their work both in and out of the classroom. Her research focuses on the intersections of socioeconomic and sociocultural class, identity, and the composition classroom. Lauren DiPaula teaches and directs the writing center at Georgia Southwestern State University in Americus, Georgia, where she is an associate professor of English. She has published and presented on the intersections of mental disability and rhetoric, and the intersections of conflict transformation and composition studies. Beyond her scholarship, she has worked in publishing on many levels, from copyediting books and technical reports to editing a literary journal and then co-editing a book series at a small publishing company. However, nothing has brought her closer to her 15 minutes of fame than did the summer of 2006, which was spent as a ghostwriter in Hawaii. Keith Dorwick, a full professor of English at UL Lafayette, is editor of Technoculture. Author of the world’s first web-based dissertation, his research interests include media production for and by youth, queer studies, young adult literature and media, and audio and video art. His art works have been both published online and displayed in various exhibitions across the country. His critical articles have appeared in such journals as Interdisciplinary Humanities, Computers and Composition, the Journal of Bisexuality, CCC Online and Kairos, and his book chapters in six edited collections. Fataneh Farahani is an associate professor in ethnology and Wallenberg academy fellow at the Department of Ethnology, Gender Studies, and

Contributors’ Biographies  237 History of Religions at Stockholm University. Through the project, “Cartographies of Hospitality,” Farahani examines the political, philosophical, and cultural aspects of hospitality (and hostility) in regards to contemporary migration and forced exile. Farahani’s recent publications include “Home and Homelessness and Everything in between: A Route from One Uncomfortable Zone to Another One” (European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2015); “Iranian Born Men’s Navigations of Race, Masculinities and the Politics of Difference” in Rethinking Transnational Men: Beyond, Between and within Nations (2013); “Reflections on Gendered, Raced, and Classed Displacements” (Nordic Journal of Migration 2(2)-2012); “On Being an Insider and/or an Outsider: A Diasporic Researcher’s Catch-22” in Education Without Borders: Diversity in a Cosmopolitan Society (2010); and “Sexing Diaspora: Negotiating Sexuality in Shifting Cultural Landscape” in Muslim Diaspora in the West: Local and Global Perspectives (2010). Farahani’s book, Gender, Sexuality and Diaspora, was published by Routledge in 2018. Elena G. Garcia is an assistant professor in the Department of Literacies and Composition at Utah Valley University. She teaches pre-core composition and focuses her pedagogical research on the role reflection writing can play in her students’ learning. She also studies how process mapping can assist writers in analyzing their composing practices, particularly identifying their writing strengths and struggles. She researches non-classroom writing practices in her study of industrial workplace writing, along with a machine operator as a research partner. Elena is also the faculty director of UVU’s Fugal Writing Center. Elena is a transplant from Southwest Michigan, the cultural differences between Michigan and Utah have helped to reveal the Othering aspects of her new home and institution. She met her spouse, Ben G. Goodwin, at Michigan State University, where she earned her PhD from the rhetoric and writing program in 2013. Ben G. Goodwin is a professional in residence for the Literacies and Composition Department at Utah Valley University. He serves the department as an instructor of their pre-core writing and rhetoric classes, as well as a consultant for transitioning students from secondary to college level writing. Ben earned his undergraduate degree from Elon University in his home state of North Carolina, initially with the intent of being a high school English teacher. While at Michigan State University earning his master’s degree in rhetoric and writing, he met his now wife Elena Garcia. After teaching at the secondary level for a year, he followed Dr. Garcia to her position at Utah Valley University, working his way up from adjunct to lecturer to professional in residence over the last five years. In his spare time, Ben enjoys cooking, video games, and the best dog in the entire world—Alfred. Eric Anthony Grollman is a Black queer non-binary scholar-activist and assistant professor of sociology at the University of Richmond. They are

238  Contributors’ Biographies the founder and former editor of ConditionallyAccepted.com, a weekly career advice column for scholars on the margins of academia published in Inside Higher Ed. They are also the founder and co-chair of Sociologists for Trans Justice, which aims to advance transgender justice in and through the discipline. Dr. Grollman earned their PhD from a topranked sociology department, where their professors attempted to “beat the activist out” of them. The trauma of graduate school sparked their commitment to fight discrimination and harassment against scholars from marginalized backgrounds, especially those who are marginalized in multiple ways (namely, women of color and LGBTQ people of color). Kimiko Hiranuma is an associate professor at Nagoya College in Japan. She holds a MA degree from Rutgers Graduate School-Neark and a doctorate from University of Tsukuba. Peer-reviewed articles by Hiranuma have appeared in a wide range of journals, including Black Studies (Japan Black Studies Association). Her primary research field is twentieth- and twenty-first-century African-American literature, especially those texts and authors that cross literary genre and challenge established theoretical frameworks. Native of Japan, she has also been studying reception/retransmission of Western literary criticism in Japanese academia. Madhav Kafle is a doctoral candidate in applied linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Before coming to the USA for his graduate studies, he taught English at different levels in both rural and urban areas in Nepal. His research interests include multilingual academic literacies, global spread of English, and critical pedagogy. He has published articles with LINGUIST List, Sense Publishers, Cambridge Scholars, and WileyBlackwell, and presented at AAAL, TESOL, SSLW, and IAWE. Santosh Khadka is an assistant professor of English and director of Upper Division Writing Proficiency Exam at California State University, Northridge. He earned his PhD in composition and cultural rhetoric from Syracuse University. He has co-edited two books on multimodality— Designing and Implementing Multimodal Curricula and Programs (Routledge, 2018) and Bridging the Multimodal Gap: From Theory to Practice (forthcoming, Utah State University Press/University of Colorado Press, 2018). Khadka has published several articles in journals in the United States and abroad. He now teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in writing, rhetoric, digital media, and professional communication. Nancy Mack is a professor of English at Wright State University and the author of Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects and two volumes about teaching grammar with poetry. She edited a special issue of the English Journal about bullying and has published several articles and chapters on memoir, emotional labor, working class, and composition theories.

