S1E1: So You Want to Be a Professor . . .

Welcome to unpack this where two unlikely academics, talk about wayward journeys into and through academia with detours into popular culture,and probably fitness and whatever else strikes our minds.

Is none other than Constance Bailey. I’m an assistant professor in English at the university of Arkansas. I also have an affiliation with the African and African-American. Studies Program,, my pronouns are she and her. I am sadly, one of those, compulsory heterosexuals, and, you know, we might get into compulsory heterosexuality as well.

And many, many other things.

This is our first episode. We’re hoping that this podcast does well, probably too much like most of our projects, but one of the main things about this podcast is that we’re hoping to give voice to, experiences that are not usually considered when we talk about higher education and.

Professionalization in the academy, we’re hoping to make that journey more accessible to folks who might be following similar paths that we took. Our paths are definitely not definitive. They’re not necessarily the right way to do much of anything, but, they should give you some sort of insight into what that journey is like when you are not one of the people that, universities anticipate maybe as graduate students, as professors, et cetera.

So for this first episode, Well, since I pitched the first episode, I’ll talk about why it came to mind., this summer I’ve had maybe four or five zoom conversations with people who found me through friends or siblings or the internet, who wanted to talk about. Their interest in pursuing a PhD in English or in rhetoric.

And these people tend to be trans or Asian American or queer or all of those things. And I sit a lot with, you know, what do you say to folks who have that question? And that’s, something that I’m really interested in talking to you about Constance, because we’re both here. We both do this job. And, but we also know that the journey here required both of us to have a good deal of luck and also a good deal of tolerance for a lot of bullshit.

Good supportive networks. And so my, I guess, ethical question about this is. What do you say? I mean, you don’t want to be a gatekeeper. You don’t want to be a person who says, no, don’t do this, but also you don’t want to be the person who told someone. Yeah, that’ll be great. This’ll be fine. And for them to come back two years later and say like, why didn’t you tell me, you know,

Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting too, because as you. I didn’t mention in the intro is that I’m also a parent and I have a high school junior. So while we are deeply immersed in conversations with graduate students and probably feeling the pressure as a black faculty, you as a transplant, as a nonbinary faculty, like, you know, we know disproportionately women and faculty members who are people of color, you know, have a greater.

Service burden, for any of you who did not know that if you’re just into binging Netflix series and you watch the chair, then Sandra Oh probably tells you that. Right. But, it’s interesting that I had not even thought about this, like this, the question of, should I go to college? So while we’re talking about like, should we go to graduate school and the ethical dilemma, you know, mentoring students.

I really had, and this will probably be a separate, you know, another episode, but this question of, should I go to college because you know, my kid, you know, I was saying to him that, and just FYI, I am very digressive Jo as well. So you’ll, you’ll get a lot of these side stories that you may or may not want to want to hear.

At some point, we’ll get really sophisticated and give you a show notes, and then you can skip all the side stories. But, but, but not today. So, but anyway, so my kid has a part-time job and he’s in high school and he’s doing extracurricular stuff and he’s in the band. And I said to him, you know, this, this, this job is all good and well, but it’s not going to pay for college.

So you need to, you know, make sure you’re doing your schoolwork. You need to make sure you’re showing up for band practice. You know, if you plan to go to college and he’s like, well, why should I go to college? And I was like, well, you know, and I didn’t insist, you know, I know that. The nature of careers and, uh, investing.

I mean, there are people who can invest in crypto and not ever get a real job. Right. I mean, so, you know, I’m not suggesting that his path to prosperity is the same that it was for, you know, for a first generation college student. I’m naturally not, but you know, but many people in my generation are, but, you know, I just assumed that because I was a college professor that he had a certain amount of cultural capital that he didn’t and that he doesn’t.

And so, you know, we just had a conversation. I said, Hey kid, you know, I’m going to love you regardless. You don’t have to go to college. And in fact, if you’re interested in doing something else, I would discourage you from going to college. I said, but I don’t really think you’d add carpentry or becoming a plumber or want to become a mechanic, which would be very useful in his family.

