Journal of Narrative Politics

Lee Aultman, B

  Vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 64-67  64    Exergue (or, The Politics of Memory)  B Lee Aultman1   The power of memory reproduces a politics of meaning. A fondness for words helps in this regard. Piecing together affective memory is a process not unlike writing. It creates densities of feeling through re-membering. Affective densities, let’s say, are their own reasons to pause and linger. The politics resides in deciding which ones signify a power that disrupts the smooth surface of ordinary remembrance. Which ones call on me to speak? I re-member my encounters with gender and the body through my mother. My mother’s name is Barbara Jean “Bob” Harrison Aultman. H/er nickname, “Bob,” was a phonetic reduction of Barbara—the result of a southern drawl that extends the sound of the hard “Bar-” by way of a more gentile “Bah-.” Barbara became “Bah-bruh.” Everyone addressed h/er as Bob. Only h/er mother and children did otherwise. Other reasons for h/er nickname remain rumors. S/he was a tomboy growing up. S/he had hairy arms unlike other girls h/er age. S/he was gawked at by boys and girls. Bob was tough. Had to be. S/he was born into poverty. S/he was the strongest and fiercest of h/er siblings. Bob was the eldest of seven: two sisters and four brothers. H/er adult life would become a proving ground for this grit. A troubled first marriage. Then becoming a single mother (with me) after h/er boyfriend left. S/he worked as a freelance cosmetologist while sewing fabrics at what I can only now call a sweatshop. Late nights s/he tended the local gas station. S/he remarried and remade h/er life. But cancer would eventually overcome that tenacity. S/he died in 2004.   Witnessing what cancer can do to the body is one thing. Watching it eat away at the mutual feelings of personhood that obtain between mother and child is another. The effects of two mastectomies (separated in time) and a complete hysterectomy (toward the last few years of h/er life) leave powerful traces. To recall is to trace delicately but without a roadmap. Which memories require me to linger with them while others do not? The narrative decision emerges from some irrational kind of knowledge I had never learned at university. And so h/er presence in my narrative is a felt rupture in the textual tracing of h/er life. S/he necessarily breaks with pronoun normativity in a way that parallels my own.  It is difficult to deal with psychic rupture. I have felt for so long that what was (what is) needed is a good theory to make sense of h/er discontinuities. But what is it to intertwine theory and ordinary life? Its braid would be uneven in texture. But it seems possible given a careful practice of representing h/er memory as a present absence, or a fugitive image. Bob complicates because s/he cannot be captured. S/he breaches the convenient protocols of social science research by redefining and reshaping the vast image-repertoire that grounds my own sense of being in the world.   1 B Lee Aultman, PhD, identifies as nonbinary and transfeminine. They are currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY. In addition to academic research and teaching, B is a co-host of the critical theory and philosophy podcast “The Always Already Podcast.” They can be reached at baultman@gradcenter.cuny.edu                  B Lee Aultman     65 I do not know how complex the cultural circuits were that incite me to feel that my mother did not die as a woman. No doubt s/he had lived as one and identified as one up to h/er last breath. S/he was an expert on the subject of being a woman. I re-member a lesson in sexual difference. “A stiff dick hath no conscience.” This was a favorite saying of h/ers. I’ve never identified with my dick (for the sake of lexical continuity). Was I being admonished for future sins of a man I was not to become? To re-member is to compose—again and again. Perhaps this was a first lesson in the female complaint about sex, love, and consent. Women are doubly burdened by the anxiety of their appearance as they relate to conscience-lacking men. Bob’s first marriage was abusive. He imposed passivity. But s/he would take up a gun and threaten him before leaving him. These memories produce a murmured critique. To re-member h/er is like paying attention to stammering speech. It feels like straining to hear a voice considered too damaged by trauma to speak. What I feel is the intensity of surprised estrangement. H/er cancer took with it all those parts of the body my culture has designated “female.” Bob is a confrontation through discontinuity. S/he is a resistance to this reduction.   I re-member a story s/he told as though it bore repeating. I was a child. It was our annual family reunion. My younger cousin ran into my grandmother’s house. “Aunt Barbara Jean, Aunt Barbara Jean!” My mother was alarmed. Wigless and bald from radiation treatment, s/he turned toward Cari. Without missing a beat my cousin pivoted: “Uncle Barbara Jean, Uncle Barbara Jean, [B] is playing with them boys out in the field!” Cari’s pivot feels like a disclosure of something I know about identity. Every repetition of the story was a reminder that our being is a function of being seen. There’s something more to it, though. I can’t help but remark on the uncanny likeness it bears to what it means “to pass” for many in trans communities. A child sees and understands that the underlying person (Bob) has not changed. What changed was the image. The abruptly unexpected absence of an aunt’s long hair transforms the aunt to uncle. Bob’s substance remained. The mark of gender was torn apart in that instant. The body indexes the norms we take for granted. And norms (like gender) have the bad habit of reassembling themselves even after their annihilation. H/er decision to have the first mastectomy was based on the necessary removal of a malignant tumor. The chemo and radiation treatments that followed would emaciate h/er and leave h/er bald. S/he wore wigs. After more than two decades of such treatments h/er body would be excised of almost all that which culture (medicine, law) invest with gendered and sexed meaning. The traces of these investments inscribed upon medical and legal documents might attest to someone in permanent “transition.” Bob is a text whose form negates such formalism. With h/er I found a space in which to situate my anxieties about gender.   I write because such texts act like sutures between my historical present and h/er narrative of being. Not a narrative of cancer but mutual decoding of the commonality of “life lessons.” S/he existed as h/er own person. But for me s/he is a relation binding trauma and love. It is not a sentimental relation. More like a proximity to what is possible under the conditions of discontinuity and rupture.   Ruptures feel like finding a breast. Bob wore a prosthetic after the first mastectomy. I found it as a child while scouring through h/er closet for shoes and clothes to try on. It was in a closed box. The object looked fleshy and similarly toned to my skin. I juggled it. I put it over my shirt. I could see there was a nipple. Then put it away. S/he approached me about it because I failed to put the thing back in its proper place. S/he made me promise not to touch it because “its insides  Journal of Narrative Politics Vol. 7 (2)   66 could hurt me.” S/he wasn’t angry. S/he gave me a lesson. “This is my breast,” s/he said while holding out the prosthesis. I re-member asking how. S/he showed me h/er mastectomy scar. I giggled because near the very top of the scar was a nipple-shaped keloid. And s/he put the prosthesis into h/er bra as part of h/er body that seemed indistinct from it. By the second mastectomy s/he decided there was no longer a need for prostheses. That surgery was precautionary and was soon followed by more surgeries. More chemo and radiation. By that time I was in high school. I got my first car (my step-father’s truck). I would drive to school and paint my nails with the hoard of polish Bob had in stock. I took h/er hair clips. I would change into crop tops, skirts, or jeans that looked like skirts. What a sissy, faggot, he-she. I never told them that “looking like a girl” signifies differently to a teenager whose mother’s body resisted what was merely or simply feminine.   Discontinuities feel dizzying, bridgeless gaps between what one knows and what is there in actuality. Radiation stripped h/er body’s ability to regulate estrogen and testosterone. S/he required replacement therapies for the molecules we were being taught in high school biology that were unique to female bodies. Another cultural index of reproductivity that didn’t seem to apply to my mother. I re-member coming home. Bob was sitting on the loveseat watching daytime talk shows. H/er legs were crossed “like a woman” and in one hand s/he held a glass of Dr. Pepper. H/er fingers barely touched the glass. S/he was still bald and usually wore leggings paired with a sweatshirt. S/he asked me what I learned that day. (I cannot help but remark on the relational banality of such a scene between a child and dying mother discussing biology.) I told h/er about hormones. “Mom, ‘estrogen,’ is a conjunction of the Greek word oistros, meaning passion and genesis, meaning creation.” I told h/er we learned that such molecules were biologically distinct to female and male bodies. “I have problems with regulating mine, you know. Do you think I am any less of a woman,” s/he asked. I told h/er no and looked puzzled. “I am who I am,” s/he said. Being re-coded from within and re-arranged from without. S/he was not the reduction of cells. A being who persists in h/er Being. S/he was confident where I seemed to question and resist. This discontinuity of cultural discourse and subject. Bob and h/er queer child formed a brief hiatus. Bob could stand astride that gap. S/he was defined by forces outside the control of the I am. But s/he still defined its limits. Could I do the same? Discontinuity was Bob’s site of redefinition. This is an odd truth. It reflects the power of something monstrous—something portentous and powerful. The monstrosity of all possibility that finds its home within spaces that expose the limits of selfhood.   A final rupture is the realization of banality. S/he died just before I graduated college. I was, of course, devastated. The news was sudden. S/he had kept h/er terminal diagnosis a secret from everyone except h/er husband and his mother (h/er caretakers). I had to fly to Colorado immediately. It felt scandalous. Why was I betrayed with willful non-disclosure? My furious speech was cut short when I entered h/er room. The solemnity of h/er death felt interrupted by the bureaucracy going on around us. I re-member crawling into h/er small bed. S/he was lucid enough to speak for a few minutes. S/he told me to be strong. “Not for me, sugar—for them.” I thought: Why should I be strong for my family? Most barely accepted my queerness. Me, the emotional rock for them? What a farce. S/he fell asleep before I could argue. I stared at the gray walls. There was off-white base-molding that was obviously washed daily. The TV hovered on its stand. This was it. The evental rupture of death amounts to waiting in a dully lighted room with a bad paint job. When s/he did pass I collapsed in an adjacent room. I didn’t hold up my end                B Lee Aultman     67 of the bargain. But it struck me only recently that “being strong” wasn’t for them. It was a command, of sorts, to preserve the “I am” in a world that seeks to extinguish me and my kind. S/he couldn’t fix the everyday violence that I had told h/er about (after school, during college). What an odd aperture through which h/er command calls to me—to remember not only who I was but, in doing so, grasping the strength required to do so. It was a strength in the everyday. Violence and the ordinary are often close friends. Sage advice to a queer child.   My mother lived as a woman but did not die as a woman. This does not rob h/er of an identity. It signifies how Bob-as-event re-narrativizes all that I know about my body in relation to the world. The technologies of medicine that prolonged h/er life are the very same that consolidate another’s embodied identity and prolong theirs. What occurs in-between requires the strength to endure a body that might not feel livable. Strength in the face of bureaucratic banalities that delay or disallow gender affirming care. Bob never transitioned in the sense used in trans communities. S/he challenged the limits of attachments to a discourse that defined the body (my body) as immutable. S/he lived through the slow decomposition of all those cultural markers that define “femaleness.” S/he claimed the possibility of h/erself in the space that was created. There could be no normal body under h/er dialectic. Only the body s/he assembles h/erself.   For my PhD dissertation I had the privileged responsibility of reading archived stories from transfeminine Americans while a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia. These stories were varied in form: autofiction, diaries, poems, or editorials. They repeated a common refrain: “We are more than a disorder.” They were women. They were who they were. The echo of Bob’s “I am what I am.” The trace of re-membered affects began to intensify their stories. I imagined how those outdated gender identity clinics must have shared the hospital room’s dull lighting and depressing color schemes. Where one woman was mired (and thus made real) by a bureaucracy of medical documentation another vanished as quickly as the spoken word. Why did these women choose the events they inscribed on the page? So as not to disappear into memory? My transness became an affective landscape of re-memory. Transness is what it is. The route to its meaning, like my mother’s, is far from coherent. Re-memory is a kind of tracing that cannot reunify what was broken. A politics of memory is a politics of the self. Writing sutures together an outline of my-self. Just at the borders I glimpse the exergue. It is the mark of my limits and the sign of possibility. It is neither words nor phrases coherent. It is affective memory retracing its steps. I often telegraph my narrative through theory. What I braid together leaves traces—the exergue’s being is the monstrosity of something not yet born but possible. The exergue counters the fiction that memory (like the past) is lifeless.   

English

Exergue (or, The Politics of Memory)

Vlavonou, Gino

Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 10-14     On Disciplinary Encounters: IR and Fieldwork Gino Vlavonou1   As far as I can remember, I encountered International Relations (IR) accidentally.   After high school in Benin, I wanted to study translation. My parents disagreed. I remember my dad saying that I would not be able to earn a living if I studied translation. There was no future in Benin for that kind of discipline, he told me. So, reluctantly, my IR journey started in 2005 at the National School of Administration of the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin. Although this first encounter with IR was accidental, my family had a significant impact on my studies. They shaped the direction I took by foreclosing some routes, and they made it financially possible in Benin. Coming from an upper middle-class family, my father had the financial means to support my education until my master’s degree. This also meant I could not disagree with his choice of what I should study.  In the National School of Administration in Benin, I majored in Diplomacy and International Relations. The goal was that I might end up being employed as a public servant in the Beninois government. There was no guarantee of this, but at the time my parents saw this as a more stable path.  IR and I have a love-hate relationship. During my undergrad diploma at the University of Abomey-Calavi, I remember being lost because I did not know what to do with what I was being taught. In that school, professors covered topics from criminal law to project management and international law. When it came to my IR module, we covered only realism, neo-realism and systems theory. As students in that classroom, we dreamt of working in the Foreign Affairs Ministry, maybe because it was one of the few places we were being trained for. Our IR classes were complemented with courses on the functioning of an embassy and diplomatic etiquette. We attended a class titled Les Éléments du Protocole (Protocol Elements) which covered topics such as precedence and ordering of high-ranking officials in meetings, how to properly set up a table for such officials, and how to dress properly. I have little recollection of all I was taught now, but I keep my school notes with me to this day.    1 Gino Vlavonou is a program officer with the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF) at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Gino’s research includes identity, discourses, political violence in the Central African Republic. He can be reached at vlavonou@ssrc.org                                                                                                                                          Gino Vlavonou  11  Looking closely at the version of IR I encountered in the National School of Administration, Benin seemed not to matter in the international system; only richer countries with military capabilities mattered. Professors taught us unipolarity/bipolarity in the international system. We learned about the French realist Raymond Aron and American foreign policy during the Cold War. At times our profs covered how systems theory mirrored thinking in Biology. But I could not link the system to the people. I am unsure of what the teachers thought about Benin’s presence in that system. I often wondered, what can I, a citizen of Benin, do with realism when it is about systems, military power, or hegemony? At times, I found refuge in my international law and international institutions classes; they gave an illusion of appeasement. If there was an international law by which all countries must abide, perhaps Benin was no longer an insignificant country. I hated that in IR courses I was not equipped to face the challenges of this tiny country. I did not know this yet, but the methods of both IR and development economics (a field that I discovered later) seemed to deliberately render poorer countries irrelevant.    I wondered where I could go from there. The version of IR I was being exposed to was everything I knew, but I hated how immobilizing that IR was. Indeed, disappointment in this early IR encounter led me to consider alternative avenues to understand how Benin could improve its economic situation. Later, I pursued a master’s degree in development studies in grad school at Université Laval in Quebec City. My dad made graduate school financially possible for me, and it is through family connections that I chose to move to Quebec City.  In graduate school, I expected to learn more about Benin and how to improve its economic situation. More broadly, I wished to learn more about Africa. Unfortunately, development studies was not helpful either. I was trained to value theories mostly by white men. I could not see my people. If anything, Beninois people, Africans, were framed as problems, problems for the international system, problems to be solved, problems to be tolerated. There were wars in Africa, poverty and famine in Africa. My core classes, such as Poverty and Economic Development, were full of formulas. They gave a sense that, if you get numbers right, African problems of agricultural production, markets, or foreign direct investments would be solved. The classes were removed from lived realities, I felt. Ultimately, my encounters with these disciplines (IR and development studies) were uncritical.   I do not necessarily blame my teachers for this. Having now discovered more of the politics of knowledge and the complexity of building a syllabus, I do not know if blame would be appropriate. Some instructors’ syllabi reflect their training. If one has been trained in mainstream approaches of IR and development studies, the syllabus might reflect just that. In Benin we had no syllabus to support the teaching. Students had to trust that the teacher was an all-knowing human. They dictated words that we furiously wrote down in our notebooks. In Quebec, it was different. I had access to course syllabi, but teachers were less transparent about the politics of the readings they assigned. Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 10-14  12   I began my PhD at the University of Ottawa many years later. I wanted to probe questions of armed violence: why people fight and how they come to make such decisions. My decision to undertake a PhD came after a year of work in Nairobi with the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). I had met my supervisor in Nairobi and wanted to work with her. This decision was easier because I had recently become a permanent resident of Canada, which allowed me to apply for scholarships and avoid expensive university fees.  My work experience in conflict analysis helped shape my interest in the conflict of the Central African Republic. To study conflict, I thought I must come back to IR. My rationale was that maybe I had been misled during my undergraduate studies. Book titles such as Why Nations Fight2 stuck with me and gave me the impression that IR was the right place to be. When I was studying for the comprehensive exams, I discovered with great interest theories in the fields of international political economy, global governance, security studies, but I wondered which theory would help me better understand the armed conflict in the Central African Republic. I decided to take another departure point and did more reading in comparative politics and political sociology. However, I had already passed my comprehensive exams in IR. Speaking with other colleagues of my cohort about my research interests, I wondered if I should have chosen to major in comparative politics instead. I could not go back and change my major but I decided to study the comparative politics reading list as much as I could. For instance, the first iteration of my dissertation prospectus relied on my understanding of IR and armed conflict and talked about civil war recurrence. Basically, my starting point was war in the international system, and the shifts toward civil wars. I was asking, why has the CAR been witnessing instability since its independence and now a recurring civil war? In the prospectus, I seemed to already have an answer, it was because of exclusionary governance practices. But this made no sense to my dissertation adviser. I removed the recurrence literature, which is a subset of IR, and entirely focused on comparative politics literature, practices of governance and identity claims.  In 2017, I was excited to undertake fieldwork. It was important to me to move beyond sanitized IR theory and get close to Central Africans. Amongst the many places where I ventured in the CAR, a public market downtown of the capital, named the Marché de la Réconciliation (Market of Reconciliation) captured my attention. The market is usually packed. Only when it rains heavily does the market look quiet. Otherwise, cars and motorbikes are honking, people are busy bargaining over prices, others are laughing. The public market brings in traders of all sorts, beauty products sellers, fruits and vegetable traders, second-hand clothes sellers, and many craftspeople.   Even as I was drawn to the market, it did not at first occur to me that this place was an important space to encounter people and rediscover IR through their lenses. In Benin, where I grew up until  2 Richard Ned Lebow, Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.                                                                                                                                          Gino Vlavonou  13  my early twenties, public markets are central to city life. But, as a PhD student, who has now spent more than ten years abroad, this fact completely eluded me! Indeed, I had been disciplined to think that IR takes place in formal, official UN-like spaces. The market did not fit into that. If I were to focus on the national level, then people in government would be the focus. That is what I planned for, that is what I wrote in my prospectus, that is how I started my research.  Initially, I had totally ignored spaces like this, I felt people there were not important. As a reluctant IR scholar, I initially focused on interviewing important “actors,” such as government officials or international NGO representatives working in the CAR. I mapped, neatly, important “actors” and wanted to meet with them when I started fieldwork. In the dissertation prospectus that I defended to my committee, there was no mention of market spaces, or no initial intent that these were spaces I would like to be in.   “Reconciliation,” the notice board of the market read! On a sunny day, I decided to enter the market. I did not know what I was looking for, but I was intrigued by its name. Another interviewee had given me the contact of a woman, a market association trader. She met me in an empty room in the market, a room with one table and a bench, to discuss reconciliation and the market’s name. The woman’s colleague was there too and they would chat from time to time in Sango, one of the national languages of the CAR.   After a long discussion, the woman quipped: ‘We [the market people] do not want them [Muslims] here.’ I shuddered. The international media had framed the conflict in the CAR as sectarian. Some armed factions claimed to represent "true Central Africans" and others claimed to represent "Muslims." But at the same time, struggles over political power at the elite level provoked the armed conflict. Other CAR civil society organization initiatives tried to correct the sectarian narrative, suggesting that Central Africans of all faiths lived peacefully together, right down to public spaces such as the market. When armed violence was raging in the capital Bangui in 2013 and 2014, some Muslim traders fled to neighboring countries Chad and Cameroun. By the time I was conducting fieldwork, some of these traders were coming back and the reconciliation narrative was present in the civil society media campaign.   Surprised by the statement of the woman, I followed up by asking why. This is when I started shifting my perspective. Speaking initially with her, and later with other market traders, opened me to their world, how goods move from neighboring countries to the CAR, and how traders sell the goods. I started to venture inside markets more often, observing what people did, observing the warehouses. I wanted to understand the woman’s answer. Ultimately, this market space was about the international. It was about people, relations, and connections to other places, how people bring and move goods around and hold the power of moving such goods. I discovered and understood (maybe superficially) how market sellers brought goods from Cameroun, Benin, Togo, Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 10-14  14  Dubai, and elsewhere. At the same time, traders of different faiths held different power to move goods.   Encountering ideas and stories in this space during fieldwork brought me joy. I was surprised, first, to have encountered the market space, an “unidentified political object,”3 and, second, to have found things I was not set to find in my original research design. When I spoke with government elites, or armed groups representatives, our discussions centered on official/formal politics, questions of coups, political representations and participation. The woman’s words linked these discussions to lived realities. Muslims traders in market spaces were strong competitors because they had a broader network and financial capital allowing them to bring in more goods at cheaper prices. When they fled, other traders took their places. But by the time I conducted fieldwork, more of these traders were returning to the CAR. Through the words of people at the marketplace, I was able to connect the problems of formal politics to the lived realities of Central Africans. At the same time, if I had not encountered market women and men, I might not have been able to understand life in the market and the competition among market traders as international.  Considering my encounters with IR I think I would have not gotten very far with my PhD puzzles without fieldwork. From the university of Abomey-Calavi, to Quebec, and now Ottawa, I was disciplined not to see people. I learned to value certain people and ideas, even if I was absent from those representations. Now, I have graduated. I am still not sure of what to make of my journey in IR and development studies. But I do love that fieldwork opened up my perspectives and way of seeing the world.  3 Denis-Constant Martin, “À la quête des OPNI (objets politiques non identifiés). Comment traiter l'invention du politique ?” Revue française de science politique, 6 (1989): 793–815. 

On Disciplinary Encounters: IR and Fieldwork

Särmä, Saara

Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 35-40    How Do We Make IR More Joyful? Saara Särmä1   In the spring of 2021, I was sitting at home, but on Instagram pretended to be in Las Vegas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfke77gsUDA), taking part in the ISA conference. I attended a roundtable on mentoring organized by the Committee on the Status of Women where a senior scholar said something along the lines of “if you publish 10 journal articles during your PhD, you’ll surely get a good job after you’re finished”. Yes, this may be true, but is it smart mentoring?   I can’t remember if I published any articles during the years I was writing my dissertation, maybe some in Finnish. It was hard enough as it was. Maybe I am one of those people who just “couldn’t make it in academia” - a line often heard when people talk about someone who seemed to be a promising academic but is no longer around.   I asked the roundtable in the chat whether there is space in academia for those of us who are less than superhuman. Those of us who have health or mental health issues, or other reasons that slow us down. Of course, everyone in principle thinks there’s space, or space needs to be made, yet I remain skeptical.   As a meme researcher I do appreciate a good meme and laughter is generally my coping mechanism, however I’ve become increasingly disturbed by the content my colleagues and academic friends keep sharing from the Shit Academics Say Facebook page (or Twitter account). This is one of those examples.   1 Dr. Saara Särmä is a feminist, an activist, an artist, and a researcher. She is the creator of “Congrats, you have an all male panel!” and co-founder of the Feminist Think Tank Hattu, which has empowered numerous women in Schools of Daring and Cursing Soirées. Currently she works at Tampere University, her postdoc project Making Meaning out of Meme-making is funded by the Academy of Finland (2019-2023). Saara is committed to making both academia and the world kinder and better places. She can be reached at saara.sarma@tuni.fi or on Instagram @huippumisukka      Saara Särmä  36    While I know sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh when the situation is impossible, I’ve begun to think that these kinds of memes just normalize a very toxic culture that is killing us slowly. And really, it might seem like a gross exaggeration to say that academia is killing us, but the effects of constant and long-term stress can be deadly.  I know it is a survival mechanism for many to laugh when faced with reality put in such a clever way. Or cry a little, sometimes even a lot. But then most just seem to move on and keep going. In the end nothing changes. Some of us give up, drop out, think that it was just me, I was too weak to make it in academia. Not smart enough, too slow a writer and thinker. Not willing to put in all the effort. Not ready to sacrifice.  Why does academia demand sacrifices? Is it really a cult as some would argue? Academia does not respect boundaries, it has no boundaries, but it cannot be up to each one of us individually to set our boundaries and do the work of maintaining them, there needs to be some other ways.  Another meme: “Adulthood is saying ‘but after this week things will slow down a bit’ over and over until you die” seems to accurately portray academic life. What if it really did get easier after this week, or month? What if we all just worked barely enough, and not way too much? We know we are governed into obedience, we write critically about governance, yet we are good little academic citizens and subsume to the will to measure that Laura writes about and produce outputs to satisfy the system. Outputs that barely anyone has time to read.   Academia is a land of many possibilities but also many impossibilities. It’s such a privileged space and I feel a bit silly sometimes whining about its problems, because academia provides such Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 35-40  37 freedoms, to work whenever, wherever, on whatever topics I want. Then again, as Sámi duojár Jenni Laiti writes about art, none of us are truly free before everyone is free. Academic freedom is an illusion, because the will to measure constricts it… and what kind of freedom is it anyways when the longest I’m allowed to do basically whatever I want to do is 3 years (my current research funding period), and even then I have to spend months of it writing new funding applications.  Jenni Laiti writes that freedom is essentially a communal experience that arises from a sense of belonging and being seen. “Freedom means living beautifully and taking care of others and your surroundings. It means I can exist as part of my community and the world as exactly the person I define myself to be.”2 In the highly individualized competition that academia is, how can we live beautifully taking care of each other? Because in order to survive, I think we must learn.  Can I exist in academia as exhausted, depressed, sad, but sometimes funny, creative, and clever? Can I be seen as my full self?  About a year ago (Sept 3, 2020), I had asked my friends on Facebook whether one’s cognitive skills will ever recover after burnout and depression. The nearly 100 answers were both hopeful and somewhat sobering. Recounting their experiences, my friends told me that it might be that full recovery will never happen, but some kind of recovery is certain. And a year from that discussion, I can tell that a lot of progress has happened, yet much remains. It might be that I just have to learn to deal with this new normal the best way I can. I was never the kind of superhuman academia wants us to be. Took me 8 years to write the dissertation. I’ve often felt that I’m too slow of a thinker and writer to make it in academia, yet somehow I’ve still stuck with it until now. But now I’m even slower and can work less hours, so where will this leave me?  Here’s a radical idea, what if academia exists to serve us, not us serving it? What if people mattered more than academia? What if we are not disposable even if neoliberal academia tries to tell us otherwise? How do we take care of each other in a way that does not allow us to become disposable? Beyond writing nice comments on someone’s FB post - commiserating or encouraging or both. What do we do? What do you do?  What I do, sometimes, I make collages. Here’s a recent one:  2 https://koneensaatio.fi/en/art-is-free-when-we-are-free/     Saara Särmä  38    The idea for this collage came from shine choi, who asked me for some creative detoxing ideas in a sucky / sticky professional situation. She had complained about a colleague, but the complaint – after a long process – led to nothing but a managerial letter avoiding responsibility. We all know how these things most often turn out. The one who points out the problem, the one who complains, becomes the problem. And/or the issue is buried in a filing cabinet. Sara Ahmed has written extensively about this in her feminist killjoy blog and several books. shine sent me a picture of a slide from a talk by Ahmed:  Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 35-40  39    I love walking in cemeteries, worked in one for a summer when I was 17. Finnish cemeteries are quite boring, most of the gravestones are of similar shape and size, black boxes, very subdued (let’s not make a big number out of this – this being anything you can think of – is one of the most common sayings here). So, when shine asked about creative detoxing, my mind went immediately to building an actual grave where the complaint could be buried and making the most extravagant headstone. Or making a grave for oneself in a filing cabinet. “If your tombstone was a filing cabinet, what would you want to be found in the drawers when people go visit your grave?” Morbid much? Perhaps, but I do enjoy imagining extravagant memorial sites for myself…  However, shine did not want to deal with this only in private: “But I want it public, shared, out in the open not buried and made into my private burden” so she asked me to make a collage with unicorns, cats, glitter and laughing woman… and I did, except for the cats and unicorns. This is my attempt to help shine not feel like she’s been buried along with her complaint.   It’s not a very good one artistically, but that was not the aim either. Of course, it would be much more pleasing to me if it was, but collages are temporary creations, I don’t throw them out and start over, I just make them. It did what it was meant to and provided shine some joy, comfort, and empowerment. She printed out a copy and stuck it on her office door. Hopefully, there will be a time when we can travel again and meet in person and she gets to have the original as well. As a     Saara Särmä  40  gift for her, I tried to convey in it the message that she’s not alone in this, that we (the feminist we) have her back, even though there’s really not much I could do institutionally or otherwise, but I can curse the injustices with her, I can be here for her.  We can measure citations, indexes etc., but this kind of emotional impact is, to me, much more important. It is the spring Laura writes about, how do we cultivate the spring so that new and wonderful things may grow? The joy of making someone else feel better, the joy of making – materially – is very different than attempting to put words on the screen. IR is what we make of it, but how do we make it more joyful? 

How Do We Make IR More Joyful?

Sky, Laura

Moving Mountains: The Mine, the Women, and the Deep Dark Snow

Stump, Jacob L.

		 Vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 81-82 		 			 81    May escapes a mess  Jacob L. Stump1     “He’s a pervert,” May said.   May stood at the window. Her small, wiry body was positioned to the side, near the curtain’s edge where she could stay out of sight but still peer at the house next door.  Elvia was across the room in her wheelchair. She sat in the sunlight cast through the gap in the curtains. Her lips frowned, eyebrows pursed, and her head moved skeptically. The old woman spat tobacco juice in the dented, gold-colored spittoon and looked at young May.   “May,” Elvia said loudly, “you gotta move on from that mess.”  His truck crept by May’s house and slowly pulled into the yard next door. The man got out, slammed the vehicle door, and went inside the ramshackle structure.   Dob’s arrival always lit May’s fuse. She shook and wept with fear and rage.  Elvia patted May’s back every day and saw the fire in her eyes. May had been on edge since she’d been released.   Nobody else around the small mountain community understood the situation. May was “touched” or “a little off,” so the story went. When May was seventeen, her daddy committed her to the Southwestern Lunatic Asylum.   May was institutionalized for two years. After her release, May moved in with Elvia.   Elvia lived next to Dob who worked at the Asylum as an orderly.   Most able-bodied men and women had already migrated out for work. Not Dob.  The Asylum was one of the few jobs left in the area. It was “a County job with retirement and benefits,” Dob told everybody after he got hired.  	1 Jacob L. Stump is in DePaul University's Department of International Studies. He teaches and writes on cultural political economy. He can be reached at jacoblstump@gmail.com  Jacob L. Stump			82  The Great Depression triggered the migration out of the Appalachian Mountains. Luther Hassinger set the local stage for over 20 years before the economic calamity. He brought his great steam powered sawmill to the mountains, made wageworkers of men, and laid waste to the vast forests and common spaces that surrounded the community.   From all around the mountains, folks followed Route 11, Route 23 and other roads East and North to the big cities for work. “There ain’t no jobs in the mountains,” everybody said as they drove away.   Waged jobs had always been scarce in the mountains. It only mattered now because people wanted cash to buy stuff.    It was during these changing times that May met Dob at the Asylum. Dob helped doctors work on the committed. He held patients down and moved them around.   Dob did obscene things to May. He would put May back into the cell, tranquilized and hazy, and then grab her pussy, squeeze her breasts, and whisper his nasty desires into her ear every Wednesday for two years of routine treatment. His breath always stank of cigarettes.   May could do nothing. She was too drugged to respond at the time. No one believed her afterwards.   Elvia saw what was going on. Since May’s release from the Asylum, Elvia watched her crumble. Elvia could see the end point in May’s eyes.   May’s bags were packed early one afternoon and set by the front door.   A metal can full of gas was out back on the porch.  Elvia had already arranged May’s ride off the mountain and to the city.   Elvia’s nephew had promised to take May “uppa country” to the Washington, D.C. area. Locals knew of a strict widow woman who ran a house with rooms to let for young, unmarried, workingwomen.   May got office work in the city right away and left the mountains behind.   Elvia looked on as she told the story.   Everything looks different. The old wooden house where Dob once lived had vanished. Blackened patches of dirt and burnt timbers had been overtaken by young green grass.   Elvia chuckled and pointed, “The flames reached into the sky as near tall as that pine over there.”   

May escapes a mess

Shah, Ami V.

Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 26-30   Love of the Angriest Kind: Notes on Belonging Ami V. Shah1   The personal is theoretical. Theory itself is often assumed to be abstract: something is more theoretical the more abstract it is, the more it is abstracted from everyday life. To abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. Sara Ahmed2   I have a love-hate relationship with my anger. It often starts with surprise when anger creeps up within me: Why anger, why are you here? Where have you emerged from? Rather than dissipating, however, the anger lingers. I begin to hate it. Anger, how have you become this elephant in the room, forcing me to contort around you? Please, take a step back, return down your path: you were not invited here, and you are not welcome.  Yet, the anger knows that it is not overstaying its welcome; that its work has just begun. It stares me in the face, reminding me that our paths are the same. We both have often been not invited and unwelcomed. With this reminder, the other feelings return – that disjointed floating feeling of disconnection, that sense of being on the sidelines, and I start to understand, justify, and even embrace the anger. Slowly, I turn back to it. I acknowledge its presence, engage in its claims, and, if I’m brave, head down the scarier path of self-reflection, coming to terms with being an accomplice in my own erasure.  It took me much too long to realize what it means to be uninvited in academia - academia was where my family of immigrants and their offspring were supposed to “earn” our belonging in a small city in the United States’ mountain west. Brown, pagan (and proud - ha!), proving your smarts gained one some minor acceptance, some credibility, some worth. For this unspoken scheme to work, one coupled book smarts with cultural conformity in all the ways - speak and write well in English, wear “American” clothes, present yourself appropriately, eat with a knife and fork… think like you are expected to think.  Think like you are expected to think.   1 Ami V. Shah is an Associate Professor in Global Studies at Pacific Lutheran University. She holds a DPhil in Development Studies, and teaches and writes about critical understandings of the global south and development, the emotive politics of representation, and decolonial international relations and pedagogy. She can be reached at shahav@plu.edu. 2 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.    Ami V. Shah  27   Yeah, this was about the book smarts then too.  And goodness how GOOD at that I was! (Am?) I was the quintessential undergraduate puppy. Shall I memorize for you? Provide that proof exactly the way it was done? Explain the importance of that theory? Sure! You’ll love me back, right? And yes, you are right that the great powers are the only states that matter!  Well shit. The anger comes back, forcefully cordoning to the side any sense of pride or accomplishment and centering instead the loss that has occurred. Conforming in the discipline of international relations – and more largely in academia and the society I found myself in – involved devaluing myself, my experiences, my history. I had already diminished my own value within my extended family and my tiny immigrant community by what I wasn’t doing. I was not pre-med. I was not studying the hard sciences.  I wasn’t even pre-law. I know, I know. This sounds like an episode of Kim’s Convenience or one of the other new “minority sitcoms” that poignantly capture immigrant life while making it saccharine and cutesy. But these were not fictionalized realities - they were mine. They still are. I’m well into middle-aged life and yes, my occupation and focus still constitute a site of contention. So then is my reality cutesy? I admit these sitcoms draw me in; there’s so much there to relate to, to love. And so much to laugh at. What does that mean for people like me? Who is relating? Who is loving? Who is laughing? How have I unknowingly made myself into an object to be laughed at? And do I mistake that objectification for my own belonging?  I’m getting ahead of myself; I never said this reflective path was straight. Being complicit in one’s own erasure is a special type of darkness that creates its own shadows to traverse. But I learned all the IR I was supposed to learn without realizing how much my learning involved erasing. I accepted the supposedly objective discussion of how the world worked and why, of which histories mattered, and that all roots of the current good in the world were somehow magically created in ancient Greece. I reiterated these discourses without questioning their own social construction; I accepted their claims of innocence.3  Through accepting so-called canonical IR, I reflected its categories back onto the world. Trained first in the United States as the Cold War hurtled to its close, I accepted the assertions of the USA’s power and potential emergence as a global messiah: Feed the World! Free the World! Lead the World! A dangerously aspirational self-subject-positioning as part of the feed/free/lead ideal white washed my own otherness and stripped not just a country, but its people, my family, of their dignity and worth on the world stage. But admitting this means admitting something else: that these people and places were never really part of the IR world. And that “these people” included me.     3 Meera Sabaratnam, “Is IR Theory White? Racialized Subject-Positioning in Three Canonical Texts.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(1) 2000: pp. 3-31. Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 26-30  28  If we think of people who matter in conventional IR, well, then I never mattered. As a child of former colonial subjects living in the Diaspora, our family stories and national ties and history meant very little to the discipline beyond being troublesome, pesky mosquitoes that got through the net separating the great from the rest, nibbling to remind our hosts of our existence. We were problems to be swatted at. My homeland existed as a place of development, disaster, conflict, hunger, poverty, rights abuses, pollution, corruption, and when we caused a little shake to jog memories - nuclear weapons. Occasionally it gained attention for its call centers, or a heartwarming story of so-called “resilience” or “innovation,” or a reference to Gandhi and essentialized, exotified, romanticized non-violence. Be the change.  The everyday experiences and knowledge of colonialism, independence, forced migration, pogroms, etc., were quick blips of world events that were rendered unimportant in a Eurocentric world system and discipline. Similarly, the non-West’s achievements, hopes, happiness, were not notable or worthy of time. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to recognize this. It also took me longer than I’d like to admit to connect that sense of not mattering and of searching for belonging to my eventual home in critical development studies, and the longer process of re-engaging with IR as a person who now asserts that yes, I do matter. My family matters. My homeland matters.   And anger deepens, because the processes of conforming, reacting, reflecting, not conforming, challenging – all of them – all of them come with risks and fear. What would it be like to be able to walk through life without that fear? Without having to assert value, striving to command respect without being seen as angry? What would it be like to walk through life without having to assert your existence?   What to do to be able to live that life?  Kick at the edges of the canon.  “But will they be prepared for graduate school?” “Are they learning what they are supposed to know?”  Incorporate perspectives of the Global South.   “This is just because of your own identity.”  Center race as a primary category in the discipline. “These culture wars are out of hand; the reality is these countries and perspectives are the most important in the world system. Stop denying it.”  And then, whilst swirling in this waltz of fragility, be kind, be gracious, and ensure you have documented justification.     Ami V. Shah  29   Now the anger and I walk as one; we are past scoffing but respectability norms curtail throwing. What to do? As we walk, we turn toward each other in despair and ask “all this? What for? Why even do this work?”   Sara Ahmed reflects that theoretical abstraction is detachment, asserting instead that “the personal is theoretical.” Recognizing my existence then, in IR and the “real world” writ large, is not just a political act, but a theoretical one. It has the potential to push past the posturing of care politics to create an alternative world. This potential may be packaged in hope and utopian visions, but I’m here for it. I’m here for the warm fuzzy, sure, and for the anger to dissipate a bit and some shadows to disappear for now.   And now I have come to love parts of this anger that confronts me, stalks me, becomes me, and turns me around. Beyond acknowledging that the anger is valid, that feelings matter in academic work, the anger has shaped me, opened my eyes, mind, and heart to other ways of being in this profession, and in this discipline. There’s nothing necessarily striking or revolutionary or astute in this telling…. But it is mine, and it matters. It matters to the students who come to see themselves within the discipline too, and the world it creates. It matters that they matter. And I love that they can see and articulate their own place in IR.   I hate the reflection anger throws at me; I love the impetus it has provided to assert the centrality of my students in the discipline, to do IR as if they matter. Teaching in and of itself is an act of love – an act of striving to journey with others on a path of discovery and understanding and questioning, and to be willing to go on that journey together, sit through the discomforts and eurekas and puzzles. And love can also be seen by showing our students that yes, they too matter. As my own classroom increasingly becomes a site of demographic diversity, what does it mean to peel back the layers of IR? What does it mean to push past inclusion that celebrates presence in the classroom, to inclusion that is welcoming, dignifying, edifying, and yes, even loving? To show students that here too, there were/are people like you, and that here too, IR happens, and that here, too, you mattered and still do? Disruption, decentering the mainstream is not just a project of displacing colonized knowledge at best or fighting in the realm of identity politics at worst, but also a project of radical inclusion and one of hope. A project of love.  A few decades ago, I was on the phone with my mother, who no longer walks this earth. Our conversation was routine, and thus forgettable. Years later, memories of the conversation emerged. To paraphrase:  Mom: “What is your paper about?” Me: “The Indian Mutiny.” Mom: “The Indian Mutiny? What’s that?” Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 26-30  30  Me: “Mom, you see, in 1857, Indian soldiers….(blah blah blah in know-it-all young adult voice)” Mom: “Oh, you mean the First War of Indian Independence.”  I have perhaps recounted this conversation too many times in recent years. I’m not sure exactly when I started remembering this conversation so clearly - I even remember the paper a bit, and the dorm room I was in during that phone call. I have a love-hate relationship with my anger. I hate how much it rattles me, it questions my existence, it forces me to reflect on a traitorous existence. And yet, anger, thank you for showing up, for arriving uninvited, and guiding me along this path toward love. I love that you brought me here, that you returned this memory, and that you encourage me daily to embody and enact your lessons.  

Love of the Angriest Kind: Notes on Belonging

Bittencourt Rodrigues Lopes, Rafael

Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 15-17     The Study Group Where I Find Myself Rafael Bittencourt Rodrigues Lopes1  When I was an undergraduate studying International Relations, I attended two study groups, one focused on African studies, the other on South Atlantic studies. I enjoyed the space to read and discuss authors and topics related to international relations, but the texts were very different from those I was required to read in courses on IR Theory. The study group texts focused on Latin American, African and some Asian countries, instead of only the USA and Western European countries. And the authors focused on people(s), not just states, as relevant actors in world affairs. The texts explored multiple forms of inequality (income, gender, race and ethnicity to highlight some). They discussed violence; not just the violence of wars but the violence of everyday life. The study group discussions helped me to think of these issues not as domestic concerns, but as problems that stem from Portuguese colonialism and as issues of international relations.   Years later, in 2019, I moved to a new city, Goiânia, where I was hired as a temporary contract professor. Even before I arrived there, I was included in a WhatsApp group for students and professors who were planning to start a new study group focused on postcolonial readings. Why did they create this space to study postcolonial perspectives? This was one of our first conversations. Isabela told me that, during her studies, she had been assigned many readings in different disciplines which appeared to assume a world where countries like Brazil aren’t relevant. Yet Brazil was the place where she had lived her whole life and from where she studied IR. Valéria told me about being a Black Brazilian woman in IR. She said the violence she sees and fears every day is not a topic in disciplinary discussions of security, just as the inequality she faces as a Black woman is not a topic in academic discussions of development. Postcolonial approaches offered Isabela and Valéria possibilities to think about their existence as something that matters in international relations.  After we shared these understandings, expectations, and desires, we began to read texts that dialogue with issues important to us. We didn’t worry about whether the authors “fit” in the discipline. We read Black women like bell hooks, Angela Davis and Patricia Hill Collins, decolonial authors such as Aníbal Quijano and Ramón Grosfoguel, Brazilian Black and Indigenous leaders such as Lélia González, Abdias do Nascimento and Ailton Krenak, among others. We also included some of our own writing, such as final works  1 Rafael Bittencourt Rodrigues Lopes holds a PhD in International Relations from the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte, Brazil), is a lecturer at the same university, and also taught at the Federal University of Goiás (Goiânia, Brazil). His main research interests are critical approaches to development, pluriversal and decolonial International Relations, Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian thought, Latin American and African studies. He can be reached at bittencourt.ri@gmail.com or via Twitter @rafa_fael_22.                                                                                                                                     Rafael Bittencourt Rodrigues Lopes  16  by undergraduate students, ongoing doctoral projects and recently published articles that brought up themes such as resistance in territories affected by extractive mining, state building on the African continent and the role of Atlantic slavery in the 19th century in the construction of the idea of ‘international’ at sea.  My conversations with Isabela and Valéria helped me to reflect on my own experiences studying IR. I am a Brazilian, a Black man, a grandson of migrants from the rural exodus, a son of a policeman. I grew up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Belo Horizonte, close to some of the city’s large favelas, but outside of them. My story had felt of little relevance to International Relations, when I understood it to be just a field dedicated to the politics of great powers. Talking with Isabela and Valéria helped me to think about how my life and my experiences in Belo Horizonte might matter to IR and connect to the experiences of people in other places, including Goiânia.  The group started meeting with four or five people but in March 2020 our classes were suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Isabela, Valéria and I decided to take our study group online. Our online group soon became a meeting place for lots of people, students of IR and students of other disciplines, students in Goiânia and other cities in Brazil, and people without any relationship to any university. Big numbers were never our goal, but after six months we had 1,000 followers on Instagram.   When Valéria, Isabela and I saw many people attending the meetings, especially during the first year of the pandemic, we reflected on the purpose of the group. I was curious: why are there so many people interested and why is there so little space in our courses for these readings? Until the study group exploded, I had viewed postcolonial readings as just one of several avenues to study IR. I had assumed that only a few colleagues and students would be interested in these dialogues. The group showed me that, even if that is true, people need a safe space to share their thoughts, experiences and texts that connect to their lives. In the second year of the study group, the number of attendees fell, but the online dialogues continued. I felt renewed by these meetings. The group reminded me not to lose heart in the face of the difficulties of the pandemic, the Bolsonaro government, and my own struggle to combine teaching and writing my doctoral dissertation.  Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 15-17   17   Some of the participants of the group offered Instagram videos with reflections from the meetings (shared with permission of all pictured).   If I can pick a recurring theme from all our meetings, it is our need to imagine an IR where we matter. I haven’t been able to answer the question I asked earlier: why do we have so little space in our IR courses for these readings? But this short story has helped me think about the first part of that question: why are so many people interested? In the study group, I encountered many people who shared the same frustration and the same hope: We are tired of reading the same stories about the same people. We want to see, study, read and write about a world where people like us exist.    

The Study Group Where I Find Myself

Parasram, Ajay

Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 7-9   Seeing Whiteness in the Margins Ajay Parasram1    It was a crisp Fall morning and I was peacocking my way across a playground, rocking my pleather jacket. In my head I was so damn cool, just like Maverick from Top Gun. I would have been two when that film first came out, but at the ripe old age of five, it still had a suspiciously strong influence on me. I was living my best life at the tail end of the 1980s as a student at Michael Wallace Elementary School in Nova Scotia. My mom and baby brother dropped me off ahead of class so I could score some playground time.   When ten kids from the “big kid” side of the playground encircled me, I assumed they liked my jacket too. (Maybe one of them wanted to be my wingman, Goose?) The looming figures were sneering and laughing, but some of them were looking away too. There was at least one girl among them, but the rest were boys. Into the circle they shoved another kid; his skin was lighter than mine but darker than theirs. I didn’t like the heavy feeling in my body, so I tried to run. Faces blurred with hands and arms, shoving me back into the center, and although I was desperately searching for them, I couldn’t catch anyone’s eyes. Me and the other Other looked at each other, trapped in this disorienting forcefield, and it slowly dawned on us that we were expected to fight like caged animals for their amusement.   Twenty-seven years later, I was invited to interview for a job at Dalhousie University. I couldn’t believe my luck, not least of all because I assumed I had totally blown the first online interview because of my roommate’s ornate but excessively large bong in the background.   “We’ll need you to give us a teaching demonstration based on whatever is being covered in class the week of your interview,” the chair of the hiring committee told me.   “No problem!” I responded.   The class was called “Halifax in the World,” a first-year course with an auditorium full of undergraduate students, and the topic of the week was African Nova Scotian history. This was a subject I knew nothing about, trained as I was in the international relations of Asia generally and colonial state formation in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka more specifically.   Problem.    1 Ajay Parasram is a transnational, multigenerational by-product of empire. He sells his labour as an Associate Professor in the departments of International Development Studies and History, Dalhousie University, Kjipuktuk (Halifax). parasram@dal.ca / @A_Parasram                                                                                                                                     Ajay Parasram  8 I had the weekend to prepare, but I was also prepping my own class in Ottawa and had just come off another job interview in a totally unrelated field. Typical ABD hustle.   On Tuesday morning, I nursed my Canada Dry Club Soda and tried to pretend like I was comfortable making notes in an airplane seat. I was doing the readings for the class I was about to lecture to. I learned that the African Nova Scotian man, William Hall, was the first person of African ancestry in the British Empire to win the Victoria Cross for bravery, but it was where he won it that kept me tapping on the side of the Canada Dry can. He won his medal during the First War of Indian Independence in 1857. The article was written by my future colleague, Isaac Saney:   Transfixed between the British command behind him and the Indian freedom fighters in front of him, Hall stays at his post, repeatedly firing his cannon until a fortress wall is breached, allowing the British troops to enter. While rewarded for his heroism, Hall eventually dies penniless and forgotten. What is often ignored in accounts of Hall’s life is the striking and sad irony of one subject people being used against another.2    The turbulence at 37,000 feet jolted me out of the article, and I spilled my rationed club soda on Saney’s article. The “irony of one subject people being used against another” was a foundational irony for me as a descendant of Indian indentured labourers in Trinidad, where I later learned Saney also hailed from.   Sighing, I looked out the window to see the evidence of the old seigneurial system of land distribution marking so-called “New France.” The land was neatly carved into straight lines, each property touching the river. Colonizers could never understand the complexity and interdependence of what they called nature and sought to bring their kind of imported order to land that wasn’t theirs to order. Colonial international relations have scarred every corner of this territory, and it is dramatically visible 37,000 feet above the province of Quebec. I closed the window shade and tried to return to the Saney text. The paper was saturated with Canada Dry and unreadable. Sigh.   My mind drifted back to the battle at Lucknow, and to a chain of events that led me to my Maverick day in elementary school in 1989. I thought about my ancestors, penniless and without English language, marking their X on the indentureship papers that took them across the kala pani and anchored them to sugar plantations in Kairi, or what the lost Spaniard Columbus insisted was Trinidad. The earliest indentured Indians came long before the battle at Lucknow during the first war of Independence — the British East India Company that preceded the formal British Raj in India had a long head start in the underdevelopment and de-industrialization of the subcontinent. What little I know of my ancestors tells me that they couldn’t possibly have crossed over until the 1860s.    2 Isaac Saney, “The Black Nova Scotian odyssey: a chronology” Race and Class 40 no.1 (1998): 78 - 91. Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 7-9   9 As I struggled to think about how to perform my teaching assignment, it struck me as significant that in 1989, 132 years after William Hall was coerced to lay siege to Lucknow, someone who could very well be his descendent was coerced to lay siege to me, someone who could very well be descended from those who fought the British in 1857.   Later that day, as I stood in front of the auditorium to lecture, I thought again of when my reluctant African-Nova Scotian opponent landed his first blow to the cheers of the all-white cell that had trapped us. His fist carried the strength of William Hall, my gut crumbled like the walls in Lucknow, and in 1857 and 1989 the African and the Indian were forced to fight for the enjoyment of the European.   Before my unwilling sparring partner could land a second blow, my mother had emerged to intercept the beating, dressed in a robe and slippers from our wood-panelled minivan. The mother of four non-white boys in Canada, she knew no one but her was looking out for us and always stayed until the bell rang and the kids entered the school. She took us both to the principal’s office and asked him what he intended to do about it. “Boys will be boys,” he told my mother.   Refusing to accept this explanation, my mother called my father at work. He stormed out of his workplace at the CBC and caught enough buses to get him to the school to educate the principal on multiculturalism, liberal pluralism, and the need to confront racism directly. (We were an immigrant family studying for the citizenship exam so the enormous gap between Canada on paper and Canada as a lived experience was always front and centre for us.) The principal met these points with a shrug and an invitation to join the Parent Teacher Association. So my father did, and then he drafted and introduced a Multiculturalism policy framework for the Dartmouth School Board in a year’s time. Based on my younger brother’s experiences growing up a few years after me, it’s clear they didn’t do much to implement the policies, but my parents made sure the school board couldn’t pretend they didn’t know.   I always see in my parents the fierceness of generations of anticolonial struggle, even if they wouldn’t phrase it that way. My mother is like Malcom X and my father like Martin Luther King Jr, or to draw analogy with the subcontinent from which we originate, my mother is like Bhagat Singh and my father more like Mohandas Gandhi. The courage to act in the now and the wisdom to do it strategically.   This colonial knot of imperial relations folded together William Hall, his could-be descendent, myself, and my could-be ancestors, while connecting the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries in Halifax and Lucknow. That’s the only story I could tell during that lecture at Dalhousie.   Just the other day, I asked my mother if she remembered. She did, but from her vantage point, she only remembered that me and the African-Nova Scotian kid fought. Although she’d have had to charge right through that forcefield of whiteness to reach us in the moment, the white kids drifted into the margins -- that invisible space that borders and imprisons narrative -- leaving two troubled kids to be disciplined.  

Seeing Whiteness in the Margins

Shepherd, Laura J.

Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 31-34   You Cannot Measure Spring Laura J. Shepherd1   We had a memoir by Joan Baez in my house growing up, titled And a Voice to Sing With, and an open bookshelf policy. I read the memoir when I was maybe eleven or twelve, the same summer that I read Brazzaville Beach (boring, I concluded, not realising that understanding all the words was not the same thing as understanding the story) and the entire collection of Dick Francis thrillers from the lowest shelf in the cold little room at the foot of the stairs that would become my bedroom many years later, when I thought distance meant independence. I don’t remember much about Baez’s story, but the title of the book stayed with me; it is drawn from a poem by e. e. cummings, and it was the first time I recall feeling the magnetism of a poem, feeling it drawing my thoughts and my heart back over and over. The verse from which the title came was printed on the flyleaf of the book and I read it, in thrall, again and again.   While you and I have lips and voices which are for kissing, and to sing with who cares if one some-eyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring with?2  I am sure that part of the poem’s attraction was the allusion to kissing and the casual use of profanity; I was the age at which these seemed both mildly thrilling and within the realm of the possible, which increased the appeal. But it was the idea of an instrument to measure Spring with that I turned over in my mind in random moments. I imagined this instrument like a pair of compasses, silver and sharply pointed, hinged open to measure the unmeasurable, because Spring was the noise of the wood pigeons nested in the eves of the house, the damp grassy smell of the garden, a soft blue light on sleepless anxiety. Spring was daffodils and bluebells on verges and in copses, the promise of hot days sticky with syrup from over-sugared ice-lollies, summer holidays, and the lonely ache of freedom. How can that be measured?   I felt softly interpellated by cummings’s poem at eleven when I first read it and I feel that way still: “you and I have lips and voices”, he wrote, and I feel my way into the position of “you”, because I was never going to be among the one-eyed sons of bitches inventing implements of measurement, abstraction, and rule. And yet, thirty-something years later, it is these whom I  1 Laura J. Shepherd is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her primary research focuses on the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security agenda, and the motifs of gender, violence, and security that animate it. Laura is author/editor of several books, including, most recently Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Logics of Global Governance (Oxford University Press, 2021), and New Directions in Women, Peace and Security (edited with Soumita Basu and Paul Kirby; Bristol University Press, 2020). She tweets from @drljshepherd. 2 e. e. cummings, ‘voices to voices, lip to lip … (XXXIII)’. Online, at www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/voices-to-voiceslip-to-lip-xxxiii/.    Laura J. Shepherd  32  serve. Contemporary academia, at least the manifestations of it with which I am familiar – in Australia, the UK, North America – seems to care not for kissing and song. It is, increasingly, a world in which we are required to measure the unmeasurable, to account for “output” and “impact” along with dollars of grant income and numbers of publications, which are more easily quantified and thus stand as an estimation of value. As if value can fit in the cell of a spreadsheet. Over the last two decades, academics in social science disciplines have learned how to measure Spring, and we are the poorer for it. This is not an individualised problem, even as it is a problem that individualises us; it is part of a broader shift towards “a quality assurance-driven audit culture”3 within the academy, a recalibration of the structures within which we operate that now cohere identifiably as “the neoliberal university”.4   While neoliberalism is a slippery concept for those of all political persuasions, its manifestation in the university setting revolves around “corporatisation, metrification, and performance-based funding models”, motivated by the desire to secure a greater share of the global market in student enrolments than proximate competitors, based on “consumer preferences”.5 These processes are themselves driven by economic scarcity as much as (in tandem with) ideology, a result of the systematic defunding of public universities by successive governments in Australia and the UK and presumably elsewhere; “the market turn has transformed universities from being a cooperating set of public sector agencies, to being a hybrid and fragmented industry of contractors to the state”.6 We are subjected to, and subjectified by, the will to measure within the institutional walls of this industry – and now within the walls of our own homes, and coffee shops, and libraries; our labour is extracted in ways that intruded into previously “private” spaces (though this distinction was always tenuous for many), gradually and then all at once with the “work from home” directives issued at the onset of the covid-19 pandemic.7 Every academic is a fungible unit, vulnerable to market trends, and every academic is conditioned by demands for constant availability (though again, these demands are unevenly distributed, with pressures felt most keenly by the precariously and temporarily employed).  The will to measure is exerted in hundreds of different ways throughout the career of every academic.  “[N]eoliberal apparatuses of the university work to construct our selves as lacking. We lack the qualities of a ‘good’ teacher according to our student evaluations, we lack the qualities of a ‘good’ researcher according to the metrics that quantify our inputs and outputs, we lack an Australian Research Council grant, we lack a publication in a ‘Tier 1’ journal, we lack tenure, we lack a promotion, we lack the ability to cross the country for a conference, we are voids. There are huge gaping holes in our credibilities as academics and we spend our days and nights, hours and hours, trying to plug up the holes, trying to stuff them with the cotton wool stuffing of appeasement, of reassurance,  3 Briony Lipton and Elizabeth Mackinlay, We Only Talk Feminist Here: Feminist Academics, Voice and Agency in the Neoliberal University. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017, 6. 4 Ibid., passim.  5 Lipton and Mackinlay, We Only Talk Feminist Here, 6. 6 Raewyn Connell, The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change. London: Zed, 2019, 137. 7 Margaret Thornton, ‘Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life’, Legalities, 2021, 1(1): 44–67, 46. Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 31-34  33 endlessly completing futile and empty tasks, searching for that moment of completeness, of success.”8  My colleagues and I are less than the sum of our parts, always, as we are reduced and managed and made manageable by these technologies of administration; we are lessened by this bankrupt process of accounting. There is rarely more of our selves to give, to account for, to express, and yet we are never contained by the measures favoured by our managers. Our productivity, our performance, is assumed to translate with ease into fields within annual planning and development forms, percentages of student satisfaction, numbers of outputs and citations to those outputs, but how can they quantify the act of kindness that fosters community, the expression of solidarity that reduces isolation and individualisation, the fulfilment of home-baked muffins brought to nourish colleagues through another endless meeting?  I have always been fierce about making myself visible in my written work. I want to be visible in the text because I am the author, I do not wish to hide my self because I am interwoven in every decision that produced the words on the page in the configuration that they are in. It brings to mind for me Donna Haraway and her deliberation on situated knowledge, in which she posits that recognising our positionality in research “allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see”.9 I sit with this emphasis on accountability often, and it guides me in the placement and revelation of my self in my research. Recently, however, I have worked on visibility in different ways, ways that are not always straightforward and are most often quite terrifying, given – as touched on above – how precarious the fiction that any of us are irreplaceable in the neoliberal university.   And I have worked this visibility, this vulnerability, from both sides. I have been an instrument, worn the threadbare mantle of “leadership” in a previous role, and I am flooded with the coppery taste of shame when I recall my complicity with the fictions of measurements that were wielded to discipline: I have – pseudo-respectfully, and with a smile – quieted dissenting voices raised in resistance, if not in song; and I have advocated for forms of measurement that increased vulnerability, precarity, the potential for harm, from which I myself was carefully insulated. I have benefited from this system and I have turned it against others.   I have made somewhat different choices this year. Perhaps there are shadows of atonement in my efforts now, in the acts that reveal my uncertainty, my own vulnerability, the tenuous hold that I have on coherence and stability in this environment, at the same time as I know my white skin and my title afford me privilege that makes risks less risky for me than for some colleagues. And so: it is my turn to create and hold space for others, into which they can step forward; it is my obligation to use the privilege I have accrued to hold managers accountable, as best I can, for the damaging effects of their disavowal of shared humanity; it is my intention to listen and amplify those voices raised in resistance, in song.  8 Eileen Honan, Linda Henderson, and Sarah Loch. ‘Producing Moments of Pleasure within the Confines of an Academic Quantified Self’. Creative Approaches to Research, 2015, 8(3): 44-62, 47. 9 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 1988, 14(3): 575-599, 583.    Laura J. Shepherd  34   In the face of ongoing and relentless efforts to maximise our productivity and minimise our selves, putting effort instead into building circles of care is an act of radical resistance. Coming back again and again to the acts of kindness, the expressions of solidarity, the nourishment and nurturing which counters the numbness and the numbers grounds me, and brings me joy. “There are moments, cracks and fissures, tiny spaces where we produce pleasure, when desire is released from the restricted codes of the academy” 10 and where instead of cells and fields and proclamations of peerless performance my colleagues and I find ways to connect, and be held, in relation. “Joy is a word not often spoken about today’s market-oriented universities. But there should be joy in learning, in making knowledge, in solving problems, in sharing”; joy is in the connection, the community, the space between us that connects us and that we share.11 “Spaces where we can ‘talk feminist’ are often spaces for repair, for healing wounds, for reflection and vulnerability”, 12 in which I connect with my collaborators, spaces in which we remain alive to violence and exclusion and in which we nonetheless hold each other. We hold each other, imperfectly: hold each other up, and to account, and in light. We work as though people matter. When asked what we have produced, we cannot – dare not – answer: our selves; each other; love. When asked how our productivity can be measured, we cannot – dare not – answer: it cannot. Your spreadsheet cannot contain my heart. You cannot measure Spring.   The audacity of that one-eyed son of a bitch.   10 Honan, Henderson, and Loch. ‘Producing Moments of Pleasure’, 52. 11 Connell, The Good University, 165. 12 Briony Lipton and Elizabeth Mackinlay, We Only Talk Feminist Here: Feminist Academics, Voice and Agency in the Neoliberal University, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017, 104. 

You Cannot Measure Spring

Edkins, Jenny

  Vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 74-80 	74   It’s May 2021   Jenny Edkins1   It’s May 2021. India is in chaos. My twitter feed is filled with pleas from families seeking hospital beds and oxygen supplies for dying relatives. Images of closely-built pyres in cremation grounds in Delhi make their way around the world.   Britain sends a few hundred pieces of equipment. Pakistan offers more. In the UK over 60% of the adult population has received one jab; 16 million are fully vaccinated. In India, centre of vaccine manufacture, the figure is around 10%.   I find I can’t bring myself to let my thoughts go there.   -oOo-  It’s February 2020. I’m watching what’s happening in China. Vast construction projects to build hospitals overnight. Huge cities quarantined with no one let in or out, though a coachload of Brits are returned to the UK and quarantined here. Medics wrapped head to toe in white hazmat suits.   Then Italy. Chaos. Hospitals overwhelmed. Decisions about who to treat. Rows of trucks outside waiting to take the bodies away. The whole of Lombardy cordoned off. It is clear that this could come to us, in the UK, and that we aren’t doing anything about it.   It’s week three of the online poetry course I started at the beginning of the month. The course is about the climate crisis, a follow-on to one, last autumn, on political poetry. My February attempt goes like this:  	1	Jenny	Edkins	is	Professor	of	Politics	at	the	University	of	Manchester.	Her	recent	publications	include	Change	and	the	Politics	of	Certainty	(Manchester	University	Press,	2019),	available	on	open	access,	and	a	co-edited	collection	of	essays,	images	and	poems	from	scholars,	artists	and	activists	entitled	After	Grenfell:	Violence,	Resistance	and	Response	(Pluto	Press,	2019).	Her	focus,	aside	from	her	own	research,	is	on	collaborative	ventures	that	make	space	for	innovative	approaches	and	bring	together	those	engaged	in	developing	them,	including	the	Gregynog	Ideas	Lab	and	the	Routledge	book	series	Interventions.	*I thank Helen Eastman and Rebecca Hare at Live Canon, Joanne Limburg, and my fellow writers for nurturing these draft poems, Owain Williams for inviting me to write for his Covid-19 Diaries, and Kandida Purnell, Amy Cortvriend, Naeem Inayatullah, Paulo Ravecca and Elizabeth Dauphinee for reading earlier drafts. 				       Jenny Edkins   		 75 To every thing there is a season February 2020  It’s bleak still out there. The rain hasn’t stopped for weeks. Shrewsbury is under water, the river risen for the second time this month  to fill basements and drown cars. The trains are cancelled, the line to Aberystwyth cut off.  Storms have brought the beach onto the prom again. Gusts tear branches from street trees. Shops are deserted, bar a few muffled figures braced against the wind seeking what shelter they can find from the sting of hailstones.  But look: in the garden,  as if it were a year like any other, the stasis of winter yields to change. Day by day the daffodils show more yellow, buds appear on the snowberry and tiny young leaves on the cherry are already showing green.  And see: on the streets, even as we despair, a new generation calls for action. Month by month their voices grow louder, their demands we listen more insistent and their calls for fresh beginnings already point the way.  Summer will come, a half-forgotten time of fruitfulness and bounty  as season follows season in its turn. Take inspiration from the earth: turn, turn away from lines of progress, lay down the dream of never-ending growth,  and listen to the signs of what’s to come.  -oOo-  It’s March 2020, and bar washing our hands for twenty seconds while singing ‘Happy Birthday’, we don’t seem to be noticing what’s happening. Or rather, we do, we the people. On 12 March, I cancel a guest lecture: the chair is worried about vulnerable relatives. And I am doubtful about the three-hour train journey. On 13 March the Journal of Narrative Politics Vol. 7 (2)			76 football stops, and on 17 March universities go online. All this well before our government acts. And when it does, it’s as if it doesn’t hear the urgency in what the WHO is saying, or see what is being done elsewhere. We are special, superior. World-leading in everything: we will be fine. Not like everyone else.   But we are like everyone else, we are just as vulnerable, and when they come our deaths just as horrific. I despair. Poetry seems impossible. My March poem speaks of the shock of an altered reality:  And a time for every purpose under heaven March 2020  How to write  when nothing is certain, when everything has changed  but looks the same?  Spring has arrived in the garden: the daffodils nearly over,  blossom out on the snowberry, bluebells ready to appear, the cherry in full leaf,  and sunshine and blue skies  replacing the rain.  How to write  when time itself has stopped, when imagining the future  is impossible?   On the streets, silence: wild animals return to wander in city deserts of concrete and stone;  goats loose in Llandudno, swans on water running clear for the first time in years and air so pure it hurts.  How to write  when people are dying alone,  fighting for breath, drowning in their own blood?  Summer will come and go, as in other years, but who will pick the strawberries or gather fruit from the orchards; who will prepare the funeral flowers and who will comfort those who mourn? 		       Jenny Edkins   		 77  -oOo-  It’s April now. April in lockdown. Here in Aberystwyth, a small coastal town at the end of the train line and two hours from a motorway in all directions, the plague reaches us slowly. Ceredigion Council sets up its own track and trace system early on. Cases here are kept low, deaths too. We obey the rules, stay at home. Rainbows appear in windows, drawn by children kept indoors. On Thursdays at eight in the evening, the town echoes to the clap for carers and people chat from their doorsteps.   In the rest of the UK, deaths rise. Spectacular Nightingale Hospitals are built, to rival those in Wuhan perhaps, though with no idea what they should be used for. Test, track and isolate is stopped. Hospital staff hastily but efficiently reorganise the wards themselves. They can see what’s coming if no-one else can. I write my anger into my next poem:  Wash your hands: a song of coronavirus After Bob Hicok2  The pandemic is coming but we’re not seeing deaths here yet. When we’ve got more cases we’ll do something. When we’re gasping for breath. When we’ve decided between saving  the economy or people’s lives.  When there aren’t enough ventilators or happy birthdays to cover  everyone. When the science says we should. When people  are dying. When white people with no underlying conditions are dying. We’ll build Nightingales  and ICUs, put proper PPE on our dead doctors and nurses,  lock up anyone who goes out for a walk, paint rainbows in our windows, we’ll become immune, we’ll go  bodiless. At the right time.  I write a blog about how deaths are being disappeared.3 Deaths recorded as Alzheimer’s by those who certify them but haven’t seen the patient. It was probably 	2	Bob	Hicok,	‘Hold	your	breath:	A	song	of	climate	change’.	New	York	Times	Sunday	Magazine,	26	August	2018,	17.	https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/magazine/hold-your-breath-a-song-of-climate-change.html	3	Jenny	Edkins,	‘Disappeared	deaths’,	Covid-19	Diaries,	15	April	2020,	https://covid19healthdiaries.com/diary?did=124	Journal of Narrative Politics Vol. 7 (2)			78 Covid, but it won’t count. People dying out of sight of family, with no vigil at the bedside, no last words, no viewing the body, no proper funeral, no visitors afterwards with their condolences.    Here in Aber, we settle into a routine, a different tempo. The weather is kind as I take my daily walk:  Exercise  April 2020  Sun on my back as I climb, breathless but breathing, the town laid out below, no-one up here but me.  Each day greener than the last, backlit branches I should admire on my steep way down.  A town held in the palm of the hills, face to the sea, worlds from danger, holding its distance.  A cyclist sweeps past; someone follows me  down into the cemetery: I wait to let them by.  Separated by a sliver, graves lie close, slate headstones ranked  shoulder to shoulder.  In the park a woman switches paths to avoid me. We smile at each other and the strangeness.  Avenues of trees in full, glorious leaf arch ahead to who knows what summer may come.  The seven-thirty pulls out empty into the stillness; crows flap upwards, silence settles back.  		       Jenny Edkins   		 79 A toy lost two days ago under the steel fence is gone, the path clear as it narrows.  In the playing field a solitary figure kicking ball against concrete pauses for me to pass.  Greetings unspoken, I head home. Today’s tally: one cyclist, three walkers,  nine hundred dead.  -oOo-  It’s May, and lockdown continues. It’s sinking in, the horror. And I’m realising what we’ve lost. What I’ve lost. Realising what it means when history strikes—to those of us who’ve been immune to its impact before. And what it means to mourn.  A time to mourn May 2020   We mourn as the numbers rise—inexorably, unnecessarily, unforgivably—weighed down by an all-consuming fury.  We mourn each other’s loss, each loss compounded by absence, each tale of video farewells and foregone funerals.  We are neither herds nor heroes—we are wise to the lies and worse: the discrimination, the inequalities, the heartlessness.  We do not mourn our lost freedom, our meals out, our days lingering over coffee, though we miss them all.  We mourn a deeper loss—of being-with, of gentle touch, of hugs in this time of grief, of anger, disbelief and searing pain.   We are learning, we who have not seen such hurt before, that we alone are each other’s comfort. We shall not forget.  -oOo-  It’s August 2020 now, and I still can’t shake Covid from my writing. The bitterness and the anger remain. They re-emerge in another poem. I’m responding to a prompt about rhyme in another course. I struggle to find something to write about. I try various words—‘trace’ and ‘missing’—in the rhyming dictionary, with no success. Then I try ‘screen’: we seem to spend so much time either on them or behind them at Journal of Narrative Politics Vol. 7 (2)			80 the moment. This throws up many rhymes, and some surprising ones. I write this draft:  Strange times  Covid-19 times unforeseen times hunker down at home times meet and greet on screen times two week quarantine times scramble for a vaccine times hygiene and deep clean times when will this be over times obscene dream times silent scream times  -oOo-  I’ve not written about Covid since then, I realise now. I don’t follow what’s happening closely any more. And so much is still happening.  My thoughts go to writings on collective trauma. Disasters that bring people together, a community of those with shared experience—experience others cannot comprehend. Disasters like floods, fires, contaminated water, nuclear accidents or landslides, their aftermath written about by Lucy Easthope, Kai Erikson, Daniel Renwick, and others.4   A memorial wall appears next to the Thames in London. Volunteers brought together by a group of relatives of the dead fighting for justice have painted 150,000 hearts. But it doesn’t feel like a community disaster. Perhaps that’s what’s so horrific about it.   People dying in isolation from family. Funerals by video link. Farewells on FaceTime. Bodies triple-wrapped in body bags.   As for those of us not directly affected, we are separated by circumstance. Some retain job and income, some are furloughed, others laid off with no prospect of return. Some happy to stay at home or mask-up, others for whom home is not a place of comfort or safety, key workers forced to shoulder the risk.   ‘We’re all in this together’ has been the ubiquitous mantra. But we’re not, are we? 	4	Lucy	Easthope,	The	Recovery	Myth:	The	Plans	and	Situated	Realities	of	Post-Disaster	Response.	Palgrave,	2018;	Kai	Erikson,	A	New	Species	of	Trouble:	The	Human	Experience	of	Modern	Disasters.	New	York:	W.	W.	Norton,	1994;	Daniel	Renwick,	"Organising	on	Mute."	In	After	Grenfell:	Violence,	Resistance	and	Response,	edited	by	Dan	Bulley,	Jenny	Edkins,	and	Nadine	El-Enany,	19-46.	London:	Pluto,	2019.	

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