Contributors’ Biographies  239 Theron Muller is an associate professor at the University of Toyama, Japan, where he teaches English for medical purposes. He is lead editor on two book projects, Innovating EFL Teaching in Asia (2012) and Exploring EFL Fluency in Asia (2014), both with Palgrave Macmillan. He received his MA from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, in TEFL/ TESOL in 2004 and is currently pursuing a PhD with Open University, United Kingdom’s Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology, exploring the publication practices of Japan-based language teachers. Ligia A. Mihut is an assistant professor of English and the multilingual writing consultant at Barry University. Mihut graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a PhD in English, specializing in writing studies and an MA in TESOL. Her areas of expertise include immigrant/transnational literacies, writing for social justice, and multilingualism. Mihut conducted a two-year ethnographic study of immigrant literacy in the city of Chicago; drawing on this work, she published two articles “Literacy Brokers and the Emotional Work of Mediation” and “Permeable Cosmopolitanism: An Immigrant Perspective,” and is currently working on a book manuscript. Her most recent work on multilingualism as social justice has been captured in a forthcoming article on linguistic justice, which will be included in the edited collection, Translingual Dispositions: The Affordances of Globalized Approaches to the Teaching of Writing. She teaches in the First-Year Writing program and multimedia courses in the professional writing major. Together with S. Alvarez, S. Khadka, and S. Sharma, Mihut is the recipient of the 2015–2016 CCCC Research Initiative Award. Voichita Nachescu, PhD, originally from Romania, received her doctorate in American studies/women’s studies from the University at Buffalo. A former postdoctoral fellow with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University, she is currently the global scholar with the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University. She is currently completing her manuscript “Where Feminism Is a Dimension of Humanism: The National Alliance of Black Feminists (1974–1983).” The essay included in this collection is part of a book project titled Are We White Yet? Eastern European Recent Immigrants to the US and American Racial Formations. Jenn Polish is a YA fantasy author and instructor of English and theatre at CUNY LaGuardia Community College. Their debut novel, LUNAV—a lesbian fairy tale set in a world where dragons hatch from trees—is set for release with NineStar Press in March 2018, along with their novella, a scifi retelling of Peter Pan. Their research interests as they pursue their PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center include mental health and race in writing classrooms and the intersections of dis/ability, race, and trauma in children’s literature and media.

240  Contributors’ Biographies Sandra Mizumoto Posey is currently an associate professor of gender, women’s and sexualities studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver. At two different institutions, she has served in combined administrator/ faculty roles. She began her career as an artist, and thus her publications span poetry, creative nonfiction, social justice pedagogy, and ethnography (she likes to describe herself as “inconsistent but versatile”). Recent works include “Made in Occupied Japan: A Collision and Collusion of Values in an Occupied Body” (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 38:1), “Why Japanese Persimmons Are Hard” (Kartika Review 17), and “More Different than the Same? Customary Characterizations of Alternative Relationship Communities” (with Megan Fowler; New Directions in Folklore 14(1/2)). She is in the midst of a book project currently titled Working Class Academics: A Memoir About the Lower End of Higher Education. She earned her PhD at UCLA in folklore (despite this, she still has a job—something she is thankful for daily). John Streamas is shin-issei (1.5-generation, born in Tokyo) Japanese American, first in his family to complete high school. At Washington State University, he is an associate professor of comparative ethnic studies. Past and future publications include poems and stories in addition to critical work on Japanese American wartime culture, racialized temporalities in narrative theory, the war films of Terrence Malick and Clint Eastwood, colorism and art, dark tourism in the US West, and race in mental health. Suruchi Thapar-Björkert is docent and senior lecturer at the Department of Government, University of Uppsala in Sweden. She has previously held academic positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Warwick, Wolverhampton, and Bristol universities in the United Kingdom. Her research falls in four specific areas: gendered discourses of colonialism and nationalism, gendered violence in India and Europe, gender, social capital and social exclusion, and qualitative research methodologies. Some recent publications include ‘Becoming Non-Swedish: Locating the Paradoxes of In/visible Identities’ in Feminist Review, 2012 (with Redi Koobak) and ‘Writing the Place from Which One Speaks’ in Writing Academic Texts differently, 2014 (with Redi Koobak). ThaparBjörkerts’s book Unseen Face, Unheard Voices. Women and the Nationalist Movement (first published in 2006) was reprinted as a Sage Classic (2015). Thapar-Björkert co-hosted an international conference at the Department of Gender Studies, Linköping University, on Post-Colonial/ Post-Socialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice (2015).