You know, if what you want to do, I think he’s somewhere between Marine biology and music production. And I said, you know, 20 years ago, you probably didn’t even have to have a college degree to do music production. I’m absolutely certain because it probably was there probably weren’t that many music production degrees, and now the university of Arkansas.

People are still building these kinds of programs. So we just had a basic, like, Hey, it depends on what you want to do in life at 16. You obviously don’t know that yet. But if you think you might do a thing, that’s going to require some type of training. Then go to college decides or major after you get there.

And you might have to have more than one college degree, but the long and short of it is, is that you’re part-time and you know, the chicken shop or wherever he works, you know, it’s not going to pay for a couple of books, but it’s not going to pay tuition. And you don’t want to start out in debt, which is still often the case for, you know, students who don’t have.

Wealthy families and, you know, um, it’s probably the Jo the constants, the Tiffany, the, you know, it’s probably the narrative of so many, you know, friends and colleagues. So that’s my sidebar random.

I think that’s an important sidebar, because a lot of folks who, who get to the end, you know, with an acknowledgement that should I go to grad school is a very classed and privileged question that folks get to be able to ask in the first place. But the folks who asked that often come from a place of, it seems like the next step, right?

Like I got my bachelor’s and this seems like the next thing I should do, except that. What you were just discussing, like we’ve gotten to a point where the bachelor’s is sort of the barrier to entry for a lot of careers or for a lot of just basic jobs. It doesn’t even have to be in the field of that job.

They just require you to have a bachelor degree of some kind, whereas a PhD in the humanities, a PhD in English. Is a very specific training for a very specific profession that is running out of jobs and also has an oversaturated job market. And, still kind of in an identity crisis in terms of what, what that education should look like when you have more PhD students than you have jobs for them to have at the end of that degree.

And so, so that is actually one of the first things that I, I talk to these people about is that this is a very special. Job specific training and you can pursue it if purely out of interest, you are okay with the poverty wages you get as a graduate student, if you are okay with putting your life on hold for five to seven years.

But if you’re doing it because you think that it’s opening a world of career opportunities for you, there are other things you might want to think about, about what you want that career to look like. And if there are others, Avenues of getting there.

Yeah. And not only that. Heaven forbid if anybody, I would hate, if anybody we’re mentoring is under the mistaken impression that we have the summers off and, and, and holidays, like, you know, you see these memes and they’re, they’re, they’re hilarious, but, but every, you know, K through 12 educator, for sure.

And most college professors who are like cringing and dying inside where it’s like, you know, Taxpayers are, you know, here’s what people who aren’t teachers, aren’t educators think I do. Here’s what I really do. And then, you know, the person’s like sort of crying and buried in papers, but yeah, I mean, I, I try to be, even in my classes, even in my undergrad classes, I try to be very candid with my students because I have, you know, occasionally I’ll have a student who says they want to be an English professor and I’m thinking.

Are you seeing that, you know, like other thing, you know, like when I, when students say that, you know, encourage, and I’m also, I’m deeply conflicted, but what I do try to do and we’ll have, I think I suffered. Either series or maybe just a section within the podcast, you know, like a regular feature where we talk about academic conferences, but the one or two students who I’ve had, who have said that to me, I was like, okay, well, let’s, let’s get you to working on a conference abstract.

He was one that’s going to be accessible. Let me see if I can figure out some funding because I want them to see, you know, they’re, they’re, you know, in a bachelor’s. Here’s what this looks like. Here’s what, you know, academia is because sometimes it just, they just think they have a really cool professor.

Right. And they don’t see any of the behind the scenes. And so I really trying to, um, we’ll set our movie that is at the wizard of Oz where it’s like the man behind the curtain or whatever.

Yeah, I think, I think, yes. I’ll say, Yeah.

We’ll say, yeah. I think that’s what it is,

it’s wicked, but I, I’m not, I’m not sure. I don’t know?

the original vision of us.

