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Voices in Cyberspace

In Liana's Posts on 2012/05/22 at 09:49

Liana Silva, writing from Kansas City, Kansas in the US.

On April 30th, Naomi Schaefer Riley, a blogger for the Brainstorm blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website, argued (and poorly) that Black Studies as a discipline should disappear; her argument was based solely on brief descriptions of three dissertations by three PhD candidates from Northwestern University’s first cohort of Black Studies doctoral program, as seen in an earlier article in The Chronicle. (On May 7, 2012 Brainstorm Editor Liz McMillen posted a note to readers stating that Schaefer Riley had been fired from the blog.) I am not going to argue with Schaefer Riley because several have already argued with her post better than I ever could (for example, Tressie MC‘s guest post on fellow University of Venus blogger Lee Skallerup‘s IHE blog College Ready Writing). However, the kerfuffle that ensued online in response to Schaefer Riley’s post hit close to home and made me think about my role as an academic who blogs.

Schaefer Riley is not an academic blogger, but many of the people blogging at The Chronicle of Higher Education and here at Inside Higher Ed (for example) are academics who blog and who, more importantly, see blogging as a worthwhile endeavor. We invest a lot of time and effort into what we do–for many of us, the care and attention we put into each of our blog posts reflects the attentiveness we have within our own research as a whole, and by extension reflects perhaps our training as scholars. (See Profhacker editors’ post on the ethics of academic blogging in response to the Schaefer Riley posts and the response from “Brainstorm” editors) When Chronicle Content Promotion Amy Alexander told Tressie Mc in a Twitter exchange that their bloggers, although published on The Chronicle’s website, are independent from The Chronicle (which she also sees as “not of” academia), that made me stop and think. Although it is true that blogs within The Chronicle and within IHE are overseen by individual blog editors, as academics and bloggers we should still be mindful of the importance of well-written prose to convey a point. My experience working with other academic bloggers is that none of us simply get on a soap box and let go whatever is on our mind. Blogging is different from journalism (to a certain extent) and is different from academic journals, but it still holds its own as a forum for ideas and for “civil discourse” among academics, like the Profhacker post argues.

Therefore, as I watched the debacle about Schaefer Riley’s post and Amy Alexander’s exchange with Tressie Mc days after NSR’s post went live, I thought to myself, how does this make other bloggers look? How does this affect our legitimacy? The online response to Schaefer Riley reminded me that our legitimacy lies in our writing: in our laptops, in our pens, in our smartphones. As Rohan Maitzen argues in her post on academic blogging, blogging is a way of continuing the conversations that are so important to keeping our fields and research alive. However, when she posits in her post “why should we blog?” it made me think about my concerns for academic minority scholars. Amidst the flurry of tweets about Schaefer Riley’s post, this tweet by Howard Rambsey II came across my feed: “Interesting: a negative blog entry about black studies solidifies my sense that we need more blogging from black studies scholars.” I knew that I was not alone in my concerns.

The post and the response that ensued afterwards reminded me of the importance of making the voices of minority scholars heard and, in a broader sense, the importance of writing as a way of making those voices heard and engaging detractors and supporters. The emergence of many minority academic programs and departments (African American Studies, Latino/a Studies, Women’s Studies, for example) is connected to a desire to make visible to others not just the work but also the culture of certain segments of the population that have been ignored, undervalued, oppressed. For minority scholars such as myself, blogging is not just a bullet point for a CV; it is an intrinsic part of what my research is about: a commitment to making the struggles and achievements and contradictions of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Latin@s, Women visible to a broader population. I cannot afford silence. Blogging allows me a platform to talk about issues that may go unnoticed, or issues where the point of view of a person of color or of a woman have been left in the cold. Because it happens. A lot. Let us not forget that Tressie Mc’s post in response to Schaefer Riley first appeared on her blog.

Minority academics who blog must, now more than ever, be aware of how important it is to articulate their ideas and their knowledge outside of our departments, our journals, our conferences. Blogging is a space in which we can do that. Many are already doing it, but that does not mean we do not need more voices participating in the conversations.We must make our voices heard, especially when others do not want to hear us.

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Dissertation, Higher Education

Eight Years Later

In Liana's Posts on 2012/04/15 at 21:28

Liana Silva, writing from Kansas City, Kansas in the US.

