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December 2024

The Positionality Series

Hello everyone! I was speaking with a friend and colleague in my program who pointed out that I haven’t written on my blog in awhile. So, I asked what should I write about. He had a quick response: academic positionality. Oof. Tough stuff. Especially as students, simultaneously learning how to produce knowledge while finding our complicity in actions that go against our values. On top of that, we still have to turn in papers, pass classes, and submit grant applications.

This brought up a few questions and tensions in my mind:

    • How do we cope with learning more and more about this world?
    • What are we to do with ourselves and each other as we learn more about our complicity in the system?
    • How do we bear the weight of producing new knowledge knowing how easily our research is manipulated and misused?
    • If we are to stay in these institutions, how can we use this position to the advantage of ourselves and our People?

Tough questions on the best day. What is more frustrating than the difficulty of such questions is that there is never time to contemplate and come to an answer while you are a PhD student (or faculty, I presume). Sure, there are a few philosophy students who may get to tinker with these ideas, but how materially? Who knows.

So, now that I am in my fifth year and will be facing the job market in one-years time, it’s time for me to reckon with what has been bouncing around in mind since I walked through the doors of Gates Hall in the Fall of 2020. I don’t have an answer, so this series will be about deeply reading and honestly responding to texts that are supposed to provide guidance in this realm. I invite you to read along and reflect as I do. There is no real order here, just some ideas. I am sure I will have an opinion on order after I am done. Here are the texts I plan on contending with:

    • Stewart-Ambo, T., & Yang, K. W. (2021). Beyond land acknowledgment in settler institutions. Social Text, 39(1), 21-46.
    • Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2004). The university and the undercommons: Seven theses. Social Text, 22(2), 101-115.
    • Hill, R. W., & Coleman, D. (2019). The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Tradition as a Guide for Indigenous-University Research Partnerships. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 19(5), 339-359. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708618809138
    • Peña, L. G. (2022). Community as rebellion: A syllabus for surviving academia as a woman of color. Haymarket Books.
    • Cath, C., & Keyes, O. (2021). Your Thoughts for a Penny? Capital, Complicity and AI Ethics. ECONOMIES OF VIRTUE, 28, 24.
    • Dodgy Scholars Resisting the Neoliberal Academy
    • Stengers, I. (2016). “Another science is possible!”: A plea for slow science. In Demo (s) (pp. 53-70). Brill.
    • Paperson, L. (2017). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. In Land Education (pp. 127-142). Routledge.
    • Suman Seth’s “Putting Knowledge in Its Place: Science, Colonialism, and the Postcolonial”
    • Dourish “Allure and Paucity of Design”
    • Yuen Yuen Ang’s very recent blog “Doing Development in the Polycrisis”
    • Positionality Statements as a Function of Coloniality: Interrogating Reflexive Methodologies
    • Cath, C., & Keyes, O. (2021). Your Thoughts for a Penny? Capital, Complicity and AI Ethics. ECONOMIES OF VIRTUE, 28, 24.
    • More to come! Gotta ask my smart friends for recommendations.