“GETTING A PHD IN <s>WOMEN’S STUDIES</s> AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, 2016-XXXX”
An edited transcript of remarks presented in defense of the dissertation, Maintenance Art for Other Possible Worlds: Rehearsing a Pedagogy of Care, delivered on May 16th, 2023 on zoom. Click here to view accompanying slides.
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[slide 2 - The shared screen displays an image: NOTICE is written in red marker on a piece of cardboard in the center of the frame. It’s out of focus, cast in mottled sunlight. Two flaps from a compostable takeout container are arranged at angles, TIME is written on one and the other is unreadable in the glare of the light. Other letters are scattered around the edges of the scene.]
Thank you all so much for being here with me today – I am especially grateful for Julia and Gwen and the workers who have made this convening possible; my committee for their willingness to engage with me and my project; my family and all my comrades/playmates/chevruta/teachers of radical friendship who have supported me along the way; and my students, from whom I am always learning.
Before we get going, a few access announcements: you can turn on closed captions by going to the zoom toolbar, clicking the carrot next to “Captions” and opting to “View,” and I will put the link to the presentation text in the chat. https://go.umd.edu/EP_DissertationAutogeography
You might take a moment now to make any changes you need in order to be more comfortable and present – do you need some water, or a different writing utensil? To give an animal companion some attention or stretch your shoulders? Throughout, I will describe the images on the screen, so you can close your eyes or look away and have an aural experience at any time. No change is too small if it makes a difference for you.
[slide 3 - The image on the shared screen zooms out slightly and more becomes visible: it’s now clear that the word-pieces are laid out over a deconstructed brown paper bag from Value Village. The word SENSUOUSNESS is clumped in the middle of the frame, surrounded twice – first by the unreadable word, SPACE, TIME, and BODY; and then by NOTICE, APPRECIATE, QUESTIONS, and another unreadable word. Two arrows point in perpendicular directions, like hands on a clock. An agenda is written in the top left corner with four items: Pause, arrive at presence; The Dissertation – What Is It?; NAQR Technique; Relational feedback.]
The work I am sharing with you today centers embodied and enacted knowledge, so my intention here is to provide a felt experience of the project and a context for making sense of it with me. The dissertation has an unconventional structure, so following the logic of the text involves a bit of disorientation. To make sure we enter the fray attuned to our individual and collective wellbeing, we’ll start by grounding in the present moment, including words from a special guest student leader, which will take about 13 minutes. Then I’ll spend about 10 minutes describing the dissertation text itself, and finally, I’ll end with a brief elaboration of a feedback technique I’ve developed through the project that I hope will guide us gently into the Q&A. The work is intended to be multivocal, center student wisdom, and function as an opportunity to care for our bodyminds as we learn.
[slide 4 - the shared image centers on SPACE]
I’m broadcasting from a watershed called WENNANEC by SENĆOŦEN speaking people, Xwaaqw’um by HUL'Q'UMI'NUM' speaking people, and Saltspring Island by the state of Canada. If you feel comfortable, I would love to know where you are all tuning in from, if you want to put a description or a place name in the chat—I love imagining everyone beaming like little bursts of light from different pinpoints all over the map, and it helps give a sense of the multidimensional space we’re creating here together in this zoom room. We are each somewhere and elsewhere, situated and dispersed, sharing this experience in both synchronous and asynchronous ways. As the distribution of our sensibilities is continually rearranged by our White Supremacist Christian Nationalist Capitalist Colonial Climate Crisis Multiple Pandemic contemporary moment, may the act of naming our location and acknowledging the land serve to anchor and fortify our capacity for relating to one another with radical care.
[slide 5 - the image shifts to center TIME.]
Now, I am honored to pass the mic to Ahlam, here on behalf of Students for Justice in Palestine, to share with us about the significance of this moment on the clock of the world, as Grace Lee Boggs named the time for growing our souls, in which we are all living.
Good afternoon. My name is Ahlam and I am a Palestinian organizer who has been working towards Palestinian liberation for the past four years at the University of Maryland as part of Students for Justice in Palestine and more broadly in the DMV for the past two years as part of Maryland2Palestine, a grassroots abolitionist org. First of all, I would like to congratulate Eva on completing her dissertation and also thank them for opening the floor for me to talk about Palestine especially in this moment.
