The Change is in the Work: Transgressing Bureaucratic Violence through Spaces of Possibility
By Erica Kohl-Arenas, Faculty Director of Imagining America, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of California, Davis
March 26th, 2023
“Those institutions that are rich in resources, that are rich in physical and intellectual resources, rich in opportunities. They should be the places in which transformations of our society are emanating from. And they're not. They are the places where dreams and ideas go to die. And that's unfortunate . . . at some level, it's criminal.”- Interview with Carlton Turner, Mississippi Center for Cultural Production, 2022
Image by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
Almost five years ago I sat with a foundation program officer from the Mellon Foundation who asked me what Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA) was doing to help academic institutions better support public scholarship, and what had changed since IA’s groundbreaking report Scholarship in Public (2008). For almost 25 years IA has been a leading thinker and doer in the space of holding academic institutions accountable to stated missions to serve the public good. This work was perhaps most visible through the work of Julie Ellison and Timothy Eatman, then IA Faculty Director and Research Director respectively, in their groundbreaking report Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University (2008), which made the case that deeply collaborative community-engaged work in the arts, design, and humanities could be rigorous, excellent, and impactful. The report was not only used by scholars, artists and graduate students to advocate for their own advancement, but was also an organizing tool among campus change makers across the country. Over a decade after the publication of Scholarship in Public much has changed, and much remains the same. With three years of Mellon funding, I set out on a new investigation with my colleague Kal Alston, IA board chair, and research associate, Christina Preston to answer those questions asked by Mellon in 2018.
In this brief blog post I describe what we discovered. A longer story about this project would include greater detail from the decolonial, relational, feminist, disruptive and creative projects that we were lucky to learn from over the past few years. At the most basic level, in a three-year research project funded by the Mellon Foundation, a diverse inter-generational team of Imagining America (IA) researchers found that very few people have faith in institutional change from the top, led by administrators or central campus offices. Instead, we found that public, engaged, activist scholars, artists, designers and organizers lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking and longstanding collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research and creative practice. In other words, the work itself creates the change, not unexecuted promises to reform systems not designed to recognize knowers and doers outside of the academy. Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, we learned how public and activist scholars have historically and consistently forged alliances and conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. And that the very methods, practices, ethics, and relationships engaged change the spaces in which they work and the people involved, pushing academic culture change outwards in concentric circles as students, peers, partners, and allies gather together across university-community lines.
We also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. By favoring narrow disciplinary boundaries and norms and individualized methods over collective commitments and reciprocal partnerships, most institutions marginalize public scholarship through outdated reward systems and bureaucratic obstacles. In our first round of interviews we selected 22 nationally known (anonymized) individuals celebrated for their work on supporting public scholarship from high level institutional perches. We interviewed university presidents, provosts, deans, center directors, and association presidents. Strikingly, it was this group of individuals who initially shared that institutions of higher education are slow moving organizations, designed to resist change. Some described them as archaic, feudal bureaucracies, reliant on outdated hierarchical modes of organizing. Others more stridently asserted that colleges and universities are racial capitalist machines, designed to maintain the status quo beyond their own institutional walls through mobility tropes and market economies that reward a limited range of ‘experts’ and exclude those who do not contribute to the business bottom line. This analysis was not new to us, given our own experiences and the wide range of literature on the topic. In line with what was shared in our research is a growing field of study sometimes termed Critical University Studies (Boggs and Mitchell 2018) that asks the university and its people to reckon with histories of dispossession, such as higher education’s entanglement with an enduring legacy of slavery (Williams, Squire and Tuitt, 2021), colonization (Patel 2005), theft of land from Indigenous peoples (Lee and Ahtone 2020), gentrification and displacement (Baldwin 2021), ongoing relationship with the production of war (Maira 2018), and the shifting of debt onto students and families (Martin and Dwyer 2021). What surprised us was that these assessments came from campus leaders.
