The Trojan Horse

3.10.2005
I'm at a conference on the relationship between American Studies and "Ethnic" Studies, George Lipsitz is talking, later in the conference Robin Kelley will also talk, and I have no idea that I am in the presence of extreme greatness, I'm sitting in the back, worrying about my thesis and feeling for the first time in months like I could be an academic, like there was something worthwhile to the whole enterprise. These folks have figured out some things that I haven't. The conference was held in a room at ELAC that is pretentious to the nines -- painted a historical color with historical plaques, and captain's chairs. I take copious notes when I listen to people speak, I can't help it. I have to, part of them are snippets of things they say, some of them are questions I ask myself as they speak. Later I go back to those cramped sheets and pull things out of them. From that Lipsitz talk I remember him saying that you shouldn't do your scholarship out of habit lest it become like scandinavian cooking. I remember him saying that there are serious people everywhere thinking about hard issues and the task of a radical scholar was to make our work like a Trojan horse, to carry with you all of those people who don't have access to places like ELAC and then to open it up and give them a voice. It was after this conference that I really started to think about where I would want to fit into academia in a real way and asked myself really hard questions about that space.

3.15.5
I'm writing in my journal for my senior seminar for Women's and Gender Studies, it's part reaction to the conference, part reaction to a class discussion -- recreated here.

Last week in class S. and I talked optimistically about taking economic theory and radically infusing it with a sense of the value of caregiving/mothering. H. rose the issue that maybe we don't want to marketize everything and maybe this feeds right back into the system. I still agree with my previous statemet that true change can be achieved through invading the system/status quo; but the ways in which these are possible is highly circumscribed. you have to use data that is out there, you have to build on previous studies and write the way that everyone else writes - stupid peer review. It's not really unlike the way that legal reform will never really be radical because it depends on stare decisis and precedent.

There are two sets of reasons for these rules. One is to prevent the deconsolidation of power. The other is to have a code and language that is intelligble. (Not that the language reason is disconnected from the power one). I digress. How do I hold onto my previous idea? This past weekend at the conference, Lipsitz talked about our ability, as people who make it into the academcy to have our work be a Trojan horse for every serious thinking person we come across who doesn't have access.

I agree with this while also acknowledging that there are real ways that this invasion is more challenging in the discipline of Economics. That suburban lawn is particularly dense, coated with extra layers of pesiticide. Can I be a different kind of Trojan horse? There are fields that have a traditional connection with liberation struggles and radical political actions, like ethnic studies, I have never head of any Econ student/faculty ever hunger-striking for anything. Economics, for the purpose of this metaphor, is the inner citadel. I'm in that citadel. I am bi-lingual. I'm there, not by mistake (as it sometimes feels), but because at some point that was a strategic choice I made. I just didn't know what I would do once I was where I am.

So, back to the Trojan horse, and smuggling more generally. Can I smuggle things out, can I take what I know and translate and reconfigure and produce it on the liminal? Is that possible?

5.21.6
DreamJob is as a lowly-research-thing in academia. I have my second interview in T minus 33 hours, and I want this job, so bad. When I heard Lipsitz talk last March, and wrote about it for class, I believed in the Trojan Horse idea, and I believed that there were serious people navigating their lives in every community and doing that with grace and some analytical skills. I know it now in a way I didn't before, and if I never leave academia again I'll be happy to have had the realness of this year of shitty non-profit job. Further I find myself in a similar place that I was in last year. As a lowly research thing, my ability to translate and smuggle will be limited. When I think about academia I keep putting off smuggling until I've gotten my degree, until I've gotten tenure, and by then I might have forgotten what I was supposed to be smuggling in the first place, and to whom.

Like most things posted here, I have no answers, it's just something I'm mulling over as I try to fall asleep.

In other news:
--My window is open and fresh spring air is coming into my window, I can smell rain and I think I can even smell the leaves growing on the trees.
--I miss TP terribly because hir phone is kerflunk and may not be resurrected for some time; on the other hand we are seeing each other in 10 days.
--Room L. and I finally put up a shelf in the kitchen that we've been talking about putting up for ages... like since we moved in.