Yeah, for sure. Well, anyway, I mean, it’s overrated, but,, yeah, there’s the ways also there’s lots of different variations of that, but yeah, I’m trying to expose them to the behind the scenes. That’s as soon as I, get an inkling that. Oh, so you say you want to be a college professor, like we could almost make it a game show.

Right. And we can do without, gosh, it’d be horrible. It’s it’s but, but the spectacle of it all is also, it’s kind of tragic, right?

I’ll put a pin in this to say that there are obviously positive things that we do this job, and there are wonderful things about it. But, before we get there, I do think that what you just said is something we should pause on, which is, you know, what is this job? I wanted to be a college professor before I knew what that meant.

I just, like you said, I was like, I have cool classes with these cool faculty and I want to be the person running these conversations. And it turns out that teaching is a, a small percentage based job, depending on the type of academic job that you have. So, so I didn’t know, going into graduate school. And I know a lot of folks don’t that there are lots of different, professorships.

And there are a lot of different teaching positions in the university that are not necessarily named professor because of the ways that hierarchy and politics work in universities. So maybe we’ll step back real quick and talk about sort of the types of jobs and what they entail.

Yeah, thank you for, yeah. And I’m I’m you’re right. I’m so sorry if I color that any of these that are away, like this is a horrible, no, we love what we do. Right. And I think that we, we think it’s important for us to be in this space. Right. And especially because they see, so. Few faculty of color. So few black women.

So if you trans faculty like, so, so, you know, we’re deeply committed to the work. Let me not, let me, let me, you know, sarcasm aside. Right. so you want to be a college professor, right? So. We’re both at R1s.

Okay. So let me, let’s let’s backtrack. So there’s public versus private, right? So for folks who are not in higher ed, right, either it’s a public state funded, academic institution. So a four year college or university. Most of which will have, you know, advanced degree options, master’s PhD, EDD, and so forth.

Private institutions, tend to be, funded by, donors or, you know, if they’re religious affiliated or, however, the case may be, um, alumni of that institution. So if it has the state name in it that has a 99%, I think that it’s a public institution versus, you know, somebody’s name.

It’s private. Yeah. That’s not a good, you know, that’s not a hard and fast formula, but, , so that’s the first distinction, obviously, we’re, at four year institutions as opposed to two year colleges. So sometimes call community colleges, sometimes calls sometimes called junior colleges. So those tend .

To emphasize more direct applications. So, uh, trades, vocations, um, you know, so direct application to what someone wants to do. So more like job training. And in fact, I know that a lot of high schools even have counted the two year. Well, actually, so that’s a whole other thing I don’t know that either of us are really prepared to go into the Hudson high school discussion.

I’ve taught K through 12 very briefly. And so we won’t try to do that now, but. Increasingly right. High schools are allowing students to get college credit. What does that mean? So that’s probably going to be something we’ll put a pin in and come back to and talk about like, what, what are the, what are the implications of that?

Good, bad and ugly. Uh, but anyway, um, so two year versus four year, right? Um, there are. Um, so research one. So, and that, that might be something that Jo wants to, he wants to talk about because there are tiers to research institutions, and This is something that I kind of understand intuitively, but I don’t ever really know how to explain it to people.

And I don’t know, I’m putting Jo on the spot explanation that I do, it has to do with it’s it’s, it’s a really complex sort of matrix.

So it comes from the Carnegie ranking system, which I’m sure has some sort of.algorithm for determining the research activity of the institutions. What “R1” names, I think it’s very high research activity or something like that. And then they go to moderate research activity and et cetera. What that means for us is that Constance and I are at PhD granting institutions where a significant percentage of our appointment depends on us producing what the university counts as research.

This is where you get the publish or perish idiom. , it means that. Our teaching load is lower than it is at teaching based institutions. And that, a good amount of our work is devoted to publishing things that have to do with the field. And I want to emphasize that. All of the work done throughout higher education.