As I work on the last revisions to my dissertation (by the time this post goes live I will have mailed my dissertation draft to my committee), I oftentimes find myself thinking back to the long road that brought me to this moment. Eight years ago, around this time of year, I was accepted at an upstate New York university for my Master’s degree, and I knew this move would change me forever. In the summer of 2004, I would leave my little island, move to a town a few hours away from New York City, and spend the next five years reading, writing, and thinking deep thoughts in hopes of achieving a PhD in English.

One of the moments that remains vivid to me is one very cold Upstate New York day, over three years ago. I was writing my final PhD exam, on Cultural Studies. In my department we have 72 hours to write between 25 and 35 pages on a topic stemming from a list of readings. I had done all the reading, assembled all of my notes on my desktop, and spent that weekend typing feverishly for hours on end. I woke up early Saturday morning, day two of my exam weekend; it was cold outside but the strong wind made the temperature drop further, and our apartment was poorly heated. The corner where my desk was located was the coldest in the house, so I relocated to the living room couch to be closer to the radiator. My boyfriend was not up yet, so I had the couch all to myself. I propped my feet up on the ottoman, pulled a blanket onto my lap, and turned on my laptop. Still not fully awake, I wrote feverishly, and in between thoughts I stuck my hands under my blanket to warm them up. I wrote page after page after page that weekend. On Sunday evening, I exclaimed to my boyfriend that I had finished my draft (12 hours before it was due).

That weekend stands out in my mind as a good example of what my experience as a graduate student had been up until that point. I had been a full-time graduate student with no other obligations other than going to class, writing, and teaching one semester per academic year. I had dedicated almost five years of my life to formulating (and complicating) questions. I read, I thought, I talked, I wrote. I had the privilege of devoting my days to nothing but studying literature and culture. Once I received, months later, the official notification that I was ABD (All But Dissertation), I was elated to know I had made it to the last stage of my graduate education.

The three years after I became ABD have not been easy; for one, I no longer have a fellowship that allows me to just read and write every day. I live in a different location from my home campus. I balance a lot more obligations than I did when I was solely studying. Distance and time have provided me with some much-needed perspective on my experience as a Latina first-generation graduate student. (I have touched upon this in the cross-blog conversation that U Venus contributor Janni Aragon and I have had at each other’s blogs titled “Academics on Academia.”) However, I am certain that this is where I wanted to be. Even though it took me a little longer than I wanted to, and even though there were moments I was unsure I would make it to the other side, I am happy that I stayed the course and made it this far.

Even though graduate school may be problematic, graduate school nurtured my intellectual curiosity, and introduced me to great minds. Is it the only place where I could have done this? No, it is not. However, I felt at home in graduate school. Grad school and I were a nice fit. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to read and write at my leisure and share my thoughts with others. My experience as a humanities PhD has affected how I approach and think about the world around me.

Achieving this hard-fought goal means so much on an intellectual and emotional level, and as such moving on will be a tough transition. The well-worn question stands true: where do we go from here? I, for one, am looking forward to it.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Higher Education, Networking

Networking aka Getting Outside the Comfort Zone

In Liana's Posts on 2012/01/25 at 01:15

Liana Silva, writing from Kansas City, Kansas in the US.

This semester I signed up for the University of Venus Networking Challenge. The challenge asked readers to reach outside of their departments and meet people in other disciplines, in other institutions, and/or in other countries. Because of my current employment position, I find myself getting in touch with a lot of people from other departments. Thus, I thought it would be unfair to count that as part of the challenge. However, the U Venus challenge prompted me to think about my interactions with faculty and staff from other schools and offices differently.

As a teaching assistant and a graduate student, I met people mostly through classes or meetings. If we were taking a class together or worked for the same professor, chances are that we would eventually get to know each other. However, unless your department is an interdisciplinary one, or unless you work outside of the department or have connections with people outside of campus, it is possible that your experience as a graduate student is limited to the footprint of the school—and perhaps only to your department floor. In my case, I knew few people outside of campus until I met my significant other.