As some of you may know, we are currently in the period of commemorating the 75th anniversary of what Palestinians refer to as the “Nakba” or catastrophe. This event, recognized as the official beginning of the Zionist state when over 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homelands, did not end in 1948 but rather has continued every single day since then. Al nakba continues when the Zionist entity steals land in Masafer Yatta and declares it a ‘firing zone’ for their occupation military. Al nakba continues when the school in Jubbet al Dib is destroyed and all of the materials are stolen by occupation soldiers because any beacon of hope for Palestinians is a threat to their violent colonial state. Al nakba continues when children are walking around Jenin and Nablus with wills in their pockets, their mothers fearing that they will be the next to join the ever growing list of martyrs who have given their lives in hope that a future generation will grow up playing futbol instead of funeral. Al nakba continues every time a bomb made by Boeing and funded by US tax and tuition dollars is dropped on a home in Gaza, and every time a small child, like Tamim Daoud, dies of a panic attack because their little heart couldn’t take the stress and fear. Al nakba continues every time Palestinians in the diaspora are demonized for daring to call out our oppressors and to call for an end to the occupation that has terrorized our people for the last 75 years.
I would like to take this time to not only talk about the ways in which Palestinians have had their lives and dignity stolen from them but the ways in which Palestinians continue to teach life. Palestinian resistance is steadfast and powerful. It comes when mothers smuggle sperm out of prisons in order to raise the next generation of freedom fighters and when those same children grow up and give everything they have to advance the cause of freedom. Palestinian resistance exists when our people defend Masjid Al Aqsa from invading occupation forces and when they fight back with stones against one of the world’s strongest militaries. Palestinian resistance comes in the form of passing down our cultural foods and refusing to let anyone else claim it as theirs, from continuing to design and wear thobes, and from teaching dabke at cultural events to keep our heritage alive. Resistance is in the diaspora when we call out our universities for inviting Zionist speakers and when we push Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions campaigns on campuses to hold our institutions accountable for what they do with our money. Palestinian resistance comes in many different forms and all of it is justified. Palestinians don’t need permission to shake off our oppressors. We have resisted for the last 75 years and will continue to resist until all Palestinians can return to their homelands from the river to the sea.
- Ahlam Majadly
Thank you so much for your time and presence here, Ahlam, and for sharing these Palestinian life teachings with us – I’m grateful to participate in diasporic resistance with you, and I know your words will be ringing in our ears as we imagine liberation from the river to the sea.
[slide 6 - now the image centers on BODY.]
For me, it’s imperative to publicly remember this ongoing catastrophe now and at every opportunity because dominant narratives, resource streams, governments and more continue to maintain the legitimacy of the Israeli apartheid state, and increasingly, efforts to counter antisemitic violence in the diaspora conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism, erasing and endangering Palestinians. This is especially important to the present context because my dissertation begins and ends with Tikkun Olam, or “Repair of the World” – a Jewish mystical origin story that describes the moment of creation as an accidental shattering of divine substance/wholeness. In the story, because the world is already broken in the instance of its creation, it’s our human responsibility to seek out and care for the fragments of divinity we find in our everyday lives in order to repair the world. This story is very deeply baked into the Jewish psyche. In a Zionist imagination, it can justify the need for the nation-state as the ultimate restoration of these fragments (figured as exclusively Jewish); it can lead to nihilistic claims that everything is broken anyway so why try to change it; and in liberal contexts, the story is often taken up in the name of social justice while explicitly ignoring or minimizing Zionist – that is Jewish supremacist – violence. I see another possibility, that at this moment in time, the Jewish responsibility to repair begins with a commitment to Palestinian liberation, and extends to dismantling the military industrial complex and all eschatological ideologies that maintain oppression, extraction, and dispossession everywhere. So it’s necessary to start our proceedings with recognition of the Nakba as the very real and relentless shattering of life that is at stake in (mis)understanding this story.
