“Getting a PhD in Women’s Studies, 2016-XXX” takes shape in an interplay of four activations: Unsettling, Dwell, Meanwhile, Sensuousness. Simultaneously a durational performance, a participatory and invested institutional critique, a social practice research process, an exercise in lifeart, and a politics of bringing imagination into form through relations of language, “Getting a PhD…” took up the legacies of artists such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Linda Montano, and Adrian Piper to inhabit the graduate school training process as residency for the deep study of interdependent creative practice and care-oriented collaboration, and the possibilities that exist (or don’t) for such forces to flourish in (or in spite of) Academia.
At the center of the project are questions: what work is required to maintain the capacity to care for ourselves, our relations, and our planet? What histories, structures, and institutions of uncaring limit and condition my own ability to give and take care? How are justice, repair, and collective freedom interdependent upon the creation of a culture of care? What am I uniquely positioned to be able to contribute to the project of increasing cultural capacity for care, in my present context/circumstances?
Begun in the fall of 2016, the project culminated with the defense of my dissertation, Maintenance Art For Other Possible Worlds: Rehearsing a Pedagogy of Care in Spring 2023.