Index

able-bodiedness: compulsory 203; whiteness and 211 – 212 academia: access to 205; activism and 232; adjunctification of 190, 223, 228; affect and 210; belonging in 60 – 62; classism in 228; construction of social class in 171 – 172; contact zones in 104 – 107, 111 – 112; contingent status in 184; contradictions in 133 – 134; difference in 67; dis/abled other in 205; dominant culture and 108 – 109; emotional performance in 211; insider/outsider status 58, 89 – 90, 170; institutional culture and 108 – 109, 111; institutional structure of 157; international poor in 170 – 171; intersectionality and 6; loss in 56, 62; materiality of oppression in 204; mental disabilities and 66 – 68, 205 – 212; money and 170; multilingualism in 126, 131 – 132, 134 – 135; myth of objectivity in 229; neutrality in 214 – 215; non-native English speakers 134 – 135; nonnatives in 91 – 92; normative whiteness in 210 – 211; oppressive practices in 226 – 227; racial norms in 87; racism in 228; as a safe house 107, 111 – 112; self-promotion in 23; sexism in 228; social space in 90; teaching/ research conflict 180; unclassifiable outsiders in 190 – 191; undermining of supportive relationships in 230; whiteness and 93 – 94, 219, 224; working-class and 61 – 62; see also global academia; higher education academic affairs/student affairs divide: collective identity group orientation and 32 – 33; faculty in 29; need for

integration of 30, 33 – 35; oppressive practices in 38 – 39; tensions in 29 – 35, 37 academic colonialism 86 academic conventions: class differences and 21 – 22; faculty and 218; first-generation college students and 22 – 23, 218; self-promotion and 23 academic conversations: academic policing and 204 – 205; class differences in 22; reaction to 21; restraint in 22; subordinate groups and 205 academic identity: mental processes for forming 153; self-regulation in 153 – 154; white academic environment and 91 – 92; workingclass backgrounds and 159 academic inquiry 168 academic job searches: composure in 203; contradictions in academia and 134; diverse recruitment and hiring 108 – 112; international graduate students and 126, 133, 144; nonnative English speakers 144 – 145; Othering and 126 academic Others: able-bodiedness and 205; academic conversations and 21 – 22; authenticity versus success in 230 – 232; Black women as 50 – 53, 233; class differences and 18 – 20, 24 – 25; contact zones and 106 – 107; discrimination and 229 – 230; diversity and 108 – 109; empowering 231 – 234; ethical social justice and 159 – 160; first-generation college students 17 – 18; global disadvantage of 8; imposter phenomenon and 151 – 153; institutional structures

242 Index and 157; integration of 110 – 111; intersectionality and 8, 18; isolation and 226; LGBTQI individuals as 8 – 9; marginalization of 7 – 8, 232; outsider status of 227 – 229; positioning of 144 – 145; racialised 90; sexuality-based difference and 18 – 20, 24 – 25; stifling of 231; stigma and 229 – 230; success narratives and 158; unique perspectives of 233 – 234 academic publishing 9, 160, 184 accent ceiling 94 – 95 access 205, 208 activism 232 Adamson, J.: agency and 182; autoethnography 175 – 185; community and 181 – 182; initial identity 177; research and 182; shifting identity 177 – 182 administrators: faculty marginalization of 32 – 34, 37; faculty tensions 30 – 33; flexible work/life policies 36 – 37; former faculty as 31, 35 – 36; proliferation of 30; scholarship of 33 – 34, 39; turnover rates of 36; types of 31 – 32; see also student affairs administrators affect 210 affective experiences 172 affective whiteness 210 – 212 African-American literature: audience and 118 – 119; context of 119; critical race theory and 116 – 117; English language fluency and 120 – 121; marginalization in 117 – 118; Othering in/being Othered 115 – 117, 120 – 124; outside the U. S. 114 – 124; racial identity and 122 agency: academic identity and 153 – 154; emotional 154; ethical social justice and 160; international graduate students and 133 – 134; social forces and 159; working-class backgrounds and 159 Ahmed, S. 1, 60, 89, 93, 204 AIDS 232 Alexander, B. K. 212n2 Alexander, M. 221 alienhood 190, 192 Almedia, S. 90 American literature 115; see also African-American literature Annas, P. J. 73

Anyon, J. 56, 61, 62 Anzaldúa, G. 76, 84 Asian-Americans: micromarginalization 219; as model minority 217 – 218 Ask Mormon Girl (blog) 103 Association for Faculty Diversity (AFD) 220 Association for the Promotion of Women in Romania 194 Austin, A. E. 107 Bakhtin, M. 159 Baldwin, J. 44, 119, 197 Ball, S. J. 90 Bean, J. 158 Beanland, R. 215, 218, 224n1 Beck, G. 222 Belcher, D. D. 134 Benjamin, W. 26n4 Bhabha, H. K. 135 Bilge, S. 86, 93 bipolar disorder: creativity and 65 – 66, 69 – 70; defining 66; romanticization of 69 – 70; stigma and 69 – 70 bisexuality 78, 84n1 – 85n1 Black academics: adjunctification and 228; racial battle fatigue and 228; see also faculty of color blackness 5 Black students 228; see also students of color Black women academics: financial hardship 47 – 48; global disadvantage of 8; looking from the outside in 45, 49 – 53; looking in from the outside 45 – 46, 49 – 53; in majoritywhite environments 46 – 47, 49; marginalization of 50 – 51; as outsiders within 50 – 53, 233; resourcefulness of 51; tenure and promotion 46, 51 – 52; unique perspectives of 233 Blue Collar Aristocrats (LeMasters) 151 bodies: disability (dis/ability) and 82; as embodied text 204; non-White 93; normative 87 – 88; Otherness and 104 – 105; White 93 – 94 Bonilla-Silva, E 88, 220, 226 borderline personality disorder 202, 204 Borgstrom, M. 11, 16 – 26 Bourdieu, P. 26n2 Braine, G. 134