And regardless of the type of institution is really important. One of the things I kind of roll my eyes at,, is when folks talk about universities and they’re like, oh, it doesn’t have anything to do with the real world. And I want to say, what do you, what do you think universities are filled with?

They’re filled with human beings. Who are also people in the world, you are affecting human beings with your time. And when you’re doing research, you’re effecting disciplinary conversations. When you’re doing teaching, you are shaping people going forth into the world to do all sorts of different professions.

So all of these things have very important real world impact. Academia tends to have a stuffy hierarchy where it privileges research-based institutions partially because that’s where the money is. The politics of that. I’m sure we’ll go into throughout, throughout this podcast. But for.

, listeners to know.

both of us are at research-based institutions. And that is usually a thing that, we have to explain to folks when they, when they ask about PhDs and, and professorships is that there are all sorts of jobs after this. And what you want to do, whether that is teaching at say a community college, ,teaching out a small liberal arts school or.

Doing research. All of those things will sort of shift your focus in terms of how you build your portfolio coming out of grad school and how you develop your applications coming out of grad school. Yeah. Did I miss anything there?

No, I don’t. Well, if he did, I didn’t notice it. I just, yeah. I thought you slammed on it. I mean, I think, I wonder if we might, you know, just. For a bit before we even go into this kind of initial conversation that we have with students, you know, where we were trying to really sort of determined, like, is this really what you want to do?

I wonder if we might talk a little bit about like how we, you know, how we arrived here? Like wherever he, you know, like, how did we get, like, what was our path? I don’t know if that’s a thing we can do. I can’t do anything briefly, you know, but, uh, you know, but if we might talk about that for sure.

Yeah, we should, we should start that story for sure. And I’m sure folks, if they feel like listening to us, we’ll get more and more of it over time. But, so I originally wanted to be a creative writer. I’ve wanted to do that almost all of my life, all of my life. I’ve made sense of the world through writing.

And I went to get an MFA in creative writing and figured out that there is no job at the end of an MFA. And in an MFA you’re supposed to write a novel, but you get maybe a year to do that after you finish your initial coursework. And so my novel was a thing that sat in a computer file for a very long time, and that I’m afraid to ever open again.

After I finished my MFA, I was in a graduate program that happened to have a very good rhetoric program, which is a field that. Thought about or heard about, knew about, , but broadly speaking. Well, my favorite definition of rhetoric is the strategic study of the circulation of power through communication, which comes from Jay Dolmage, and, and is very much.

how I think about rhetoric I think about how the ways we communicate and all of the structures that shape our communication affect power and distributions of resources and the different life opportunities that people have. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot throughout my MFA as this, you know, queer, not yet out trans a child of immigrants.

, and thinking about how I was expected to tell certain stories how those stories would be evaluated based on expectations about what is authentic, how those stories were judged in ways or received in ways that didn’t reflect any of my white peers in, in well as a largely white program. And so, I learned that there was this whole field talking about things that I was interested in.

I slipped sideways into that PhD program didn’t apply anywhere else was fortunate enough to get in fortunate enough to have supportive advisors throughout my journey and swore up and down. I would never go into academia because I didn’t want to do the research publish or perish sort of thing, and learned that I should never make predictions about my life because I wound up finding research that I.

Care about, , which is very much looking at how narrative circulate, how they affect our politics, how they affect the lives of the people who we tell stories about and who gets to tell those stories. I found, I found this thing that I’m passionate about, and again, I’m very fortunate along the way to,, have been able to make a career thus far out of it.

I am pre-tenure as is Constance. So, so the career is to be determined for both of us. But that, that’s how I wound up here. I don’t think I ever heard about your journey.

Yeah. Okay. So it’s so funny, you actually. Sub-fields that on paper sound like completely different things in the sense that, you know, you’re a rhetorician or Rhet comp. One of my areas is folklore and oral tradition. And, folklore is very much about, studying how people create and sustain those traditions.

Right. And so it’s something that I come back to, but, just to kind of backtrack. I. I grew up in a family of educators, but everyone taught high school K through 12. So for a while or a bit, I thought that’s what I was going to do. And you know, like everybody, you know, it’s like, oh, I’m going to be this.

I’m going to be that blah, blah, blah. But, two things happened. I had a sports medicine internship as an undergrad. But even before that, when I was in, high school, I had a biomedical research internship at the university of Mississippi. And so, going into that I thought I want to work in epidemiology and immunology, which would probably be really useful right now.

What I ended up organic chemistry did not really agree with me. And did that in an allied health course in high school where I got like, I don’t know, a hundred clinical hours or some things that could have taken like a nursing assistant exam, but we saw, um, autopsy. And so that, you know, the blood, I was like, yeah, you know, but, but I still did the sports medicine internship.

So, , at Alcorn state university, which I have to plug as a historically black college and university. You know, in terms of categories, that is another one that we will for sure return to, because I feel like my experience at an HBCU was so instrumental for, , shaping who I, who I am. So we’ll, we’ll talk more about categories, of course, as the podcast goes on.

But so having said that, I decided, since everybody else in my family is a teacher, I’ll be a teacher, basically. So then, you know, English as a major, because I thought, well, I really love to read. And, as any, person with an advanced degree in English will tell you, leisure reading, what is that?

so I mean, you try to do the research, right? And the, and the writing,, especially this publish or perish imperative that we often have and research institutions sometimes take takes you away from your love of just reading the novel for the sake of the. So having said that, you know, long story short, one of the directors of the honors program mentioned something called the Ronald E. McNair Program.

I was like, oh, okay. I’ll apply for that. Sure. So I applied, we didn’t have one at our institution, so I had to apply at the university of Mississippi again. So I had multiple summers at, What’s popularly referred to as Ole miss. So that was interesting, right. There was, the racial dynamics of, Oxford Mississippi were very different from the, racial dynamics of the small town in Natchez, Mississippi, where I grew up and also very different from attending.

HBCU. So that was, just interesting. Right. But, that time was formative. I got further introduces or on a Hurston and black women preachers. One of my mentors there, , was, doing research on Pauli Murray and some other, black women scholars. And so, , it was great. I had not thought about it.

A PhD at all. , really before the McNair program, quite honestly, but it provided me. And I didn’t also think I was eligible for the program because it’s ideally for first generation college students. But if you can, write a decent application, , there is a category for groups that are underrepresented in graduate education.

And so that includes pretty much any minority. Women. If you’re not a white man, there’s a good chance that you are underrepresented in graduate education. So, um, that program , was just this a wonderful experience that I would encourage. You know, if anybody’s listening to this podcast who is in college and undergrad, To that, because it allowed me as an undergraduate to make academic presentations and to go to conferences.

And , it helped me get fee waivers for scholarship applications. And it helped, in terms of. , increasing my exposure, which of going to graduate school was about exposure and about having this cultural capital and this knowledge that I would not have had otherwise. I think I gave a presentation at Penn state when I was a junior.

And then I went to some conference in Boston that I don’t remember now. And they publish our research in a journal. And now it’s just a journal of like McNair scholars, but it’s the idea of like academic publishing is a thing. I don’t think, you know, as much as your students, our students, we assign them articles and academic articles.

Understand the process of when, like how does a thing get into, you know, and so, uh, to some degree, at least you get a little bit of that exposure, or I got a little bit of that exposure, so that’s my really long and rambling way of saying that. Yeah. I didn’t know that a PhD was a thing. untilMcNair and I was not sure that it was a thing I could do, but, , when I went to graduate school and I took a course with my doctoral mentor, Dr. Anand Prahlad.

shout out if he, if he wasn’t, so this little shout out people in this tag them so they can start listening to the podcast. Right. , but it was on the black preacher. In popular culture. And I was like, you could, you can take a class or if people talk about the plaque. And so, you know, learning that through the study of folklore, I could just about anything when I think about my group identities and how we make meaning.

