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Opening
Session: Friday,
October 12 -- 8:30-9:30 a.m. We want to welcome
and thank all of you who have come here today for your courage and commitment.
We wish to begin by offering you an overview of what it is we propose
to do here together. The Ph.D. in Women's Studies is both a culmination
and a beginning. It is a culmination of the formal integration in North
America of Women's Studies as a field into institutions of higher learning.
It is a beginning because its academic, professional, research, pedgagogical
and political implications are just |
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| Opening
Session: Friday,
October 12 -- 8:30-9:30 a.m. Part II: Why Are We Here -- A Chorus of Voices As Sally just said, the members of the organizing committee and the conference participants come from many different kinds of institutions and academic backgrounds. To begin our conversation today, we wanted to open with a "chorus of voices" drawn from the thoughts of the organizing committee and the participants. What follows is an edited collection and selection of what we all said about why we wanted to be here and about the contributions, questions, struggles, challenges, hopes and expectations we bring – for ourselves, each other and our common conversation:
As an early graduate of a women's studies PhD program I have a vested interest in our conversation both personally and on behalf of my peer group and also because I have experiential knowledge to bring to the table. The "newness" of the women's studies PhD means I am somewhat of a "curiosity"– in one sense because some people get excited about the possibilities I represent but sometimes in another sense because people don't take me seriously. I continue to struggle with the desire for respect and "solidity" that accompanies disciplinarity, but remain committed to an interdisciplary model for our field. It seems ironic that women's studies which has been so committed to the centrality of a strong theoretical grounding now doesn't seem to know quite what a women's studies PhD is "about." As a community college faculty member and a woman of color, I hope to take back to my institution information about how PhD programs in the field of women's studies are addressing issues of difference in terms of curriculum, teacher training, and research. A majority of the students in women's studies at my institution are students of color, so reconstructing the field so that the concerns of women of different races, ethnicities, classes, sexual orientations, nations and physical abilities is at the core rather than the margins is essential for the teaching and learning of our community college students. I am hoping this conference will help make this intellectual orientation a reality. As a faculty member in an elite doctoral institution, I find the definition and practice of feminist methods within such an institution of higher education a constant challenge. The cloak of a "PhD granting women's studies Department" makes it more difficult yet more necessary to consider how women's studies both constitutes and challenges the hierarchies expressed by such codes as "Research I," particularly as we select our faculties and students with increasing attention to race, ethnicity and class. As a joint-appointed black lesbian, I continually wonder how we balance the demands of pedagogy, student advising and mentoring, scholarship, community service, health and personal life? What are the implications of the PhD for this already difficult balancing act? As a faculty member in a large MA program, it isn't likely that I will ever teach doctoral students, but our program is a feeder to women's studies PhD programs and continues to attract students whose ambition is to earn the women's studies PhD. Ours is a program with many tenure track lines and my hope is that it will become a home for students coming out of PhD programs. So, I care greatly about what those students are learning–the curricular, theories and methodologies that are shaping that next generation of women's studies scholars. As a senior faculty member in a research institution, I see the creation of the women's studies Ph.D. as a watershed in the fields history. As the number of majors and minors grow and new departments are established, we need qualified people to teach these students and run these departments. WE need viable places for B.A.s and M.A.s to take their degrees and a PhD should be one of those places. The new generation of scholars these programs are producing do not simply borrow from different fields of study but rework discipline based sources into altogether new methodological frameworks. I find this intellectually exciting. Now we need a good common understanding of what the PhD is both as a course of study and a professional career path. As a women's studies director in a liberal arts college, I wonder what the PhD will mean for undergraduate programs. women's studies has been unusual in its 30 year history in that the knowledge and practices in the field–especially as an interdisciplinary enterprise-- have been largely defined within undergraduate programs. Coming from an institution that will never have a PhD, I wonder what the PhD will mean for my program, my students, for the curriculum that I teach and the faculty we hire in the future. As someone committed to science and technical fields, I am interested in bringing