Once I was done with coursework, my interactions with my peers were even more limited. Field exams required me to immerse myself in reading, and the dissertation research was no different. Every new semester brought new students while old friends moved away. If I went to a department function I knew few of the students, and without the commonalities of sharing an office or taking classes together, we had little to go by—it got to the point where I had trouble remembering classes when new students would ask me about a professor. Hence, I retreated into my academic shell.

Adjunct teaching was no different; we all taught at different times and had different obligations that kept us away from the office. During that year I was an adjunct, I got to know well two other adjuncts in addition to two faculty members, and the only reason this happened was because we all spent so much time in the office. I would prep for my classes, then I would work on my dissertation, then I would pick up my daughter and drive home. However, this was not the case for most adjuncts.
These stories are not uncommon. We have been warned that our disciplines have become silos, and even with Twitter we might run the risk of listening only to the voices that sound like us or that think like us. It’s easy to follow someone on twitter, but how often do we follow someone from a different discipline or from a different career path?

In my new home town I have felt the urge to reach out and meet other fellow academics in part because I needed the scholarly interaction; the dissertation can become a black hole where you hear only yourself and forget what other voices sound like. In reaching out I have met some wonderful people from different universities (fortunately I live in a city that contains over a dozen universities and colleges within an hour of the city center), and this even helped me find my current job.

As part of the UVenus Challenge, I resolved not just to reach out to other academics but to keep alive the connections I already had. I made lunch appointments, I attended the TEDXWomen live streaming event in Kansas City, heard Gloria Steinem speak at UMKC—a highlight of my semester—and handed out my business card. (To think, I had to remind myself to hand out business cards! Something I had never done before.) But in the spirit of the challenge I pulled my gutsiest move yet: I contacted a Latino/Latina studies scholar whose work I admired and and who teaches where I work. We met for coffee in her office and talked about graduate school, my work, and academic writing. As I sat there, talking about my research and about the process of academic writing in general, I felt like I was shedding my graduate student shell.

As graduate students we immerse ourselves in our departments, and the deeper we go into our research, the less likely we are to connect with others. Making friends as an adult is hard enough without adding the layer of academia. It was not until I moved away from my school to a big city where I knew no one that I really reached out to people across departments and outside of my university. It gave me a real appreciation for the work others do at the same time that I developed new friendships and connections.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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Writing

I Write, You Write, We All Write

In Liana's Posts on 2011/11/07 at 09:32

Liana Silva, writing from Kansas City, Kansas in the US.

Thursday, October 20th, was the National Day on Writing created by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). In order to celebrate this day, programs like the National Writing Project asked readers to share why they write. On Twitter, this took shape in the #whyiwrite hashtag, with plenty of people posting in 140 characters or less reasons why they write. I participated in the celebration by tweeting, and encouraged others to post as well. However, among the tweets I read, I didn’t see any that said “I write because I am a writer.” We often think of ourselves as people who write (as in, who perform the act of writing). But how often do we — particularly academics — think of ourselves as writers?

Back when I taught first-year writing, I used to start the semester out with the question “What is a writer?” (I must admit I didn’t come up with this brilliant idea, but adapted it from a suggestion from another instructor.) Students would always come up with different ideas about what that meant, but more often than not they never talked about themselves as writers. They thought of published authors as writers. They thought of people who sat in a sunlit room all day with a stack of white pages (or who sat in front of a computer all day) as writers. They thought of people who are paid to write as writers. My students often did not think of themselves, or their instructors, as writers.

I don’t blame them. I didn ‘t fully embrace my identity as a writer until only recently, even though it’s one of the reasons I ended up as an English major. So that first week I liked to open the door to that possibility and, hopefully, change for better their relationship to writing.

At my new job I talk to students, faculty, and staff about writing on a regular basis. I enjoy talking about writing and, specifically, how important it is within higher education as a form of communication with our peers and with a community at large who is interested in what we do within our disciplines. Talking about writing comes natural to me, but through my job I realize that many see writing as something they must do but not as something they are. They think of themselves as people who commit the act of putting ideas down in the shape of words (especially for PhD students who need to write a dissertation in order to graduate, writing can become a chore, a job), but they often don’t think of themselves as writers.