So, you know, one of my areas of research is, , black women’s humor and the comedy. And as you all can tell them about. Um, I’m well versed in comedic timing. Right? So if this academic thing doesn’t work out, I’ll one of my side houses will be,

one of the backup plans.

one of my many backup plans if there’s ever like open comedy shows again.

So yeah. That’s that. So I guess, you know, back to like, what did we tell students? Or, I don’t know. Did you miss anything in your life?

No, but I think so if you’re listening to this, you can hear, I think in both of us that there are things that we really love about this and where I, eventually end up when I have these conversations, is that, at the end of the day, I. I get to write about the things I think are important.

I get to talk to students about the things I think are important. I get this incredibly beautiful experience of people finding me on the internet because I am, you know, trans or Taiwanese American or whatever. And they haven’t had a faculty member who had, who shared that identity category with them before.

And they needed someone to talk to about what it would be like to go through this space. And. You know, there are things I really love about this job. And for folks. Who decided that they want to take that journey, , who are structurally marginalized folks. I will fight for you to be here for sure.

I want you to be here. , I just want you to be equipped and prepared before you get here to know that. These spaces are not necessarily hospitable a lot of the time. And that, you know, if you are prepared, if you know that you need to build networks of support, like actively seek them out.

If you know that a lot of this. Profession is kind of gaslight-y, you know, , it’s structured around a very specific type of knowledge that belongs to a very specific group of people that is made to make you feel less than if you aren’t familiar with the same names or the same histories, or if you aren’t interested in the same names or same histories, you know?

And, and it helps to know that beforehand, or I wish somebody had told me beforehand, , I realized that I got all the way through undergrad. And all the way through my MFA without ever having an Asian American, uh, faculty member. I think I had one Black professor before graduate school, but, you know, we are very, uh, We are very underrepresented in these spaces.

And the knowledges that we bring to those spaces are very underrepresented. And so, that means both the work is really important and also that getting there to do that work, getting the space and encouragement and resources and peace of mind to do that work is going to be a challenge.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. Ditto. Attending an HBCU doesn’t necessarily mean that you have. A ton of black professors. Right. Um, and sometimes that, that is not necessarily the case, although I was fortunate. Right. , and certainly you, you have probably more black faculty than you than you would at a larger, institution but.

Uh, as you could tell, probably from, you know, a little bit of my background, my path to grad school was a little circuitous. And so, I mean, that’s one of the things that, I, , tell graduate students, you know, that you kind of have to chart your own path and you have to decide what’s important to you.

And, and that’s something that I really try to have a candid conversation with, graduate students about because when I entered grad school, I was very traditional. 22. I was single, you know, didn’t have any children. And by the time I returned for my PhD, I had. A child. And I had my second child during the process of my getting my dissertation, um, completed.

And, you know, my family dynamic changed. So, you know, so many things about, you know, what were important to me, like being like I’m still in the south. Right. And that is something that, you know, for all, you know, so I didn’t have any children. I don’t think I could. Now, of course, I’m saying that says anything about it.

You know, once the quarter we meet, you know, outside of the staff, I feel free. I’m just joking. But, but, you know, so geography matters. Like there were so many things to tell us. It’s like, you really have to think about your personal situation, your family situation, that matters in terms of your, in terms of attrition, in terms of, you know, your ability to stay the course.

Because as Jo pointed out, it’s, it’s, uh, A humanities PhD tends to take longer, you know, five to seven years on average. And I don’t even know I could take him longer than that, but so, you know, the ability to stay the course, you know, but it’s something that I think, you know, I’m committed to trying, and this is kind of another question, but, you know, I want to be here because there are students who need to be mentor here.

There are, you know, our presence does matter, but having said that, um, I wanted to backtrack just a little bit. Yeah. I don’t really know how or why or which question I felt like it came in. One, went around other questions that my attention span is kind of whatever, but is this, this idea of like academic gatekeeping or academic hazing as I like to call it, right.

Anyone who’s familiar with the sorority or fraternity that. To me sometimes is a thing. And I think it can be intimidating for graduate students and it can be daunting and it can be traumatic actually, you know, because there are, there is this sense. I think maybe, I don’t know if it’s, if it’s older faculty or if it just has to do with, like, we tend to replicate the processes.