As we pause and take in this reality, we will each have a different somatic response – it might trigger feelings of despondency, fear, overwhelm, anger as the Nakba relates to our own lives or reminds us of other places marked by settler warfare and the violence of dispossession. May we stay present with the urgency of our care by returning to our senses. I invite everyone to take a moment and close your eyes if that’s comfortable, or let your gaze fall at the end of your nose so your visual field softens, and notice what color the light is under your eyelids – for me, it’s red, maybe for you it’s green, or blue black. If you don’t see a color, maybe you can imagine one. Notice how the shade changes as you move your head gently, exploring what movements bring ease to the back of your neck. If your jaw is clenched, can you relax it? As you move your head, how do you perceive the different qualities of light around you? Maybe as colors, or sensations of temperature, or some other unnameable quality of energy that alerts you to the textures of the field around you. When you’re ready, you might gently blink your eyes open and take in your visual field anew, which may feel totally different than it did just moments ago. As we transition into the description of the dissertation text, you might check in: do you need to make any adjustments to your current situation in order to stay present? Have a sip of water? Here – I’ll change into my bluelight blockers. *Changes glasses*
[slide 7 - the image travels over to a circle with a quote from Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “[Big, noisy] spectacles matter: we revolt because we cannot breathe, and people take to the streets in the effort to clear up the organized abandonment and organized violence that condense the weight of centuries. All true. And yet, because I’ve been nearsighted my entire life, I also think of spectacles as eyeglasses–lenses that sharpen focus onto small or blurry or distant details. In combination, these two kinds of spectacles support practical remedy, as instruments that help with vision–with the ability to see things we would miss without them.”]
As both a text and an enactment (and I’ll explain what I mean by that in a moment), this dissertation plays on the dichotomy of spectacle Gilmore illuminates here – in any project, there are stories of different scales happening at multiple registers throughout, ones we see and know, ones that sneak up on us or take us by surprise. Methodologically, my project has embraced this tendency and unfolded fractally – following a small pattern as it repeats and recombines to create a bigger picture. The conceptual fractal from which this dissertation emerges: UNSETTLING, DWELL, MEANWHILE, SENSUOUSNESS.
[slide 8 - we shift to a new circle with a quote from Mierle Laderman Ukeles: “Hasn’t it been art that can transform the meaning of material, re-invent identity, and rename the lost?”]
As I say in the project’s introduction, “I offer this dissertation as evidence of a framework for interdependent creative practice and care-oriented collaboration, the expression of a commitment to art as life, life as art. This work is intended to cultivate a visionary imagination through transformative learning, proposing counter-pedagogical moves for rehearsing a world beyond Liberal Enlightenment mythologies of thinking, knowing, and being which have us learning and relearning empire every semester.”
Following the model of artists such as Ukeles, as well as Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, and Linda Montano (to name a few of the project’s influences), I have approached the creation of the dissertation as a work of lifeart, integrating my creative and scholarly practices to study what is unfolding in my everyday experience of being trained as a PhD student. Like these artists, I am playing with instruction, duration, and placemaking to surface meaning in my daily student life through dogged attachment to a central question: How do I maintain my capacity to care for myself, my relations, and the living world we share? The emphasis here is on maintenance – the work it takes to keep things working, to keep things alive. Maintenance requires attention to the moment before breakdown – what habits, rituals, resources, routines, etc. render one ready to meet the disruption of disrepair that is maintenance’s companion? As I’ve endeavored to simultaneously disrupt and inhabit the dissertation as a formal/professional genre of knowledge production, the resultant “tectonic instability” (to reference Dr. Rowley’s work with Elora Chowdhury and Isis Nausair) has surfaced more questions about ableism, crip time, and how to manage interruptions (which are inevitable and which proliferate under conditions of increasing vulnerability and precarity) with skillful compassion and sensitivity to multisensory/asynchronous access. Speaking of which, I’m running out of time here! So I will quickly summarize the four chapters, and then hopefully we can unpack them more in the Q&A.
[slide 9 - Chapter 1: Art For Earthly Survival - An Unsettling Underpedagogy For Uncertain Times; Teaching and learning to show up to our creativity when it feels most impossible]
In this chapter, I describe how I approached teaching a hands-on, practice-based class, “Art For Earthly Survival,” in the Fall of 2020. I structured the class around values of belonging, difference, and sovereignty, and brought students through a series of creative exercises and activities to imagine and materialize more liveable worlds together at a time when that felt very difficult.
[slide 10 - Chapter 2: Maintenance and the Art of Feminist Dwelling; Sitting with maintenance as a contradiction of waste, value, and care]
In this chapter, I look at Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work in depth, thinking it through in conversation with a piece of my own. In the winter of 2018 (I believe), responding to my own deep anxiety about throwing anything away, I was busy making an installation in the department’s old offices in Woods Hall. Inspired by Ukeles’ 50 year long residency in the New York City Department of Sanitation, I replaced the department’s trash cans with this experimental waste transformation receptacle/ritual container. At the same time, a scurry of squirrels descended upon the office and began to tear things apart. Reflecting on the different impacts our interventions had, I consider the dynamics of enclosure and alienation that subtend institutional spaces.
