omgphd

[omgphd]

[omgphd]

One of my supervisors took a picture of me during my PhD Viva and sent it to me so that I could remember the experience.

My hair looks SO good.

[katrinapavela]

I have finally submitted my PhD Dissertation. It’s been a looong journey 😭 and I’m grateful to a lot of people 🙏🏾:

Friends & Fam

[katrinapavela]

“Desire is always the axis along which different forms of cultural policing take place”—Isaac Julien (1992)

[whitepeopletwitter]

[demonprincex]

Academic Publishing is a Goddamned Exploitative Farce

In order to succeed in academia, you must succeed in academic publishing. The length of the published works section of your CV (the academic equivalent of a resume) determines your job offers, promotions, pay scale, whether you get grants, and whether you get tenure. If you do not publish, you die.

Different schools have different expectations. A school that is not rigorous about research might expect you to publish one peer-reviewed journal article a year; a more taxing school might require three or four. Along with these publications, you are also expected to present your work at numerous conferences, poster sessions, symposia, and visits to other universities.

An academic who fails in this task will not get tenure; they probably won’t even get a job in the first place. If you do not participate in this game, you’re a failure, a fraud of a scientist.

But generating academic articles is not just a matter of hours upon hours of work. You must conduct research projects, organize them, analyze the results, make sense of the results, write the results up in a theoretically interesting way, and submit the articles to multiple journals, one at a time, waiting months to (in all likelihood) earn a rejection or two. Finally you get in, but you must edit the work– that’s another month or two of conversation. Then formatting. Meanwhile, are you conducting new research? Going to conferences? You better be.

The problem with this system is that academics are obligated to perform all these duties for free. If you publish a journal article, or even write a chapter in an academic book, you do not get money. None. You do not even get a free copy of the fucking text.

A few months ago, my colleagues and I published an article, and were told that if we wanted the charts to be in color, we would have to pay for the color ink. In every single issue. We would have to pay to have our article run the way it was written. This was in a top-tier social psychological journal.

After you are published, an journal may ask you to serve as a reviewer. This is a great honor, in some ways; you are now one of the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge. Peer review and criticism is an essential part of academic discourse, and it is why journal articles are of such high quality and rigor.

But you don’t get paid for it. Again, you are expected to review dense drafts, critique them, and write careful, fair reviews of the work. This allows the journal to run high quality work. But you do not get paid. Neither the author nor the editor gets paid.

And this is the case for a publication that costs thousands of dollars a year to read. A subscription for an academic journal is a few hundred dollars as an absolute minimum. Most people cannot afford this. Universities must spend thousands of dollars acquiring access to hundreds of journals so that professors and graduate students can perform their work. These journals make huge gobs of money. None of it goes to the people producing the content.

Imagine if fucking The New Yorker did not pay its writers, demanded its editors work voluntarily, and charged $500 a year for a subscription. Imagine if in order to do your job, you had to pay for this subscription, submit work that took thousands of hours to complete, and received no pay. That is the reality in academia.

It doesn’t end there. Let’s say you submit some research to present at a conference, and you get accepted. Yay! You are getting a line on your CV, and you get to share your research with hundreds of other people from around the world. And you are helping the conference to fill out its schedule!

You spend hours preparing a riveting, TED-worthy talk, spend the whole week of the conference practicing late into the night, fly out to the conference, and deliver it perfectly. You provided high quality content to hundreds of paying conference-goers.

You did not get paid for that. You just did a massive, highly prepared speaking gig, based on years of research, and got nothing in return. In fact, you lost money. You had to pay the conference a steep “registration fee”, between $300 and $700 dollars if you’re a professor, for the honor of providing content for the conference.

Every person at that conference paid hundreds of dollars in registration fees, plus membership fees and travel expenses. Many people provided free lectures, presentations, classes, and posters, because they had to. They are expected to.

Academic journals and academic conferences prey on their necessity, draining money and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of free labor from the graduate students and professors that are obliged to work with them. It is an exploitative, wasteful, disrespectful pyramid scheme. And I am not buying into it.

This is one of the many reasons why I am not applying to tenure-track positions. My (forthcoming) PhD took a lot of work to earn; that expertise is worth something. When the degree is in my hand, my days of unpaid labor are done. And if other academics similarly refused to provide writing, research, editing, curation, and presentation services for free, the publication-tenure system would finally crumble.