I tell students on a regular basis that writing isn’t only important because they need to graduate or pass a class but because it is the key to engaging other scholars in conversation. Even in informal media like Twitter or Facebook we write to get our ideas across or to interact with other academics. And even though we can argue that academic writing is not the same as tweeting, the rules of engagement are similar: we value clear, well-argued writing in each case. We value thoughts that are well articulated. We value creative, interesting posts that steer away from the clichés. Therefore, I think the most important advice I can share with my writers is this: think of yourselves as writers.

Why does thinking of yourself as a writer matter? When academics have to balance so many other roles and responsibilities, why add “writer” to the list? I believe that thinking of yourself as a writer can change the way you feel about writing in general, and this is especially important in the culture of “publish or perish.”

Rachel Toor mentions in her article at The Chronicle of Higher Education how thinking as a writer leads you to think about form as well as content; Rachel Cayley at the blog Explorations of Style talks about how it changes your writing strategies. But I argue that, for academics, it can also affect your relationship to writing for your profession. When you think about the importance of writing in order to engage conversations in your field, writing becomes less tedious, more useful. You don’t find time to write; you make time to write. For writers, writing is essential in order to think. The act of writing doesn’t get easier, but it can feel a lot more organic.

Readers, do you think of yourself as a writer? Why or why not?

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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How Do You Define An Academic?

In Liana's Posts on 2011/08/20 at 02:53

Liana Silva, writing from Kansas City, Kansas in the US.

Last May, I left my teaching position without a job prospect in sight. It was a gamble, I admit; at the time I had interviewed for jobs, but I hadn’t heard from anyone yet. As far as I was concerned, I was unemployed as soon as I submitted my final grades and received my final paycheck via direct deposit. (I blogged about it at University of Venus).

As I searched for jobs and dug deep into my brain to figure out what my options were (and worked steadily on finishing Chapter 2 of my dissertation), I thought a lot about that realization I discussed in my last post: I am a writer. I was dedicating more time to writing, and I don’t mean solely dissertation writing. I applied for freelance writing gigs, and started a blog to keep the creative/intellectual energy flowing. Even though being unemployed was scary and frustrating, I had time to write. I was trying to figure out what else I could do other than teach, and I always came back to writing.

Looking for jobs was frustrating and liberating. For the first time in a while I had the chance to think about what jobs I wanted to apply for and what was meaningful to me in a job. I thought I didn’t have a chance at a well-paying teaching position with benefits, not without my Ph.D. in hand, so I didn’t feel limited to those jobs. I didn’t feel anymore like those were the only jobs I should be looking at. And so I kept on looking for jobs where I could use my writing skills.

It’s not that I didn’t write on a regular basis. I am, after all, working on my dissertation. But academic writing (in the guise of my dissertation) consumed my writing life. Because I thought about my dissertation all the time, I felt frustrated. But the worst part was that working on my dissertation had made me doubt my abilities as a writer, at least in the initial phases.

On the other hand, blogging has helped me find again that confidence in my skills. I flesh out my ideas. I tweak, copy, and revise each blog post. I obsess over sentences until they sound right. I’m always thinking about blog topics–some related to my research, others not so much. It has helped even with my own dissertation writing: I write at night, and in the morning I come back to my dissertation ready to hunker down and work.

However, I can’t shake the feeling that perhaps my blog stands in contrast to my academic persona. Even though my posts have a certain measure of intellectual thought—I strive to present complex ideas in a way a broader readership can grasp—they don’t feel academic-y. Smart? Sure. Insightful? I think so. Traditionally academic? Not quite. And I struggled with this. As I read Lee Skallerup Bessette’s fantastic blog series this summer on being a bad female academic, I thought: am I a bad female academic? Am I an academic at all if I’m not in the classroom?

Blogging has prompted me to reflect upon what it means to be an academic. If Lee responded to stereotypes of female academics, my position as an ex-instructor made me think even further. Is academia the only sanctioned space to pursue intellectual inquiry? (Ta-Nehisi Coates touched upon this in a post for The Atlantic last month.) Do I have to be in higher ed to be an academic? And what happens to all this thinking going on in my brain? It needs an outlet, right?

For now, I continue to blog twice a week. Writing feels right. I have yet to figure out where my blog fits on the spectrum of academic blogging, if at all. Maybe it won’t matter. I will continue to think deep thoughts and pursue those lines of inquiry to wherever they may take me. I will continue to write and share with whoever wants to read.

This post was also published at Inside Higher Ed.

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