Index  243 Brand, A. G. 69 Brooks, J. 103 Brown, M. 220 Brown v. Board of Education 81 Burden of Academic Success, The (Hurst) 153 Caldwell, G. 215 Carastathis, A. 78 – 79 Chesnutt, C. W. 119 Chliwniak, L. 35 Chua, A. 157 – 158 civility 204 civil rights movement 81 Claiming Disability (Linton) 71 Clance, P. 152 Clare, E. 212n4 Clark, B. 156 Clark, H. 66 Clarke, M. 131, 134 class differences: academic conventions and 21 – 22; academic Otherness and 18 – 20, 24 – 25; impact of 54; loss and 56; value in 55; see also social class; working-class backgrounds classism 228 class reproduction 62 class studies 55 Cobb, J. 151 Coble, B. 11, 28 – 40 Cochran, L. L. 108 code-switching 55 – 56 collective identity group orientation 32 – 33 college composition 201 – 203 Collins, P. H. 50, 51, 233 color blindness 220, 222 – 223 Colvin, C. 81 communities: contact zones in 103 – 104; imagined 103 – 104, 107, 111; impact on job satisfaction 106; speech 182; undermining of supportive 230 community colleges: marginalization of 39; transfer to four-year institutions 57 – 58 community of practice 182, 184 composition studies: grand narratives in 163; social class and 162; social orientation and literacy in 163 composure: academic job searches and 203; heteronormative (re) production and 203; mental disabilities and 208; struggle for 202, 204

compulsory able-bodiedness 203 compulsory heterosexuality 203 Conditionally Accepted (blog) 1, 231 – 233 conference costs 171 conscientization 154 consciousness 159 contact zones: in academia 105 – 107, 111 – 112; in communities 103 – 104; diverse faculty and 112; dominant culture and 106; research and 107; social class and 162 contradictions in 134 Cook, M. 57 corporatization 221 – 222 counter-diagnosis 73 creative incoherence 73 creative nonfiction 216 creativity: bipolar disorder and 65 – 66, 69 – 70; mental disabilities and 72 Crenshaw, K. 6 “Criteria of Negro Art” (Du Bois) 122 critical perception: identity construction and 154 – 155; self-regulation in 154 critical race theory 116 – 117 cultural appropriation 92 cultural capital 218, 224n1 cultural group success 157 – 158 culture wars 221 – 222 curriculum: hidden 90; social class and 61 – 62 Cvetokvich, A. 211 Daniell, B. 163, 173 Davies, A. 9 Davies, B. 129 Davis-McElligatt, J.: on being the first 46 – 47, 49, 51 – 53; early years of 42 – 45, 49; fear and 52 – 53 de-composition 208 deaf/deafness 71 Deluca, K. 12, 54 – 64 DePalma, M.-J. 168 depression 201, 204, 208, 210 – 211 depressive stances 211 – 212 Deraniyagala, S. 215, 224n1 Dews, C. L. 7, 56 dictation 166 – 167 Didion, J. 215 difference: flattening of 223 – 224; as norm 135; pre-set categories of 168, 171; recognition of 220 DiPaula, L. 11, 65 – 74

244 Index disability (dis/ability): academia and 67, 205; access and 208; defining 212n1; medical model of 71; participation and 208; social model of 71; unapparent 204 Disability Studies (DS): disability discourses in 72; disability models and 71; universal design and 67 discourses of position 169, 171 – 172 discrimination: impact of 229 – 230; LGBTQI academics and 9; nonnative English speakers 129; Otherness and 229; sexuality-based 24 – 25; stresses of 230; women of color and 230 diversity: administration defining of 220; color blindness in 220; defining 108; foregrounding of 219; recruitment and hiring for 108 – 112 diversity change initiatives: individual differences in 32; status differentiation in 32 Dorwick, K. 1 – 14, 76 – 85 Douglass, F. 119 Du Bois, W. E. B. 118 – 119, 122 Dumas-Hines, F. A. 108 Eastern Europe: fall of socialism in 173, 189; feminisms of 192 – 193, 198; outsider status of workers from 192; political discourses in 197 – 198; regional identity of 193; as a theoretical and scholarly space 198 Eastern European immigration: identity and 190, 194, 196; increase in 193, 196 – 197; racialization of 189; whiteness and 195 – 197 ecocriticism 216 Elabor-Idemudia, P. 1, 8 Ellison, R. 119 embodied text 204, 212n2 emotional agency 153 – 156 emotional labor 51, 151 – 152, 156 emotions: academic detachment and 229; class and 163; cultural normalization of 156; defining 156; fear and 52; imagination and 157; imposter phenomenon and 156; marginalized faculty and 151; outlaw 156; psychiatric disorders and 69; separation from intellect 204, 210; whiteness and 211

employee benefits: job protections and 14n3; politicization of 4; sexuality-based discrimination 24 – 25 “End of Black American Narrative, The” (Johnson) 122 English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching 128 – 129, 131 – 132 English language: accents and 94 – 95, 128, 131, 147; fluency and 120 – 121; in global academia 114 – 115, 120 – 121, 133 – 134; hierarchy of 115, 121, 132; high status of 127; native-speakerism and 131 – 132; Otherness and 117; suppression of vernaculars 210 – 211; whiteness and 128 – 129, 132 environmentalism 215 – 216 “Environmentalism’s Racist History” (Purdy) 215 epistemology: eurocentrism and 91; of ignorance 92 – 93; knowledge production and 88; racial and gendered history of 87 – 88 “Equity Issues in the Academy” (Elabor-Idemudia) 1 Essed, P. 92 ethnic identity 196 – 197 ethnic studies 216, 220 Eurocentrism 87, 90 – 91 experiential knowledge: disregard of 87; hidden curriculum and 90; women academics of color and 92 faculty: in administration 30 – 31; administrator tensions 30 – 33; female career trajectories 35 – 36; former administrators as 36 – 37; marginalization of administrators by 32 – 34, 37 – 39; mental disabilities and 67; reduction of tenure-track 31; standardization and 221 faculty of color: academic conventions and 218; advancement of 228; color blindness and 223; corporatization and 221; disadvantages of 218, 221; marginalization of 221; as misfits 217; quantification and 221; student demands for 224; upward mobility and 222 Fall of Language in the Age of English, The (Mizumura) 121 Fall of the Faculty, The (Ginsberg) 34 Farahani, F. 12, 86 – 95