A significant number of respondents in this first group of interviewees also believed that the most transformative work, as well as the accompanying challenges, takes place at the critical intersections where scholars of color, and those from other traditionally marginalized backgrounds, are radically expanding how we understand research and who is considered a producer of knowledge. In academic institutions, as George Sanchez has noted in IA’s 2004 Foreseeable Futures publication, “faculty of color experience a more difficult context where they are pulled between the commitments to communities of color almost all bring with them to the academy and the departmental culture which tells them, either directly or mostly indirectly, to abandon those ties or risk professional suicide.” This is especially true for faculty whose public scholarship involves deep engagement with movements, community stakeholders and pressing regional issues. These critical intersections are also where research innovations are born, drawing upon longstanding relational, reflective, and reciprocal community-based practices and principles.
For the second round of interviews we identified 27 scholars and artists with evidence of highly impactful public, engaged and activist work, as well as a handful of community-based culture keepers with longstanding relationships with academic institutions. Our graduate scholar research team interviewed over 50 next gen public graduate scholars. A majority of these interviewees were women of color and / or BIPOC identified, working in close partnership with communities and movements outside of academic institutions. Through this second round of interviews, we learned that out of necessity and brilliance, scholars at these critical intersections have created centers and institutes, cultures of peer support and mentorship, models for careful engaged research and artmaking accountable to those most impacted, innovations in pedagogy and mentorship, new approaches to ethical peer and institutional review, and new forms of public programming and scholarly production. A growing body of scholarship confirms our finding that the work itself is the most promising space of change. Some even recognize how advancements in equity and social justice have been catalyzed and might be organized through academic institutions (Cann and DeMeulenaere 2020, hooks 1989, Hale 2008, Patel 2021, la paperson 2017, Lorgia Peña 2022, Sudbury and Okazawa Rey 2015, Valenzuela 2017). This approach requires that we simultaneously resist reifying academic institutions as inherently endowed with democratic valor while placing a high value on the power of public knowledge making and the university’s unique capacity to serve as a catalyst for change. Whether through the formation of new centers, revised policies and procedures, collaborative projects, movement alliances, and initiatives within and beyond the classroom, or through the ‘bolt holes and breathing spaces’ that ‘hotwire’ the system towards radical possibility (la paperson 2017), universities can be hopeful sites of grassroots democratic learning and action.
In keeping with this scholarship, the research team organized a call for Stories of Change case studies to provide evidence of projects that bridge university-community knowledge production and counter the histories of harm done by academic institutions referenced above. From projects that address racial justice issues on campus, to community based planning initiatives, to efforts to honor elders struggling with Alzheimer’s, to peer networks to recognize the wisdom of Filipina care workers, to prison arts programs, cross-border mural making, to a remote-access ‘crip nightlife’ project, to community-based environmental justice organizing, and many more, these Stories of Change sit alongside the moving stories told in our second round interviews as demonstrations of how the work itself changes the academy.
Of course, just as their work leads the way, it was disheartening to learn firsthand about the emotional and physical labor required of community and movement-aligned researchers (Fine 2017) and the urgent necessity to build peer support systems among scholars who embrace activist, engaged, and public approaches to research and artmaking. As is similarly told by Lorgia García Peña in Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color (2022) and Victoria Reyes in Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope (2022), we heard about how these spaces are especially critical for scholars from traditionally marginalized backgrounds who find themselves further challenged when choosing to engage in community-oriented research methods not understood or appreciated by traditional disciplinary gatekeepers. In our research with both faculty and graduate scholars, one commonly used way of describing these supportive institutional spaces is as an ‘undercommons’ (Harney and Moten 2013) where specifically activist and movement- aligned scholars build supportive relationships, collective power, and a safe space to produce radical research. Harney and Moten take the position that undercommons scholars experience a necessarily ‘fugitive’ relationship to the academy as they work in ‘marooned’ communities set up to avoid cooptation and control from the institutional center. Others who use the term ‘undercommons’ more loosely describe the many supportive hybrid spaces occupied by activist scholars (Patel and Buchanan 2019). Running through these perspectives is an analysis of power and marginalization along the intersections of race, class, gender, and ability, often with a focus on how efforts to institutionalize ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ fail to recognize the fundamental demands of engaged scholars of color, translating demands into moderate frameworks and leadership practices (Ferguson 2012).