that knowledge into the PhD. It has seemed to me that women's studies interdisciplinarity usually stops at the borders of scientific and technical fields. As a faculty member teaching in a PhD program, I find teaching the foundational seminars a difficult challenge, as the course attempts to provide the entry-level graduate student with a thorough interdisciplinary introduction to the field by exploring the problematics and analytics of women's studies work. I wonder how to train interdisciplinary women's studies scholars without reproducing eclecticism and theoretical arrogance and how to teach graduate students to read and evaluate theory and to ground, epistemologically and methodologically, their own methods of inquiry when they have no disciplinary identity outside of women's studies. As a first year graduate student in a women's studies program, I have committed my life's work to the discipline of women's studies and to creating positive change in the lives of women through teaching and research. I am a re-entry student, a woman of color, concerned with the low number of African-American women in women's studies advanced degree programs. This disparity has the potential for posing serious implications for the future of women's studies in terms of representation and multiple perspectives. As a student in a joint degree program, I am interested in how the requirements in such programs are in tension with or complementary to feminist activism. Is a joint PhD program more conducive to "interdisciplinary activism" than an English doctoral program would be? As a scholar of Native American Studies, my work reminds me that the women's studies PhD must acknowledge on a curricular and theoretical level the significance of multiple identities in addition to gender. How, for instance, can a women's studies PhD program train students to negotiate the complexities and variations within the category "woman"? As a women's studies faculty member who has just returned from spending time at a university in Uganda, I now believe that building partnerships between first world and third world women's studies programs is an urgent and mutually beneficial task. Given the accelerating momentum of globalization, I think such partnerships are of relevance, both intellectually and materially, to women's studies PhD programs. As someone who started teaching women's studies in 1978, who has been a full-time women's studies faculty member ever since and is now tenured in a PhD granting program, I am here to help shepherd the field that has constituted my professional life toward its destiny as a doctoral granting field, particularly to think about the significance of doctoral education in women's studies for research on women and gender. How will the new research connect and interact with research on women and gender in traditional disciplines? What new problems and discoveries will doctoral education in women's studies bring to our attention? Will the new doctorates allow us to synthesize research processes and results in new ways? Will they make a difference in public attitudes and policies concerning women? As an instructor in women's studies in a comprehensive university with a women's studies PhD, I'm aware that most of us taking doctorates in this field would never get jobs in the type of institutions in which we were trained, in part due to structures and strictures of programs vs. departments. What does it say when PhD programs are turning out scholars that they would never be able to hire? As a student who entered a women's studies PhD program in its first-year of operation, I have watched the program struggle with the challenge of "disciplining" a program of study that is in many ways, as Wendy Brown reminds us, "impossible." This process has uncovered myriad questions about the foundational philosophies on which women's studies rests. I have wrestled with representing the subject(s) of women's studies in my classes and in my work, with (re)producing a women's studies canon and what such a canon ought to look like, with gathering knowledge about interdisciplinarity and resistant methodologies that are somehow coherently particular to women's studies, and with my own role as an interdisciplinary student of a particular kind. As a faculty member in a graduate program, I talk to students about their careers. They worry that they will not be able to find an academic job. I wonder how effectively we have incorporated experiential learning and internships in women's studies graduate education? Have we explored this possibility? Do we intend a women's studies PhDs only to prepare students to teach in women's studies programs? If not, how are we shaping the curricular to train our students for other careers as well? As someone who is part of the generation that created women's studies, I believe that the future of the field is in the PhD programs. I did my scholarship within the traditional disciplines and though I have moved far beyond its boundaries, I don't believe that I will be taking the next steps to create new ways to shape women's studies. That will be the role of scholars and teachers who are starting within interdisciplinary women's studies and will determine its future direction. I want to be part of that dialogue between past and future. As a women's studies
PhD and current women's studies faculty member, I want to know how the
Women's studies PhD can or does help to reshape the academy and society?
