akargl Says:
November 29th, 2011 at 2:40 pm edit
The quarter has gone by so fast! I’m looking forward to the interesting things we’ve brewed up for next year, and to conversations about what else to do. For my part in the blog part of these conversations, I’d like to offer a provocation:
A main thing I’d like to see in S & J’s future has to do with the kind of re-worlding going on in the occupation movement, including the hope its form may signal for the ongoing struggles with inequality within it. How might we re-world the space in which we find ourselves in such a way that we resistance-occupy it? What happens to justice in the workings of a group located in a context internally and more broadly socially defined by intense hierarchies? With the Matsutake Worlds group, Anna Tsing (2009) deftly problematizes the competitive individualism so characteristic of academia. I’m not sure that competitive collectivism is a desirable alternative. Last spring I at times felt apprehension about how to engage in efforts toward collaboration in a context where I was being measured on my ability to form collaborative links (and to perform them on ecommons and in class). How am I best to perform the collaboration put on the table not only as a possibility to think and engage with that is clearly full of possibilities for justice, but that is put on the table also as a set of criteria for selection with material consequences (and therefore a potent basis for competition)? I’ve been so nourished by the grade-free environment of my program that perhaps I’m especially sensitive to the tensions of a learning environment that one classmate likened to the reality show, Survivor. I think there is interesting room here for S & J engage more of the justice concerns where it is. So, briefly, in addition to the wonderful kinds of conversations and encounters it has already fostered, I’d like to see S & J engage campus and UC politics more directly, as well as to operationalize within the space of the SJGTP the inequalities faced by students in different disciplines – including the differing and power-laden funding landscapes within graduate education, as well as the economic hierarchies of the future beyond grad school.
akargl Says:
November 29th, 2011 at 4:14 pm edit
i also think a science and justice pub night would be a good thing.