[demonprincex]

24-7prose keeps unearthing old favorites of mine! 

[ambhis101]

This makes me feel better about teaching at a Community College with my Ph.D. Teaching is fun, even when it’s frustrating, and they even pay me overtime. :-)

[omgphd]

totally hear you. I feel like I was so naive when I started my PhD journey (coming to a close (finally) this year). I like teaching more than I like the research track for a career. The expectations are relentless, and just as you’ve done one thing it’s not enough and there needs to be more, more and more. I’ve worked as an hourly VL and a full time Lecturer. Honestly, the hourly VL is better because you are literally paid for what you do, whereas when you’re a salaried lecturer--the level of expectations (meetings, admin, participation in other colleague’s work, team building bullshit, REF, TEF, etc.) means you are getting underpaid. Yes, I want financial security, which a salaried lecturing position offers, but I don’t want it at the cost of my sanity and health. 

[sixpenceee]

This is awful. @sixpenceee

[superheroesincolor]

The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015)

“The Sound of Culture explores the histories of race and technology in a world made by slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and moving through to the twenty-first, the book argues for the dependent nature of those histories. Looking at American, British, and Caribbean literature, it distills a diverse range of subject matter: minstrelsy, Victorian science fiction, cybertheory, and artificial intelligence. 

All of these facets, according to Louis Chude-Sokei, are part of a history in which music has been central to the equation that links blacks and machines. As Chude-Sokei shows, science fiction itself has roots in racial anxieties and he traces those anxieties across two centuries and a range of writers and thinkers—from Samuel Butler, Herman Melville, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, and Donna Haraway, to Norbert Weiner, Sylvia Wynter, and Samuel R. Delany.”

By Louis Chude-Sokei

Get it  now here and leave a review if you can.

Louis Chude-Sokei is a professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. His essays have appeared widely in publications such as African American Review, Transition, and The Believer. He is the author of The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora, which was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

[ Follow SuperheroesInColor on facebook / instagram / twitter / tumblr ]

[katrinapavela]

This is a screenshot from the publisher’s feedback from a critical volume which will feature my work. I’m very new to this process of publishing in a volume, so it’s the first time I got to read what the publisher had to say (it’s not the first piece i’ve written for publication, but the first to be published the spring). 

I did not breathe until after I read the words outlined in red. What was I waiting for? For the publisher to identify my chapter as the weak one–out of the 22 featured. It’s fucked up, I know.  I have struggled with Imposter Syndrome since I was a teenager (approximately age 12-13).  While I have been tackling it head on in the last few years, academia has exposed that insecure nerve that’s been there for decades. I don’t speak or write in fluent academese, and I’m not sure I want to. I will be honest and say that I can be confident about my knowledge in some areas, I am still grappling with being a scholar comfortable in her own skin. 

[zanabism-deactivated20200529]

What's your view on the demonization of white men who have no racial prejudice or huge economic boost from their parents (yes that can be the case as we don't all fall into one category) and are simply trying to get by and earn themselves a good income, and then be labelled a racist man who's simply where he is due to white privilledge because he's well off and white? And then the impact that would have on his mentality and view of the people generalizing him?

lol for you, as a white man, to use the term “demonize” in relation to yourself and how you are treated in a white supremacist society is unbelievably pathetic and just one of many indicators of your cognitive dissonance from the reality you live. 

you are not demonized as a white man in a white supremacist society. what is happening to you is not demonization. you are privileged in every way at every turn. there is no such system that causes you harm, nor is there a component of society that disadvantages you. 

even if every person of colour you met without cause called you a fucking racist everyday – that still would not amount to any harm that is significant enough to even talk about. in fact, that would further benefit you?? as a white victim?? 

“the impact that would have on his mentality” 

Have you thought, just for a moment, about the impact of living in a white supremacist society has on people of colour?? marginalized communities that have been historically exploited, have had their ancestors killed and continue to have their families harmed because of white supremacy?? I know you haven’t because you wouldn’t be here asking such a pathetic and embarrassing fucking question. 

you’re not a victim of anything, you’re a fucking baby who is sad because not everyone he interacts with is in love with him. the last line of your message in itself indicates you’re a typical racist who deserves nothing. 