I want to know if and how the Women's studies PhD contributes to reshaping
the academy as a site of liberatory thought? If the women's studies
PhD does not or cannot participate in this endeavor, I want to know
why? Are there elements of the field or of its pedagogical practices
that reinforce exclusion or favor hierarchy or reinforce existing power
structures? How can the field imagine or reimagine itself to counter
these elements and be a force for social change? |
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| Diversity
Panel: Friday, October 12, 2001 -- 12:00 Imagining Our Way Together (Inez Martinez) Good Afternoon. I was making little headway preparing these remarks when I had a dream. In this dream a number of women I know, a rainbow of feminists, were sitting around talking. They were one after another agreeing that they were disappointed with the graduate education they received. I had to admit that I was, too. Of course I don't think my dream captures the universal experience of feminists who have received graduate education in America. It just gave me a clue about what aspect of my experience I could offer today that might be useful. As I ruminated the next few days over why I had been disappointed in my graduate education, I happened on a passage from Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, and Reflections that I'd like to share with you. Jung is narrating his encounter with a Native American from New Mexico: [In Taos] for the first time I had the good fortune to talk with a non-European, that is, to a non-white. He was a chief of the Taos Pueblos, an intelligent man between the ages of forty and fifty. His name was Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake). . . ."See," Ochwiay said, "how cruel the whites look. . . . Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think they are mad." I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad. "They say that they think with their heads," he replied. "Why of course. What do you think with?" I asked him in surprise. "We think here," he said, indicating his heart." I can not claim to be a blood Pueblo although I may in fact be so blessed, nor do I claim that Ochwiay Biano's words represent the beliefs of the Pueblo. In fact, one point I want to stress about diversity is that no writer or thinker is representative of any whole group because no whole group is homogenous in its beliefs nor timebound in its culture. Nevertheless what Ochwiay says about identifying knowing with what happens in our heads seems to me the source of my disappointment with my graduate education. I can't tell you how validated I feel when I read of research that indicates that knowing occurs in other areas of the body, such as the research showing that our intestines have a number of cells like those in our brains, making sense to me of such linguistic habits as attributing a cognitive status to "gut feelings." Regardless of any biological grounds for extending the source of knowing beyond our brains to other parts of the body, I have since childhood found my most numinous moments of understanding accompanied by my imagination, my feelings, my body, and a sense that what I was grasping could lead to change-in me and often in the world. By imagination I mean the psychological capacity to create images of and emotionally respond to visions and narratives that one has not oneself experienced in the external world. I also mean the arising from within of ideas one has never had before, usually after a period of time of giving attention to a problem or question. These experiences of thinking, imagining, feeling, sensation, and sense of relevance were most powerful in me when I was reading imaginative literature. That is why I wanted to major in literature, teach it, and, if I could, write it. At graduate school, studying imaginative literature was subordinated to learning current critical discourses, each to be discarded when the new intellectual fashion appeared providing new fields of possibility for publications for each emerging generation of professionals. Much was required of the head, but little of the heart or the imagination. Nor was there concern over the effect of what was being learned on either me or on society. Women's Studies began in a context of political movements for social justice-Civil Rights, the anti-war movement, the women's movement. It accordingly distinguished itself from most academic fields in its overt commitment to social changes intended to lead to societies in which women as well as men, and people of all nations, races, and ethnicities could have the opportunity to realize their potential as human beings, societies in which bigotries would be replaced by the harvesting of difference. Here in America, even in our women's studies communities, we have not succeeded in creating such a society-nor has any other people. My question today is how can we educate not only to inform, but actually to transform? To begin to answer this question, I think we need to grasp the psychological dimension of what we are trying to transform. In the last few years, we have seen how historical conflicts-the Balkans, Islam and Christianity, tribal enmities in central Africa, to name a few-do not disappear because of the passing of time or the long enjoyment of victory by one of the parties. Conflicts that are resolved by physical power live on as long as their descendants live on. They live on psychologically, which means both consciously and unconsciously. It is as if conflicts that are not dealt with conscientiously but are stifled by successful impositions of power become cultural embodiments of human stuckness, a level of fixation that will not go away and will not even significantly change until human imagination , consciousness, and conscience intervene in some way to alter the dynamic. The dynamic in its simplist terms consists of you or me, and in its simplist terms must be changed into you and me, a transition that in involves an imaginative, emotional, kinesthetic grasp of the humanity of the other and the actuality of the other's experience. What might such an intervention look like? Totally unpredictable, but one historical example I believe is passive resistance. As members of America's dominant culture with pretensions to conscience watched those crossing racial barriers being viciously beaten, the violence underlying the institutions of racial segregation became inescapably manifest, requiring them to acknowledge the horror of the social policies they were supporting. It worked a moral shift. Imagining such moves requires ideas, but it requires more than ideas. Ideas are necessary, but are not enough. We in America have had access to excellent ideas about how to struggle against racism, ideas put forth by many thinkers. In our own time, women and men of color have pointed us to