Although there is much to celebrate which I look forward to sharing in a longer contribution, our research found that in the end the biggest obstacles to change is what I have come to term ‘bureaucratic violence’ presented in the everyday life of the academy. Most prominently, we heard about lack of resources and mentorship, a competitive peer culture, disciplinary gatekeepers, and bureaucratic challenges such as an inordinate amount of rules, forms, and levels of approvals built into the system to inhibit partnerships and resource sharing outside of academic institutions. The antidote to these sobering findings can be found in the inspiring stories told by the generous individuals, interviewed and the contributors to the Stories of Change project who despite these enduring challenges hot wire the university for radical change (la paperson 2017). These findings also remind us that while ‘the work’ is changing the culture of the academy from the inside out, we still need insider administrative brokers to disrupt business as usual to alter the policies and procedures that make the everyday life of academy so challenging for public, engaged, and activist scholars.
These findings are the result of the generous time and wisdom of all the people we interviewed and engaged, and my research partners Kal Alston and Christina Preston. I also thank Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana and Alana Haynes Stein whose research helped us to better understand the challenges and opportunities of engaged graduate scholars at UC Davis. Similarly, Gale Greenlee and D. Romo conducted an in-depth study to understand the experiences of graduate scholars in IA’s Publicly Active Graduate Education program. You can read more about our work here.
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Erica Kohl-Arenas is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis and the national director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. Following early mentoring friendships with Myles Horton and Helen Lewis, both of the Highlander Center, Erica is a popular educator and scholar of grassroots community development and the radical imaginations and deferred dreams of social movements that become entangled with the politics of professionalization, institutionalization and philanthropy. Kohl-Arenas is the author of the book, The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty, (UC Press, 2016) and is currently working on a book about radical world building projects from the 1960s and today in rural California and beyond. She is the co-organizer of two action research projects, including one on transforming higher education to better support activist and public scholarship, and another on the reclamation of land and agriculture in building self-determined futures in rural Black Mississippi as a partner with the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture). A born and raised Californian, Erica enjoys rivers, wildflowers, the Pacific Ocean, redwoods, family, friends, and gardening.
Institutional Context: My institutional context is unique in that I am both a faculty member in a small American Studies department and an administrator of a national organization that reports to the Provost of my campus, UC Davis. I study the brokering politics of social movement leaders and philanthropic professionals and in my new role I am beginning to see similarities where I sit between public scholar and administrator.
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This entry is part of a Public Writing Project, Higher Education for the World We Need, co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Initial reflections in that writing project will be posted here, on the blog of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). The Collaborative is a multi-institutional community of practice, network, and movement hosted in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. The Collaborative advances ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.
The 2023 Collaborative Unconference will be hosted @ Lehigh University from June 7 to 9. See Reimagining the "Impact" in Impact-Focused Education for more information and affordable registration. Registration closes May 26.
Save the date for, Stepping into the Work: Expanding understanding of global positionality, responsibility, and opportunity, a Collaborative gathering in partnership with the Global Engagement in the Liberal Arts Consortium at Haverford College, immediately outside of Philadelphia, November 10 and 11, 2023.
References
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Buchanan, Blu, and Kush Patel. 2018. “Dodgy Scholars: Resisting the Neoliberal Academy.” Public: A Journal of Imagining America. https://public.imaginingamerica.org/blog/article/dodgy-scholars-resisting-the-neoliberal-academy/
Cann, Colette, and Eric DeMeulenaere (2020). The Activist Academic: Engaged Scholarship for Resistance, Hope and Social Change. Myers Education Press.
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