Went through. Right. And so, you know, there was, you know, for a while, very much the sense that, you know, like, oh my gosh, you’re a scholar in English and you don’t know who co or you don’t know, you know, this idea of sort of high theory or whatever, you know, this idea of sort of high versus low. Right? One of the things that I think that, um, made me gravitate towards.

Folklore and cultural studies. It was this sense that there is value in, in, in everything that we do. And there is value in, you know, popular culture, just because a lot of people like it, you know, doesn’t somehow make it inferior, which, which is, uh, Implicit, I think in some, a lot of subfields within, in English.

Right. And so it’s interesting in terms of kind of umbrella departments, because folks who are on oral tradition can be housed in English, but it can be its own thing. I think rhetoric has the same thing. So, uh, but thinking about kind of our starting points in, in English, right.

Um, as. Umbrella, uh, as, as from gatekeeping field, it’s it’s, that is hard, right? To, to kind of explain to students that you can research, you can write about anything. And that’s the, the great, the beauty of, uh, I think one of the reasons we love it is because write about something that you’re passionate about, charts our own path, or write about something that.

You know, other people aren’t writing about, they’re not, they’re not a ton of people writing about black women’s comedy and humor. So that allows me to some degree, not a lot of people writing about representations of black college students. So that allows me to, to chart my own path in a way that if I’m trying to replicate.

You know, everybody’s worried about Shakespeare and everybody has read about Shakespeare because that is one of those gatekeeping things that you have to do a degree in English. Right. And so, that’s the thing I would say, you know, in terms of, um, Just just, I don’t know, advice, I don’t know over my experience and you know, and I’m not saying that I’m above it either, right.

I might be doing it. I’m not, but yeah.

Yeah. it’s a, it’s a constant recursive process, right? How do we do better than the journey we had to take? How do we make it easier? Something you said about you can write about anything. Yeah. I am. I’m a queer kid who found safety in school. That’s why I’m here. You know, I, school was the thing I knew how to do when everything else felt like it was falling apart.

And, , it gave me knowledge that really saved my life. , the bodies of knowledge that I draw from a lot in my work, which has some overlap with Constance, uh, Black and women of color feminism, critical race studies. I also go to disability studies, trans studies, queer studies, all of these things. What’s at the heart of it is the conviction that the experiences of people who’ve been structurally marginalized.

Are important that they have knowledge and that in amplifying that knowledge and wisdom, we can make the world better. Right. Um, and so, so finding these fields that could name the experiences that I was having that I didn’t know, you know, it just felt like something was wrong with me or even just that I was uncomfortable in ways that I couldn’t put, I couldn’t put a finger on and to find these.

Bodies of knowledge that can name those things. And that was actively challenging. Those things was really illuminating and I just, it was incredible for me. So that is one of the, one of the things that keeps me here. And one of the very promising things about this job, it is also one of the challenging things like Constance said, these tend to be the fields that are either not given an department or a physical space on campus that are the first ones to get budget cuts and, and all of that.

Um, so it’s, it’s a struggle, but if you are lucky, you find really good people to be in the struggle with you. And that’s really, you know, the most I can ask for at this point,

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s how, uh, how we linked up, right. That, you know, we found common struggle, right. Shared struggle. , I I’ll never forget one of my good friends again. I’m all about shouting people out. No other reason than it outside them. And they have to listen to the episode. But one of my good friends from graduate school, Dr.

Shelley Ingram, who was down at the university of Louisiana, Lafayette, I, one of those weird, awkward, you know, graduate students slash, you know, faculty. Mentoring events at the beginning of the year, I was like, Hey, I heard you’re from Mississippi, no

Mississippi, you know, uh, you know, people, I don’t know, it was as if Mississippi was a neighborhood. Right. But it’s like, Hey, we should be friends, you know? Right. This shared sense of a oppression, right. Being from Mississippi and then sort of thrust into the Midwest or something. But, um, yeah, I mean, I think that, that those shared experiences are, you know, what.