Index  245 Fasulo, A. 180 Fazlhashemi, M. 89 fear 52, 152 female career trajectories 35 – 36; see also women academics female students 152 feminism 91; see also transnational feminism Feminist Studies Center (University of the West, Timisoara) 194 Feminist Theory (hooks) 49 Figler, H. 126 first-generation college students: academic conventions and 22 – 23, 218; academic conversations and 22; academic Otherness and 17 – 18; application process 218; class differences and 25; dislocation and 17; fear of acceptance in 152; marginalization of 151; performance anxiety 23; retention rates 216; working-class 19, 22, 151 – 152 fixed identity 76 Flanagan, C. 222 – 223 flexible work/life policies 35 – 37 Flores Niemann, Y. 1 Freeman, E. 20, 26n2, 26n4 Freire, P. 151, 154 French Lessons (Kaplan) 166 Fricker, M. 94 Frye Jacobson, M. 195, 197 Fussell, P. 154 Gaillet, L. L. 178 – 179, 184 Gappa, J. M. 107 Garcia, E. G.: early years of 101; Otherness and 104 – 105, 108 – 110, 112 Garner, E. 220 Gates, H. L., Jr. 5, 119 gender studies 216, 231 “Genealogies of Community, Home, and Nation” (Mohanty) 193 Ginsberg, B. 34 global academia: audience and 118 – 120; English proficiency in 114 – 115, 121, 133 – 134; insider/outsider status 123 – 124; marginalization and 117 – 118, 172; Otherness and 118, 120, 122 – 124; power dynamics of 118, 120 – 121 global citizenship 173 goal-directed consciousness 155

Goffman, E. 77 González, C. G. 1 Goodwin, B. G.: early years of 100; false assumptions and 104; Otherness and 106, 109 – 110 Goodwin, F. K. 70 graduate students 149 – 150; see also international graduate students Gramsci, A. 151 Grant, M. 215 grief memoirs 215, 224n1 Grollman, E. A. 1, 226 – 234 Guglielmo, L. 178 – 179, 184 Gutiérrez y Muhs, G. 1 habitus: double historicity of 90; multilingual 132; social class and 20, 26n2; white academic environment and 90 – 92 Hall, I. P. 180 Hall, S. 87 Hammerly, H. 31 Harré, R. 129 Harris, A. P. 1 heteronormativity discourse 9, 203 heterosexuality 191, 203 hidden curriculum 90 Hidden Injuries of Class, The (Sennett and Cobb) 151 higher education: academic affairs/ student affairs divide 29 – 33; austerity in 3; border crossing in 5 – 6; color blind racism in 221 – 223; commodification in 222, 224n3; corporatization in 221 – 222; cultural capital and 218; diverse recruitment and hiring in 108 – 112, 220; diversity initiatives in 32, 216, 219 – 220, 222 – 223; engagement in 2; flexible work/life policies 35 – 36; gendered and racialised inequality in 89; heteronormativity discourse in 9; identity politics in 222 – 223; institutional racism and 223 – 224; job preparation in 106; marginalization in 29; meritocracy and 228; non-White faculty in 4, 219; oppressive practices in 32, 38 – 39; political correctness and 221 – 223; politicization of 4 – 5; support for STEM fields 216; systems of oppression in 5, 226 – 228; underrepresentation in 6 – 7; see also academia

246 Index Hinshaw, S. P. 69 Hiranuma, K. 10, 114 – 124 HIV 82, 232 “Home” (Morrison) 124 Hood, A. 215 hooks, b. 49, 50, 51 hope 158 Horner, B. 212n3 Hubbel, L. 31 Hughes, T. 67 humanities 216 Hurst, A. 153 Hymes, D. 182 identity construction: affective experiences 172; critical perception and 154 – 155; intersectionality and 5 – 6; multiplicity in 76 – 77; social class and 154 identity politics 222 – 223 imagination 157 imagined communities 103 – 104, 107, 111 Imes, S. 152 immigration: discourses of 195; Eastern European 189 – 190, 193 – 195; marginalization and 189 – 190; nativism and 189 – 190; Othering and 183; race and 195 – 196; rates of 193; whiteness and 195 – 197 imposter phenomenon (IP): benefits of 157 – 158; critical perception and 154; emotions and 156; enactment of 153; fears and 152; strategies for 153; studies of 152 Individual Network of Practice (INoP) 182 insider/outsider status: privilege and 60 – 61; working-class backgrounds and 58, 61 institutional culture 108 – 109, 111 institutional racism 223 – 224 interactive positioning 129 – 130 international graduate students: academic job searches and 126, 133; agency and 133 – 134; ascribed and negotiated identities 127, 130 – 131; contradictions in academia and 134; educational practices and 147 – 148; insider/outsider status 127 – 128, 130 – 131; majority to minority status of 126 – 128, 130 – 132; money and 169 – 171; multilingualism of 126,

