≈ Three Hundred Credit Hours
In the times I feel lost, disconnected, and/or weary from carrying tension in my body, I try to remember the calm cadence of Alice Walker’s voice – “it is one of the most difficult things in this world to be a free woman…and the most fun”. Some may say that to be a free woman is a personal goal, an admirable lifelong aspiration, but to be a free woman also undergirds the professional career I envision for myself.
The work I aspire to do in the field of education entails transforming the classroom into a living laboratory. The type of pedagogue I hope to be is deeply invested in the idea that education is a space built on possibilities – a place to experiment with the vibrato of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’s (BIPOC) voices, the fullness of our bodies when revered as a reliquary of living memory, the steeliness of a backbone turned upright in Melissa Harris Perry’s crooked room(s), and to own the pleasure of refusal in the face of racist deficits and oppressive stereotypes. To be a free woman, as a person and as an educator, means engaging in a constant reflexive turn towards accountability. Why am I doing this work? Who and what am I committed to? How can I do this work in the most ethical way? And whose language rolls off my tongue and onto the page when I forgo objectivity to tell the truth?
my favorite picture of Alice Walker - young, joyful, and free.
As an emerging scholar, I, too, am experimenting. I delve my hands in uncertainty and learn from experts in the field. They are luminaries with collated CVs, sensuous storytellers sprawled on concrete patios, ancestors reaching across the plane, pushed out students with defiance in their brow, and the fire of resistance nestled in the history of the land I/we occupy. To be a free woman is not a lofty goal, nor is it intangible. It is an everyday practice of fine tuning the sharpness of strength in my voice, refusal of who/what I am expected to be in order to reach the graduation stage, assertion that the self is a source of knowledge, and (re)membering that one’s scholarly identity is not the sum total of our lives.
I want to write a dissertation that I am proud of – to interrogate the depths of my inquiry and speak with and alongside Black women instead of appealing to the institution. I want to engage in work – organizing and academic – that is accountable to my participants, sistren, and communities. I want to weaponize epistemological and ontological frameworks to excoriate the rationale behind my/our exploitation. I want to contribute to the rich and vibrant stories of survival, moving beyond dichotomous representations of power, decolonial refusal, reclaiming of knowledge situated outside of school systems, Pleasure Activism (adrienne maree brown), and classrooms as a site of ecstasy and discovery embedded in the disciplines of education and women and gender studies.
In these past two years, I spent over an estimated three hundred hours Confronting Authority (Derrick Bell), tracing the beginnings of perceived educational achievement gaps, and located myself on academic plantations. I underlined quotes from texts gifted to be on Blackboard, wove threads of curiosity in code maps, circumvented whispers of respectability, and I stopped searching for neatly constructed answers and began to mold new questions. I asked for help, shed countless tears in office hours and the Tom Green room, and forged a network of support and guidance that felt like a compass when I was lost. I felt emboldened by the critical activation of my agency as an integral element of intellectual work and reframed mistakes as cherished lessons.
In short, I embraced the mess – finding excitement in my frustrations and inspiration in the struggle of breaking epistemic and emotional strangleholds wrapped around my throat, and my pen. When asked about my personal, academic, and professional goals, they are one and the same. I want to be a free woman and a possibility model for others standing alongside me and those who will come after me. I want to be a free woman – as I [Live] a Feminist Life (Sara Ahmed), in building on the long tradition of radical pedagogues reshaping our classrooms, in my praxis as a scholar activist, and in the space between the pen and the page.