You bring us, you know, colleagues and, and, uh, cohorts together sometimes. Um, and also as you pointed out, like in terms of disciplinary interests, right? These fields that are, uh, in some cases still emerging because of the, um, you know, very subjective experiences that marginalized. You know, are, um, experiencing, so, so you still see kind of new sub fields that are emerging, which I think is one of the exciting and kind of beautiful things about the profession.

Maybe

Yeah,

word.

I think, I mean, maybe to , pull us to some takeaways a bit toward the end of the episode, it’s that it’s, challenging that you should go into this fully prepared, knowing that it’s a struggle. I mean, it’s a struggle for everyone. Grad students are notoriously underpaid and overworked and it’s five to seven or however many years of.

Am I doing this and am I going to find a job at the end of it? Am I doing this? And I have anything worthwhile to say and all of those things. , so to know that going in that it will be challenging, but also to know that if you can find folks. Who you trust? Who’ll stand by you, , who you can whine about the day with, , you know, over happy hour at the end of the day.

Like that’ll only get easier if you can find advisers you trust. , that’s really important. , one of my friends Anjali Vats– as long as we’re shouting out people. I think she got it from someone else. Too. So I, this is a whole chain of, of academic telephone, but, uh, she says you need an advisor, particularly, , women of color, , in graduate school, you need an advisor.

Who’s going to slay the dragons for you. , and that’s always stuck in my head, but I mean, especially as a structurally marginalized student, you do, you need an advisor who is willing to go to bat for you. Who’s going to say my student’s going to do things differently because they’re not, you know, The student you have in mind, it’s not going to work for them, right.

They’re not doing the sort of work that you’re trying to prepare people for. And we want to give them the chance to do the work that they are best for. So, so yeah, being prepared for the challenge ahead and, , knowing how important it is to find folks who get what you’re trying to do and are willing to fight for you to be able to do that work.

Am I missing anything?

No. I mean, I think that’s a really good, a good takeaway. And I mean, that, to me speaks to, I think an adjective that we haven’t used that is vulnerable. And so that to me speaks to the vulnerability of graduate students. And, you know, one of our tasks as mentors is that we, we do have to, uh, in some cases be willing to, to go.

You know, go to bat or quote-unquote slay dragons. Um, I like that. I like Ashley’s metaphor. That’s that’s awesome. But, um, sorry, that’s the other, I think precarious thing about our business as tenured as junior faculty, right? So we’ll, that’ll be a whole other episode about like the different rights of, you know, and especially even to differentiate, um, contingent faculty from.

Tenure track tenure faculty. So, so that’ll be another thing for us to unpack. Right. But, uh, you know, in spite of the vulnerability of graduate students, uh, you know, junior faculty, uh, we can make a difference. I think we’re committed to being here because we want to make a difference, uh, in spite of, you know, some vulnerabilities that we ourselves are experiencing.

So yeah, I mean, I think. There’s a lot more we could say probably. Uh, but, but that’s probably for another episode, so yeah, I think, yeah, I think in the way of introductions, we might’ve covered it all.

Awesome. So that was our first episode. Thank you for joining us. If you managed to make it thus far, our idea for this, podcast is to make it through sort of different. Aspects of the academic journey to discuss what our experiences were. Again, not as definitive experiences or even the right way to do things, but as accounts that both expose maybe how structures of marginalization work.

, but that also give folks who might come from related positionalities and idea of what these experiences are like, , and how different people have navigated them. And, , along the way, we’ll be taking detours into the many different topics that Constance that I wanted to discuss, , having to do with academia and probably popular culture, unpacking things, et cetera.

, but yeah, thanks for tuning in.

All right. So if you have questions, feel free to hit us up at theunpackthispodcast@gmail.com. Also, if you’re interested in being a guest, or if you have suggestions for a future episode, topics or guests, theunpackthispodcast@gmail.com