131 – 132, 134 – 135; non-nativeness in writing 129; Othering and 126; positioning theory and 130 – 131; self-positioning 132 – 133; student visas and 142 – 144 international scholar identity 163 interracial families 42 – 45, 47 intersectionality: academic Others and 6, 8, 84; class- and sexualitybased 19 – 20; as counter-discourse 18; feminism and 198; identity construction and 5 – 6; multiplicity in 76 – 77, 83 – 84; white male privilege and 84; whitening of 93 Invanchikova, A. 199n1 “Invisible Disorder” (Clark) 66 Israel 8 Jacobs, H. 119 Jaggar, A. 156 Jamison, K. R. 69 – 70 Japanese academia: academic job searches in 179; African-American literature studies in 114; community in 181 – 182; contingent status in 178 – 179, 184 – 185; foreign academics in 180 – 181, 183 – 184; initial identity in 176 – 177; Japanese language scholarship in 114, 120; labor flow and 183; Othering and 183 – 185; outsiders in 175 – 176, 180 – 181; shifting identity in 177 – 180; teaching/research conflict 180; third space in 183, 185 Japanese Americans 217 Jarrett, G. A. 122 Jensen, B. 55 Jo, V. H. 36 job satisfaction 106 Johns, B. 81 Johnson, C. 122 Johnson, L. N. 8 Kaflle, M. 12, 126 – 135, 145 Kaplan, A. 166 Katz, S. R. 126 Kaye/Kantrowicz, M. 197 Kerschbaum, S. L. 67 Key, D. 104 Khadka, S.: early years and education of 138 – 141; English language and 146 – 147; job search 144 – 146; literacy memoirs 163; positionality

Index  247 146 – 148; student visas and 142 – 144; study in the United States 141 – 142 King, M. L., Jr. 220 Kletzer, L. G. 126 knowledge production: accent ceiling and 94 – 95; credibility and 94; epistemology and 87 – 88; eurocentrism and 87, 90 – 91; racialising and othering processes of 86 – 88; structural racism and 88, 95; symbolic violence in 95; white male privilege and 87 Lang, D. 22, 23, 25 language: dictation and 166 – 167; goaldirected consciousness and 155; inner thinking and 155; naming and 154; native-speakerism and 131 – 132 language teaching: identity in 181; marginalization of 177; see also Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) Latter-day Saints (LDS) religion 102 – 105, 107 – 111 Lave, J. 182, 184 learning styles 207, 212n3 LeMasters, E. E. 151 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and intersex (LGBTQI) academics see LGBTQI academics Leste Law, C. 7, 56 Lewis, B. 71 Lewis, M. M. 204 LGBTQI academics: first-generation 17; oppression and 5; research and 9, 229; service work 16; underrepresentation of 4, 6, 228 liberal arts 217 Limbo (Lubrano) 55 liminality 157 Lindquist, J. 162, 172 Linkon, S. L. 55 Linskoog, C. 199n1 Linton, S. 71 literacy 162, 168 literacy experience: categories of difference in 172; global citizenship and 173; little narratives in 163 – 164, 173; mobility and 173; religion and 167 – 168; social class and 162 literacy memoirs: political events in 164; social contexts of 163 – 164; of transnational scholars 163 – 164

“Literate Lives Across the Digital Divide” (Pandey) 164, 170 little narratives 163 – 164, 173 Lodge, Henry Cabot 195 Lorde, A. 52, 53 Lowe, L. 164 Lubrano, A. 55 Luke, A. 61, 62 Mack, N. 11, 149 – 160, 227 Mad at School (Price) 66, 210, 212n3 “Mad Fight, A” (Lewis) 71 Mad Pride movement 70, 72 Mählck, P. 89 majority-black spaces 47 majority groups 126 majority-white environments 46 – 47, 49 Manning, P. 77 “Mapping the Margins” (Crenshaw) 6 Marciniak, K. 190, 192 marginalized academics see academic Others marginalized identities 7 – 8 Mark of Shame, The (Hinshaw) 69 materiality of oppression 204 Matsuda, P. K. 171 McCoy, S. 158 McCullough, L. 223 McRuer, R. 202 – 203, 208 mental disabilities (dis/abilities): academia and 66 – 68, 205 – 212; composure and 208; counterdiagnosis 73; creativity and 72; disclosure of 67 – 68, 72; medical model of 71; rhetoric of 72 – 74; selfdisclosure and 68; sharing stories of 72 – 74; social model of 71; stigma and 67 – 68; students and 68 – 69 Meriläinen, S. 9 meritocracy 228 micro-marginalization 219 Mihut, L. A.: literacy education of 164 – 168, 172 – 173; transition to United States 168 – 169 mind/body split 204 Mizumura, M. 121 MLA Guide to the Job Search, The (Showalter et al.) 126 model minority 217 – 218 Mohanty, C. 193 mood memoirs 72 – 73 Morgan, B. 131, 134 Morrison, T. 123 – 124

248 Index Moss, B. J. 168 Muir, J. 215 Muller, T. 10, 175 – 185; agency and 182; autoethnography 175 – 185; community and 182; initial identity 177; research and 179 – 180, 182 – 183; shifting identity 177 – 181 multilingual habitus 132 multilingualism 126, 131 – 132, 134 – 135 Muñoz, J. E. 210, 211 Nachescu, V. 12, 188 – 199 naming 154 “Narratives of Literacy” (Daniell) 163 National Alliance on Mental Illness 72 nation-state framework 130 native-speakerism 131 – 132 Nepal: high status of English in 127; migrant workers from 145; postcoloniality and 130; study abroad in the United States 141 – 143 Nero, S. 130 neutrality 214 – 215 New London Group 147 Nishimoto, A. 116 No Child Left Behind 62 non-native English speakers: discrimination and 129; nativespeakerism and 131; Othering and 128 – 129; scholarship of 114 – 115, 123 non-natives 91 – 92 Norton, B. 134 Obama, B. 46 – 47, 220, 222 objectivity myth 229 Olsen, T. 151 On Being Included (Ahmed) 1, 93 One Mind Youth Movement 81 oppressive practices 32, 38 – 39 “Optional Ethnicities” (Waters) 196 Ore, E. 5 O’Rourke, M. 215 O’Shea, A. 67 Othering: costs of 229 – 230, 234; ethical social justice and 159; positioning and 129 – 130; scholarship of 229; United Kingdom government policy and 9; see also academic Others outlaw emotions 156 Out of Place (Said) 90 Ozturk, M. B. 8

