coldhearted scientist وداد

(This is for the recast of that paper.)

On the question of the interaction of academia and activism:

In my case, activism has been a parallel life that takes time away from academic work. It is a sacrifice I have accepted, although not with the peace Brittany Letiecq says she has.

(I also have much to say about how you need professional training, for Valeska’s reasons, and organizational stability, although maybe I err–perhaps one must be “fugitive” in Moten’s sense. You do need a lot of support)

Ideally, though, it can ground work and life–so you wake up with your mind stayed on freedom, as it was once said, and held in love. Yet it has taken me some time to see this because of the ways academia is informed AND the way this activism was informed (as charity and also as weak reform)

It has not transformed my research, that is to say, to the extent that any of the theory I use also applies to this, I would have found it without this (It did show me other fields I was more interested in, like law)

What it did clarify and in some ways transform was my politics (abolition means decolonize means demodernize; see Moten and others who point out that for abolition we’d have to abolish the world in which prisons are necessary [a point I’ve made about undocumented immigration, but that’s outside scope here] … otherwise, with reform, we’re actually helping the system in the way Moten says critical academics are)

And from there, my relationship to the university (see Moten again, on professionalization, university/prison, and other issues) … let me see if I can articulate this. The discomfort I have with it is Moten’s, and I always saw this as a deficiency or inappropriate excess, and felt bad about it … but one can use it

My thinking today was somehow along these lines. Putting it into words it seems more turgid; my mental image was of about three or four lines: opposition between academic work and activism, but theory from both finally coinciding; activism transforming politics; that transformation leading to understanding the division: both that it was real, very real, and that one needed to transform one’s idea of self to get past it.

A key element here is that academia means competitive individualism and the kind of self my political thinking, based in the experiential learning of activism, constructs is one that won’t participate in that.

Axé.