Women Activating Agency in Academia

Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir

Alison L. Black, Susanne Garvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351376471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women Activating Agency in Academia seeks to create and expand safe spaces for scholarly, professional and personal stories and assemblages of agency. It provides readers with the opportunity to connect with the strategies women are using to navigate academe and the core values, linked to trust, relationship, wellbeing and ethics of care, they live by.

The collection offers the stories of women academics from around the globe and across disciplines and showcases their efforts to meaningfully listen and converse in order to resist self-audit and diminished identities. Reflections come from a range of responsive, personal and aesthetic techniques, including writing groups, guided autobiography, auto-ethnography, collective activism and slow scholarship. Chapters engage with themes and ideas such as agency, neoliberalism, ontological security, androcentricity, identity and collegial support, which manifest in unique ways for female academics.

The focus in this volume is what really matters to women in the academy, as they share their efforts to 'be' themselves in their work, to 'care for themselves and others' and to 'count what isn't counted'. It aims to prove how collaborative storytelling and discussion can empower female academics to preserve and achieve these ambitions.

1
Telling stories, gaining wisdom

Putting our voices into our practice

Melissa Burchard, Amy Joy Lanou, Leah Greden Mathews, Karin Peterson, and Alice Weldon

Introduction

What do you get when you cross an agricultural economist with a nutrition expert with a cultural sociologist with a Spanish literary theorist with a moral philosopher? In our case, you get a recipe for success: a collection of professional academic women who have been working together in a writing group for over a decade (some of us for nearly 20 years). Having endured the rigors of graduate school, we realized that we needed to create our own support structures if we were going to survive, and better still, thrive as women in academia. Although we recognized our white privilege, we noted that we still needed structures that would help us narrate life and work in different ways, since we were uncomfortable with the ways the traditional stories of the academy seemed to limit us – one of the most telling of which is the story of a lack of gender equity as women progress through academic careers (Diezmann & Grieshaber, 2013). We began with the belief that being successful in the academy is often more difficult for women than for men; we have discovered that for us, success in the academy depends a great deal on our coming together and sharing both personal and professional life.

Rather than trying to fit our lives into the traditional image of the solitary scholar, we have used our writing group to transform our experiences of the academy, escaping the isolation and (much of) the insecurity that academia can create. At this point, we are all full professors or professor emerita; two are department chairs and two have been program chairs; our members have served on important faculty committees and have won teaching, service, and/or research awards. We all attribute our accomplishments to a great extent to the way that we have used our writing group to create a space where we can tell and enact stories that enable us to be relatively whole, integrated persons by helping us to balance all aspects of our lives, professional and personal. Through an empathic practice of deeply engaged listening, critique, and support of each other’s work in all arenas (scholarly, administrative, teaching, parenting, partnering, experiencing life’s joys and sorrows), we consciously help each other bring ourselves fully to our academic careers. Working in this group has helped us develop our abilities to narrate a professional sense of self that includes our moral commitments, and thus is more capable of bringing what we value to the issues and opportunities we face.

We have realized over the years that we do much of our work together through storytelling. We share, reflect, respond, situate, and contextualize our lives through the stories we tell each other about what we need the group’s help on. Then, working together, we challenge, question, and support each other’s storytelling efforts to make sense of what we experience in our various roles on campus. This process reflects both empathy and a narrative theory of self-making as well as knowledge-making; that is, it reflects concepts of connection, self, and knowledge as being constructed through narrative. There are many articulations of this kind of theory. In After Virtue, MacIntyre argues that it is “natural” for us to think of the self as a narrative, and that we must be able to construct a narrative in order to be able to explain our actions, feelings, thoughts, and responses. Thus actions are made intelligible by our narrating them and placing them in context, for without context we cannot know how to “read” or interpret them (1984, p. 209). Importantly, our stories are not complete by themselves, because we are social beings in social worlds, and thus both responsible to and constrained by the stories of our fellow humans, our communities, and our traditions.

Nelson also offers an account of narrative as identity constituting. Such stories have a particular set of features, which are also features of personal identity:

Through one’s own and others’ selective, interpretive, and connective representations of the characteristics, acts, experiences, roles, relationships and commitments that contribute importantly to one’s life over time, an identity makes a certain sort of sense of who one is. It does so because it is essentially narrative in nature.

(2001, p. 15)

Again, the claim here is that through narratives we make sense of who we are and what we do, that we are intelligible. Like MacIntyre, Nelson is saying that we co-construct our narratives of identity with others; my identity is not just a matter of what I think I am or am doing, but what others think and say about it too.

We now present stories that evidence how the group has enabled each member to recognize and utilize aspects of identity needed for positive growth or even survival.

Transforming potential failures: Alice

Having arrived late to full-time academic life, I have experienced periods of deep insecurity and doubt concerning my identity as a professor. The intense effort my departmental senior colleagues applied to denying me tenure did not contribute to greater confidence. Fortunately, however, university-wide peers and the administration did grant me tenure. And shortly afterward, the scholarly writing group invited me to join. It has been invaluable in helping transform potential failures into building blocks of a most rewarding career.