Pandey, I. 164 Pandey, I. P. 170 Parks, R. 81 participation 208 Peckham, I. 54, 55 Penrod, D. 107 people of color: marginalization of 221; mistrust of science and 216, 224n4; in STEM fields 216; teen activism of 81; white privilege and 78 – 79 performance anxiety 23 Perry, I. 5 Piazza, R. 180 Polish, J. 10, 201 – 212 political correctness 221 – 223 poor 6, 44 – 45, 48, 59, 83, 107, 128, 151 – 152, 166, 170, 195, 219, 223, 228 Posey, S. 11, 28 – 40 positioning theory: defining 129; interactive 129 – 130; international graduate students 146 – 148; majority to minority status and 126; Othering and 129 – 130; reflective 129 – 130 postcoloniality 79, 86 postfeminist era 78 – 79, 88 Postman, N. 159 postracial era: intersectionality and 78 – 79; Western discourse of 88, 220 poverty 12, 48, 55, 158, 193 – 194 Pratt, M. L. 103, 107, 111 Prendergast, C. 68 Presentation of Self, The (Goffman) 77 Presumed Incompetent (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al.) 1 Price, M. 66 – 68, 71, 72, 73, 202 – 203, 208, 209, 210, 212n3 Pryal, K. R. G. 72 psychiatric discourse 72 psychiatric survivors 70 Purdy, J. 215 – 216 quantification 221 queer critique 20 – 22 queer sexuality 232 – 233 race: African-American literature and 116, 122; in diversity initiatives 32; epistemologies of 95; flattening of differences and 223 – 224; immigration and 195 – 196; intersectionality and 93, 232; marginalization of 36, 219 – 220; recognition of inequality and 88; standardization and 221

Index  249 Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Sullivan and Tuana) 92 Race in the College Classroom (TuSmith and Reddy) 219 racial battle fatigue 228 racial bullying 221 – 222 racial grammar 88 racial identity 122 racial justice: environmentalism and 215 – 216; neutrality and 214; protests for 220 racism: academia and 228; environmentalism and 215 – 216; everyday 228; institutional 223; as a system of oppression 226 – 227 Ray, V. 233 Reagan, R. 164 Reddy, M. T. 219 “Re-envisioning Religious Discourses as Rhetorical Resources in Composition Teaching” (DePalma) 168 reflective narratives 175 – 176 reflective positioning 129 – 130 regional identity 193 religious discourse 168, 172 religious literacy 168 “Required Reading” (Beanland) 215 Rethinking Faculty Work (Gappa, Austin and Trice) 107 Risman, B. 226 Ritchie, J. 73 Robila, M. 196 Rock, C. 222 Romania: blacklisting in 165; end of official dictatorship in 164 – 165; religion and 164 – 165, 168; tactics of survival in 165 – 166; value systems in 172 Romanian flag 165 Romanian passports 169 Ronald, K. 73 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf) 73 Roosevelt, T. 215 Roscigno, V. J. 224 Rubenfeld, J. 157 – 158 Rubin, L. B. 151 Rumens, N. 8 safe houses 107, 111 – 112 Said, E. 90, 223 Salzer, M. S. 67 Sanders, B. 198 Sawyer, L. 89 Saxonberg, S. 89

school shootings 80 Schuster, J. H. 126 Scott, J. 188 Second World: pro-West assumptions about 192 – 193; transnational feminism and 189, 192 Seinfeld, J. 222 self-disclosure 68 self-positioning 132 – 133 self-promotion 23 self-regulation: academic identity and 153 – 154; consciousness in 159; critical perception and 154 Sennett, R. 151 Sense of Regard, A (McCullough) 223 sensibility 203 sexism: academia and 228; in STEM fields 227 – 228; as a system of oppression 226 – 227 sexuality-based difference: academic Otherness and 18 – 20, 24 – 25; employee benefits and 24 – 25 Sharma, G. 163 – 164 Shor, I. 151 Showalter, E. 126 Shuck, G. 131 Siebers, T. 210 Skeggs, B. 159 Smith, L. 171 social class: academic conventions and 22; classism and 228; college attendance and 54, 60; construction of 172; contact zones in 162; curriculum and 61 – 62; defining 55; discourses of position in 169, 171 – 172; identity construction and 154; impact of 54; literacy and 162; problems defining 162 – 163; relations to production in 56; studies of 55; values and 171 – 172; worth and 56 – 57; see also class differences; working-class backgrounds social invisibility 82 – 83 social justice 80 – 81, 229 social networks 184 social sciences 217 social structures 157 Sollors, W. 122 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois) 118 South Africa 8 speech communities 182 standardization 221, 228 Standing Rock uprising 81