[omgphd]

People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.

Theodore W. Adorno (”Rethinking the Culture Industry”)

Man, if this doesn’t sound like Trump voters. Because Donald Trump is a product of the Culture Industry. 

[mynumberonefeeling]

Musing #43: a brief comment on counter narratives in pop culture under the white gaze

I had a long discussion with my PhD advisers, a Black British woman and Black British man. The discussion was discursive, but mainly concerned pop culture (music, TV), black resistance along gender lines, and the ways in which capitalism continuously exploits black bodies. The discussion lasted two hours and exhausted me. 

I received an email from my male adviser saying the following:

“Also as I was walking home I was thinking about our conversation  and thought of a way to crystallise what I was talking about. It may be possible in pop culture to present nuance and counter narrative. However who defines something a pop culture is the white gaze (that it appeals to the mainstream audience). So even in those counter narrative moment the white gaze is present and that gaze frames and limits representation in pop culture. The presence of the white gaze is something that is always contended with in pop culture.” –K.A.

To which I responded:

“… I will say that while I agree that the white gaze is something to be contended with and is ever-present, I disagree that it always underpins counter narratives in pop culture. Two things come to mind. I recall Toni Morrison specifically saying (a year or two ago) that what she is interested in is writing without the gaze, the white gaze. That when she writes, she is not speaking to white people.  Now Toni Morrison would not be the widely celebrated and decorated writer that she is without a significant white following, but she is not shy of saying her writing is not conceived for them. Still they come because we create significant value and they have appropriated her as ‘authentically african american’. Still she inhabits a space outside of that and in relationship to that gaze.  That is literature–elevated to mainstream, sure. 

In this age of social media and pop culture, black twitter have been naming, celebrating and elevating all kinds of things to pop culture status. The impetus for that love and celebration is not concerned with the white gaze, but the white gaze is concerned with it (e.g. L.A. Times hiring a dedicated journalist to observe black twitter, white media constantly exploiting hashtags for capital gain). Yes, the white gaze is always there, and it has the power to elevate things to pop culture status. However, it has to look to the fruits of black culture for what’s next (which is exploitative under capitalism, I know). Similarly with Toni’s work, the impetus for the creation, and the response it engenders from black people is not always  defined by the white gaze (clearly there is always foolishness some of us are attracted to), even as the white gaze is always seeking to profit off of it. Does that persistent truth mean that the impetus for our creation lies in that ever present gaze? That means that black people are never allowed to define a reality for themselves outside of whiteness.  The pursuit of doing so under the reality of white supremacy, for me, is a form of resistance. 

I hope that makes some sense. I just think more than one thing is happening at once.” –KP

[rachelshi]

thank you for the feature in @dazedmagazine @zingalingaling c/o @thelonelylondoners bless @xaymacans @pelin_sharp @_westindians always for doing the good work

[johnboy95g]

This perfectly sums up white privilege.

[xaymacans]

like bruh.. credit the artist: rachelshi 

[rachelshi]

wild

[wallowtoday]

@rachelshi holy shitttt this is amazing 

[notyourfuckingalatea]

I admire the crtique and the artistry but if we could talk about white privilege without being sexist or misogynistic.

that would be great.

[genderqueerspace]

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. […] Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness. Turning to the aesthetic in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations. Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.

José Esteban Muñoz, 

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Goodbye, Professor Muñoz.  You are missed by many.

(via blackqueerboi)

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

for Asian women, boycotting Guerrilla is the honorable choice

As an Asian woman, I think it’s important to stand in solidarity with our black sisters on Guerrilla’s casting and boycott the show. There is a very conspicuous lack of black women in a show that purports to tell the true story of black civil rights fighters in the UK. A true story of black civil rights in the UK does not exclude black women or relegate them to side roles. Therefore, although Freida Pinto certainly is a good actress and there is nothing wrong with showing the relationships between black and Asian people in the UK at that time, Guerilla is still not acceptable.