One such story concerns a translation project. The writing group had set up a daylong retreat to focus on my English version of a just-published novel by an Argentine woman, about the early days of the “Dirty War.” Unfortunately, when my colleagues arrived they found me crying, barely able to talk. I was profoundly depressed after a sudden personal loss. I was incapable of talking about my work or believing that it or I was worth anything. Simply imagining the upcoming trip to Argentina to meet and work with the author was impossible.

Here is an edited version of the story I wrote years later about that moment:

The stillness does not suggest repose but retreat. The silence indicates “uh oh” instead of energetic cogitation. It is heavy all of a sudden. Of course, Alice cannot see the expressions on her colleagues’ faces because of the film of tears over her eyes or her hands placed and removed as some sort of armor, fence, or barrier that fails to deliver its intended protection. She feels there is no protection in this place.

Melissa breaks the silence first. “Oh, Alice, it’s okay, you know it is. That’s what we’re for. This is what we’re about.”

“I know, I know, I …. Oh-h-h, ahhhh.”

Nothing. Or everything. Silence. Alice can feel the others exchanging glances. “Can you say what you’re feeling, Alice?” It’s that gentle, almost pastoral, apparently-so-genuine tone that Karin can sing out when she thinks about it, when she is attending to someone even more insecure than she herself feels.

Alice wants with every nook and cranny of her body and being to stop this nonsense, this little-girl, baby, victim, immature, irrational self-pity, the hyper-vulnerability crap. All that vocabulary, though, only intensifies her sobbing that pours rather than drips out the tears now forming a veritable pool on the table. “The novel is no good. They’re all thinking it’s been a waste of their time; why on earth did I pick this one to translate? And now this on top of that. I am useless, disgusting, little, immature, and worst of all, I’m wasting people’s time. I give up. I quit. I cannot.”

Were any of the three university colleagues reading her mind? Or did they recognize the feel of, if not the reason for, her extreme distress and loss of control? Or did they simply possess the requisite grace, courtesy, or mere practice of waiting with the right mix of calm yet care to undergird someone important to them, slowly to begin the lifting process? Alice would never know.

What she does know dawns on her little by little, as the violent tornado of self-doubt and self-hate begins to let up, thus leaving room for miniscule windows of clarity, not totally soaked and darkened by the furiously pounding downpour. She sees that the world – her world – has not in fact ended, that she is alive, and that she is neither alone nor, evidently, totally worthless. She can let them even carry her. It won’t be a perfectly smooth carrying, but they won’t drop her. They will not drop her.

No, the group did not drop her; that is, they did not drop me. Nor have I dropped them.

That day of my debilitating breakdown in the presence of my scholarly colleagues ended quite differently from how it began. Specifically, the group let me cry and talk as much as I could or needed to, as they listened and caringly and carefully responded. They decided to discuss the novel themselves while I simply typed notes, if I could. Nothing was being asked of me, except to listen to them. They suggested overall themes, overarching metaphors; they responded to and clarified characters, plot, and cultural references. They talked about what they didn’t understand, asking each other questions and responding to them or hearing my occasional clarifications. They offered critical interpretations grounded in their respective disciplines of philosophy, sociology, economics, and gender. They noticed specific phrasing and meaning, often suggesting something that sounded much more fluid to me. Through it all, I managed to take copious notes and began believing in the book itself. As my colleagues uncovered things that had not occurred to me, the novel began literally to glow right before my mind’s eyes for both its flowing word crafting and its local and universal significance.

Only a few weeks later I flew to Salta, Argentina, to be the houseguest of my author’s family for two weeks. That trip wouldn’t have happened without the scholarly writing group. Given my emotional state prompted by that intensely personal event, I couldn’t have handled a visit among people I had never met in a country I had never visited; nor could I believe that I deserved such a chance. I did go, though, and I learned and experienced more than I ever could have hoped for. More importantly, I grew to love the author and believe in the urgency of getting her book to people well beyond her own country. It was no longer primarily about my scholarship. It became a matter of relationship, of a passion for the person behind the original novel’s creation.

The trajectory from those first chapter drafts in spring of 2005 to the summer of 2009, when my translated book appeared in The Feminist Press catalog and then on the local bookstore shelf, still seems magical. And it still seems communal, because it is. Not only did my writing group colleagues carefully consider and caringly comment on my translation at that 2005 meeting; they also had read every chapter I wrote, month by month, giving me specific, invaluable feedback. More importantly, they helped me believe in my own belief in the novel and my ability and preparation to move from first draft to final publication.

Telling stories as a scholarly practice: Melissa

A story from under the bed: the monsters are real

When I was a child I heard all the usual monster stories, and I’m sure I engaged in playing monster games (although I have a much clearer memory of playing Pixie and Dixie under the table with my brother Norman). But I also knew that even though the monsters in the stories were not real, there were monsters in the real world. Maybe those story ones weren’t, but there were real monsters in my life. I told my father again and again that there were bugs in my bed, but he could not perceive them, and consequently could not protect me against them. My father literally did not know these monsters; they were not a part of his world. But I experienced them nightly, and I knew that these monsters were real, even though they could not be fully imagined or articulated. They were inchoate, cloaked in both visual and conceptual obscurity, and their form of torment was to touch me, ever so lightly, through the night.