250 Index STEM fields: myth of objectivity in 229; people of color and 216; support for 216; women in 227 – 228 Sterling, A. 46 stigmatization 229 – 230 Streamas, J. 10, 214 – 225 student activism 80 – 81 student affairs administrators: academic affairs and 29 – 30; faculty conceptions of 33; faculty marginalization of 33 – 34, 38 – 39; hierarchy within 39; outsider status of 29; responsibilities of 29; strategic plans and 39; undervaluing of 37 – 38 students: affective experiences 172; female 152; mental disabilities and 68 – 69; self-disclosure and 68 students of color: activism and 81; affective expression and 205, 210, 212; application process and 218; corporatization and 221; diversity initiatives and 214, 216, 220; faculty of color and 223 – 224; liberal arts and 217; in STEM fields 216 success narratives 158 Suchland, J. 192 Sullivan, S. 92 Sweden 88 – 89, 94 – 95 Swedish exceptionalism 87 symbolic identities 196 systems of oppression 5, 226 – 228 Szasz, T. 70 Tate, G. 55 Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL): marginalization of 177; native-speakerism and 131 – 132; in Nepal 127; in the United States 126 – 128, 131 – 132, 170 tenure and promotion: Black women academics 46, 51 – 52; PhD candidate supervision and 91 Thapar-Bjorkert, S. 12, 86 – 95 Third World: criticism of the West 192; English proficiency and 127; international graduate students from 130, 169; majority groups in 126; social class and 173; transnational feminism and 189, 192 This Fine Place So Far from Home (Dews and Leste Law) 7, 56 Thomas, J. 67 Thomas, K. M. 8

Thomas, R. 9 Tienari, J. 9 Tomlinson, B. 205 Touched with Fire (Jamison) 69 transgender faculty 76 transgender women 191 transnational feminism: activism and 188; Eastern European women in 191 – 193, 198; intersectionality and 198 Trice, A. G. 107 Triple Package, The (Chua and Rubenfeld) 158 Tsalach, C. 8 Tuana, N. 92 Turnbull, L. 81 Turner, V. 157 TuSmith, B. 219 unclassifiable outsiders: in academia 190 – 191, 198 – 199; concept of 199n1; misreading of 188 – 190; privilege and 191 United Kingdom: gendered and sexual inequalities in 9; LGBTQI academics in 8 – 9 United States: activity-based classrooms in 147; alienhood in 190; citizenship 146; cultural representations of 115, 124; Eastern European immigration to 189 – 190, 193 – 196; educational practices in 147 – 148; English-only environment in 132; ethnic identity in 196 – 197; monolingual policy in 126; nation-state framework 130; non-native English speakers 133 – 134; racial formations in 189; religious discourse in 168, 172; study abroad in 141 – 143; value systems in 172; visa process 142 – 144, 146; whiteness and 195 – 197 Utah County: community in 103, 105; demographics of 101 – 102; Latter-day Saints (LDS) religion and 102 – 103, 107 Utah Valley University (UVU): contact zones in 105 – 106; culture of 101, 105; Otherness and 105 – 106, 108 – 111 Verdery, K. 165 Vygotsky, L. 153 – 157, 159

Index  251 Walker, Francis A. 195 War on Drugs 221 – 222 Warren, K. 122 Waters, M. 196 – 197 Wave (Deraniyagala) 215 Weingartner, C. 159 Wellman, B. 184 Wenger, E. 182, 184 West, C. 209 What Was African American Literature? (Warren) 122 white fragility 211 – 212 white male privilege: dominant discourse of 87; presentation of 80, 82; protection of 77 – 80; social invisibility and 82 – 83 whiteness: able-bodiedness and 211 – 212; affective 210 – 212; defining 195 – 196; depressive stances and 211 – 212; Eastern European immigrants and 195 – 197; in grief memoirs 215; identity and 197; normative 210 – 211 white privilege: academic colonialism and 86; cultural appropriation 92; ethnic identity and 196; institutional norm and 93 – 94; racial ideology and 88 will 159 Williams, E. U. 108 Williams, M. A. 168 Winans, A. 212n3 Wolff, L. 194 women: activism 188, 190; disregard of lived experiences of 87; imposter phenomenon and 152; Latter-day Saints (LDS) religion and 102, 105; rhetoric of 73; in STEM fields 227 – 228 women academics: adjunctification and 228; advancement of 228; career trajectories 35 – 36; flexible work/ life policies 36 – 37; STEM fields and 227 – 228; turnover rates of 36; see also female career trajectories

Women in Black 188, 190 women of color: discrimination and 230; experiential knowledge and 92; health burden of 230; seeing reality 49 – 50; see also Black women academics women’s studies 188, 191, 194 Woolf, V. 73 working-class academics: belonging and 61 – 62; code-switching 55 – 56; discourses of 171; emotional agency and 154; insider/outsider status 59, 61 – 62; international scholar identity and 163; “straddlers” 55, 60 working-class backgrounds: academia and 61 – 62, 149 – 151; academic conversations and 22; college attendance and 54, 60; cultural deficiencies in 19; insider/outsider status 58; jobs defining 56; middle class and 159; social forces and 158 – 159; student jobs and 58 – 59 working-class students: agency and 159; critical perception and 155; cultural expectations and 156; discourses of 171; emotional agency and 154 – 156; fear of acceptance in 152, 160; stresses of 153; success narratives and 158 Worlds of Pain (Rubin) 151 Wright, R. 119 Yans, V. 19 Yellow Power Movement 224n2 Yoshimura, E. 224n2 You Don’t Have to be Famous to Have Manic Depression (Thomas and Hughes) 67 Zebroski, J. 157 Zebroski, J. T. 162, 169, 171 Zembylas, M. 156 Zilber, Herbert 165 Zorn, D. 152 – 153, 155 Zweig, M. 55