[slide 11 - Chapter 3: Meanwhile (an interruption); the play within the play]
And then I let the squirrels take me – Meanwhile stages an interruption to the unfolding of the dissertation by getting caught up in storytelling and thinking about how maintenance orients attention to both the moment of breakdown and the moment before. Writing just after the celebration of Passover, thinking about Robin DG Kelley’s unpacking of the significance of the story of Exodus in the 19th and 20th century Black radical imagination in his book Freedom Dreams alongside Jill Hammer’s approach to Jewish dreamwork as a liberatory praxis, in this chapter I tell my own version of the events that lead up to the famous departure that we might all be more familiar with.
[slide 12 - Chapter 4: Dirty Judaical Sensuousness; or, How I Used Art to Shield Myself From Academic Professionalism and Failed Repeatedly; Resisting the visual with the image]
In the final chapter, I give myself over to the incomplete thought, the unfinished idea, the rumination, the rehearsal. Intentionally leaning into paradoxes of legibility and illegibility, this chapter assembles images from my writing/study process, embracing the embodied and self-referential mode to which Marx makes reference in his critique of Feuerbach’s conceptualization of materialism: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism–that of Feuerbach included–is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively…Hence, in the Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical form of appearance. Hence, he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary,’ of ‘pracitcal-critical,’ activity.”
After I submitted the text, revisiting it to prepare for this presentation, I realized that it makes one kind of sense if you start at the beginning and go to the end, and it makes a different kind of sense if you start at the end and go backwards – perhaps evidence of my Benjaminian tendency to turn away from the storm of progress to look at what's going on behind me. Somehow, I did this both on purpose and by accident. Art Magic! Chapter 2, which is the first piece that I wrote, functions as a kind of pivot – if you come at it one way, you are entering more from the art critical side and if you come at it the other way, you are arriving more from the art practical side. When I read any academic book I generally go forwards until something makes me pause, then I go back and re-read what led up to it. Then I go back further and re-read the front matter that I probably skipped, I go to the end and look at the end notes and index, and make my way backwards to where I stopped in the first place. That the dissertation text loosely follows that logic is probably because this has been a process of me learning to be my own primary reader.
[slide 13 - A TECHNIQUE: GIVING AND RECEIVING GENEROUS, GENERATIVE, AND LIFE-AFFIRMING FEEDBACK, and a quote from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson:
“We are remaking the whole world—at once in our most intimate and local places, and through our matrix of relationality with all living things and anti-colonial movements on the planet. A never-ending project, a practice, a way of living.”]
So we’ve finally arrived at the promised technique, in yet another four part fractal; Notice, Appreciate, Questions, Resonance. A brief rehearsal of the practice: reflect the ideas, images, figures, or gestures that you notice or that stand out to you; indicate/describe things you appreciate, things which have value to you or aspects of connection; illuminate what questions you hear at the center of the work, or what questions of your own you sense entangled in the work, or questions you have to better understand the work; and/or share any resonant works or riffs from your own collection that your experience of the text inspires.
Drawing on both Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process and Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic”, I offer this framework as a rubric, an articulated strategy for ethical practices of self-connection shared, a proposal for an erotic technique of radical intellectual friendship. I have tried to craft it like a spell for healing and disability justice, to protect and nurture the creative spirit that animates a radical imagination, where awe and fear are intimately linked at the level of the nervous system, beholden to timelines of healing, rather than timelines of capital and empire. On one level, this rubric is the accommodation that the office of disability services cannot imagine for my officially diagnosed with ADHD brain experiencing rejection sensitivity conditioned by a history of convoluted attachments to institutions and traditions of study, trying to stay connected to my inner knowing within a process of professionalization in the midst of many simultaneous pandemics (ie, what it takes for me to take care of myself, my family, my friends, my students, my companions while writing).
I have cultivated this protocol to protect my own vitality/capacity as I calibrate my discernment in navigating the terrain of academia, and it has proven very useful with my students to cultivate bodymindfulness/sensitivity/sensibility in how we share our creativity and learning in ways that center our embodied experiences of and needs for care. Sometimes I think about it as an ethics of transmission and translation, a response to media studies. A process of tuning into the frequency of Meanwhile. I invite you to use it right now now, or anytime it might help you make sense of a work in process. When you feel lost in the unfolding, return to your senses:
[slide 14 - Finally, the whole picture comes into view. What do you notice? What do you appreciate? What questions are arising? What threads of your own inquiry are resonating?]
Thank you, and I welcome your responses! You can raise your hand, put comments or questions in the chat, or simply unmute. All modes of participation are welcome.
Companion Playlists: