Nothing is normal and you’re angry, scared, exhausted…on repeat every day. Karen and Kel talk about our new emotional landscape and accepting where you are right now, in the face of so much suffering and fear. Whatever you’re doing: it’s enough.
Karen and Kel launch the new project of revisiting our core job market advice with an eye to its gaps around racism and the experience of BIPOC scholars. We begin with the first section of the Professor Is In book, which discusses the “big lie” of graduate school. We dive into all the ways that graduate admissions and graduate training privilege whiteness and marginalize Black scholars and other scholars of color. We question what the current uprisings mean for campuses and whether meaningful change can actually happen. While as white people we cannot know what it’s like to be a BIPOC scholar in the academy, to the best of our ability we will search out places where we can correct prior gaps, silences, or misinformation around issues of race and racism. ...
When Karen gave the advice, “stop acting like a grad student,” she was working from a model grad student in her mind who, it turns out when she gave it a bit more thought, was a white male. In today’s episode, Karen and Kel dig into that normative model, and talk about all the ways that the advice on how a job seeker “needs to act” needs to be complicated to account for people who come from different subject positions and are viewed through different racist lenses. Advice about “thinking your department is out to get you” for example, needs to reflect that for many grad students of color, the department really is out to get you. ...
Recorded prior to the #BLM moment, this episode talks about planning for Fall 2020 in the new COVID world. It’s almost impossible to plan when everything feels so up in the air, and transitioning through the frantic effort of moving classes and life online, to summer, and then on to Fall prep, has been profoundly destabilzing for almost everyone. As you look ahead, know that above all, you need rest. Karen and Kel talk about how you can’t stop on a dime, though–you might need to plan the resting…. scheduling time to slow down, and let your nervous system unwind. So don’t feel weird about scheduling your rest, and also don’t be surprised if feelings of rage and fury rise up as your frantic hyper-defense mechanisms click off. ...