This is both a trauma story and a philosophical – a metaphysical – one. As a child I was sexually abused, and one of the ways I relived that trauma, nightly, for months, was to feel the horror of that touch in the dark, unable to escape it because I didn’t know what it was, and no one else knew either; in fact, no one else could even perceive it. The story exhibits a metaphysics of trauma. It is a metaphysics of plurality, in that it shows the evidence of more than one world that I, and others like me, live(d) in. Not a familiar mind/body split, but one between the ordinary world, where the monsters are in books, and that other world, where the monsters really hurt us in ways and for reasons we do not understand. Where we are told that what hurt us didn’t happen, and that we can never tell any other person, because then worse things will (but won’t have) happen(ed). A “real” world and a “dream” world. And after a while, we may no longer know which is which. And some of us actually live in that hurting world without even letting ourselves know about it, as though we were alive in one world, and dead in the other.

A story of theory and practice

As a philosopher, telling stories is not generally what I am expected to do. But I want to tell stories because I believe they help us know and understand ourselves and the world more fully, more accurately. I think that philosophy has always been a matter of storytelling, in that what we do in constructing a theory for some phenomenon is tell a (complicated, stylized, formal) story that is supposed to explain it (Trebilcot, 1991). Thinking of philosophy, and theorizing in general, as storytelling makes sense to me because that’s what philosophy feels like – telling a story that helps me make sense of the world.

Thinking in terms of story, though, reflects the kind of work I do as a philosopher. I’ve had to spend a fair amount of time in my career explaining to other philosophers that I am doing philosophy. I work on non-traditional subjects: interpersonal violence, violence against women, child abuse and trauma – topics that traditional philosophers tend to avoid. These non-traditional topics encourage the use of story, since they aren’t fully intelligible without the stories we tell to express their reality.

So some stories I tell are painful, for me and the reader, because for me, philosophy is nothing if it is not engaged in explaining the world, and the world is all too often a place of pain, which must somehow be survived and encompassed. Many pains originate in our personal lives, but cannot be integrated fully unless we also find room for responding to them in our professional lives as well. On the other hand, many people experience pain and even trauma through their professional endeavors. The experiences of a fear of not measuring up, of repeated rejections of one’s work, of a lack of interest and/or support on the part of colleagues, and of simply being constantly pressured to do more and more with less and less; all these are opportunities for significant distress and even trauma to assail us. Pain and trauma are real; a philosophy that ignores them is ignoring reality.

This non-traditional path in philosophy has never been easy to navigate, but I can’t imagine even being able to follow it without the support of my writing group. The pain of the personal is compounded by the professional experience of skepticism with regard to one’s topics and fields of study; it’s not easy getting work on child abuse and trauma published in philosophy. So the support of my group in encouraging me to pursue this work, their belief in the importance of it, has been my rock to stand on. Even more than that, these women have given me the invaluable gift of their witnessing: they have heard my pain, the pain of experiences that no one wants to know about, with acceptance and caring, and reflected it back to me changed, more intelligible through their understanding. People in general avoid the reality of child abuse, of rape and domestic violence, because it is so very hard to bear. The amazing generosity of my writing group colleagues has made it possible for me to bring stories, ideas, and arguments to philosophy that I’m sure I could never have done otherwise.

Living deep interdisciplinarity: Amy, Leah, and Karin

Deep interdisciplinarity is an evolution of our group practice that is now a core operational principle for us as individuals as well as for our collective. A part of this evolution was recognizing how helpful it is to have input from colleagues in other disciplines to help us communicate our work as clea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Telling stories, gaining wisdom: putting our voices into our practice
• 2 You’re not alone: discovering the power of sharing life narratives as academic women
• 3 Responding to longings for slow scholarship: writing ourselves into being
• 4 “We would love to have you over … ”: building career capital in a new academic environment
• 5 How yoga taught me about vocation
• 6 Intergenerational bodies: women’s knowledge production in supervisory relations
• 7 Feasible utopias and affective flows in the academy: a mobilisation of hope and optimism
• 8 Beyond silence and conformity: a reflection on academic activism as resistance to managerialism in the contemporary university
• 9 Academia as therapy
• 10 Travellers: traversing the academic landscape: a dialogue
• 11 Confronting, collaborating, and crafting: an enlivening methodology for academic ecojustice activism
• 12 Women writing to ourselves: rescuing the girl child from androcentricity
• 13 Embracing the power of the self as a female scholar
• 14 Vulnerability: an uncomfortable means to a positive place
• 15 PhD: Pivotal Heart Development
• 16 Stretching the elastic: can we change the heart of university management?
• 17 To care for self and others: a collaborative conversation
• 18 I am the compliant academic
• Afterword
• Index