If you’re still struggling, imagine how you would feel if the roles were reversed, if a show about Asian civil rights decided to cast a black non-Asian woman but never mentioned Lily Chin or gave Asian women good roles, or if a show about Indian resistance to the British cast a black non-Indian woman but never gave Indian women good roles. I think Asians understand more than anyone the pain of being erased from history and I promise you that continually defending Guerilla is just going to make that worse for other people. Black women are far more important than any show.

Black and Asian women in fandom have had each other’s backs on characters like Iris West and Joan Watson, Finn and Bodhi. And black feminist fans willingly boycotted Birth of a Nation because they chose to believe rape survivors, even though Birth of a Nation was about an important part of black history and their boycott was part of what killed the movie’s popularity. Even Gabrielle Union, who acted in that movie, refused to excuse it. That was honorable, and we too should be honorable. We owe it to each other to continue in the legacy of solidarity between women of color that has always been here, fragile but vital.

[arthoebeyonce]

📣📣📣 this is a public service announcement for those following the grenfell tower story abroad 📣📣📣

a lot of the foreign press seems to ignore the main tenets of the story so if you may here is a brief breakdown of why it’s shaping up to be a defining national moment in the uk:

***the housing tower is located in north kensington. it is social housing for poor and working class londoners of which a huge number are BME. the borough of kensington and chelsea is the richest in london and marked by devastating inequality and gentrification that some poorer residents describe as social cleansing. non-luxury housing in london is generally a huge issue that has gone unaddressed for decades now, and privatisation of social housing provision has meant that profit motive and cost cutting have been strongly featured in poor people’s housing. race, housing and poverty are also tightly linked in london; this was a poor and ethnically diverse community as you can see if you watch videos from the scene. first victims we knew that sadly perished were a black british female photographer and her mum, and and a syrian refugee.

***the council is tory and they have done less and less for the housing of its poorer residents and more to accommodate wealthy people. for example, the council is sitting on 300 million in cash reserves yet somehow didn’t find cash to install basic fire sprinklers that the residents asked for? not only that but the 8 billion refurbishment that included the now notorious cladding was partly done for insulation but partly also to make the ugly 1970s council estate look more aesthetically pleasing for the swanky neighbourhoods nearby. the more flammable material used in the cladding saved the building contractor a whopping £5000

***government has been tory for the past 7 years and the order of the day has been austerity. public services have been cut to the bone and so has local authority funding. social housing managers who often work for subcontracted private providers paid by the council have a huge case load. they are encouraged to spend less and less time on health and safety (including fire safety) and more on asking intrusive questions about people’s jobs and incomes because of the tory culture of dividing people into the “deserving and undeserving poor” ie those who work and those who don’t. people on benefits are not prioritised when it comes to housing despite individual circumstances, which is why in grenfell you had 70 year olds with limited mobility living on the 22nd floor.

***uk has probably the most entrenched class system in the world and trashing of the working classes and the poor is almost a national hobby for some people. right-wing tabloid media is extremely powerful and they paint a picture of benefit cheats and non-working immigrants even though most poor people in britain work (they are the new working poor who have terrible wages and live in squalid and unaffordable housing) and most BME people were born here, they’re not immigrants

***if you are poor you are largely voiceless and meaningless to this neoliberal tory government. the tenants had written letters raising concerns about fire safety and in response were threatened with legal action. of course they couldn’t respond because tories have cut legal aid because of… yes, austerity. meanwhile tory ministers have been sitting on reports about fire safety in council flats including one from a coroner of a case where six people died in a housing block in south london in 2009. the prime minister didn’t meet the people affected at the scene and the response has generally been very poor. local council has been nowhere to be seen and the donations have come from ordinary people – proper working class solidarity in the face of state that treats them with utter contempt.

TL;DR: austerity kills, gentrification kills, indifference kills. people want justice, they are angry. why did up to 150 people die? this was preventable – it’s scandalous, horrific. it’s like poor people’s lives don’t matter in britain – a hurricane katrina moment for the uk. so please watch videos of THE PEOPLE, poor and working class londoners, who are suffering and expressing anger. don’t listen to theresa may, tories and the bbc trying to sanitise the story. this has everything to do with inequality, poverty, race and most of all CLASS. make those people visible again and help us change things because honestly this is the breaking point and we don’t need people spreading a false narrative abroad. cheers, peace out