next steps we could take-perceiving as the outsider within and considering her observations and evaluations as Collins has directed; being willing to endure conflict for its creative possibilities as Lorde has advised; finding the voice within us and not "selling it for a handclap or our name in print" as Anzaldua urges; learning to travel playfully between the worlds of people we have been taught to think of as not real as Lugones explains; trying to learn what it means to think from the heart, as the epistemologist Mountain Lake takes for granted. If we are serious about transforming race relations in the US, I think we must first acknowedge the state of psychological fixation in unresolved historical conflicts. Americans have taken the land that supported the lives of Native Americans. Although Americans have enjoyed the victory of that usurpation for centuries, the fact of it psychologically has not gone away, nor has the fact of the enslavement of people from Africa, nor the displacement of Spanish cultures, themselves products of imperialism, in the American South and Southwest. Memories of these disempowerments persist, I suggest, providing us the challenge of attempting to imagine ways for us to evolve beyond them. All culture has been imagined. Any of it can be reimagined. That is the hope for human psychological evolution. We need to be able to imagine redemptive acts that could lead to transformation of the psychological states remaining from patterns of cultural oppression, including racism. I use the word "imagination" quite purposefully, because I believe such inspirations arise from the unconscious. The destruction of the WTC was an act of realized imagination that is stupefying in its completeness and effectiveness. I suspect that a major cause of the depression that followed for so many of us was the unarticulated sense that our materialistic, rationalistic culture has not psychological force to equal it. It is our challenge as human beings to incubate acts of imagination as redemptive in effect as the attacks on the WTC were expressive of resolution to destroy. The approach most feminist American educators have taken toward education of students' feelings and imaginations has been to try to get them to recognize aspects of their own socialization. There is no suggestion of existing levels of unconscious psyche that we share, that is evolving, that contains unrealized possibilities for human psychological development. Nor are students normally asked to integrate the ideas they're learning into their feelings and imaginations. We don't for a number of reasons: 1) we conceive of knowledge as a matter of intellect, ideation, language; 2) we do not know how to measure learning that occurs in feelings and bodies, so we can't evaluate students in terms of them except, perhaps, in behavior such as their ways of relating with peers and with students they teach. Because the university functions to credential people both as to competencies and as to adequate socialization, we do not institutionalize the teaching of what we can not measure. I can not stress enough how limiting that is. 3) We do not honor the timing rhythms of the body. We ask students to cram in more material and to turn out more work than their bodies, feelings and imaginations have time to integrate. One of my favorite images comes from the I Ching. It portrays a farmer who sneaks out every night to yank at the young plants in order to speed them along. Let me make the obvious point that the restlessness Ochwiay describes prevents the kind of knowing that comes from being still-nurturing the development of our unconscious psyches by taking time for the integration of ideas, feelings, and experience. Can we create programs that give priority to that kind of time? I am suggesting that our approach to knowing is too exclusively heady to transform human atrocities such as racism. I think that this one-sidedness comes from our graduate education's cultural origins in Europe, specifically from the idea of the University developed in Germany that freed intellectual Europeans and their descendants from the domination of religious ideologies. The development of efforts at impartial research proved pivotal to humans' developing more and more technological power. Its focus is too psychologically narrow, however, to have succeeded in helping us grant the space to those different from us to exist and to flower. Women's Studies has in a number of ways distanced itself from that "value-free" aspiration, including by asking students to bring to consciousness the possible social implications of the knowledge they produce. In that sense, it has practiced knowing from the heart. If one is thinking partially from the heart, then one experiences one's thoughts in terms of their possible effects on others. For one thinking from the heart, the issue of social relevance is inescapable. What else might we be able to do within the structures where we work? Answering this question requires ongoing collective efforts, but I can hazard a few suggestions. Although the best way to bring contents of the unconscious to consciousness is reflecting on our dreams, I do not believe that approach can be used in an educational institution. A more workable approach to nurturing students' imaginations is to ask them to study art, particularly imaginative literature, for what it reveals about the unconscious psyche. Also, we could consider accepting products of the imagination as work worthy of degrees. We could insist that theoretical studies be accompanied by fieldwork whenever relevant or possible. We could also nurture the unconscious by structuring our programs so that students have time to integrate their feelings and sensations with their ideas, time to treat their bodies respectfully in terms of labor, time to watch as the unconscious psyche unfolds and manifests. We could start that process by modeling it ourselves, for our students learn what it means to be professional scholars from watching us. Helping the collective psyche evolve requires individual development from each of us. I would like to see our concern for diversity extend to the psyche of each individual. I would like us to assume that space must be made for the existence of each individual's sense of reality, including that person's weaknesses and horrors, not that they might inflict them on others but that they may own them and learn to deal with them responsibly. Without this creation of psychological space I can not imagine cultures, including our own, stopping using difference as excuse to subordinate, deprecate, physically violate, and even to maim and kill others. The good part about creating this kind of space is that it can be attempted by each of us individually-and as teachers in the classroom. In terms of education, it means-surprise-leading out the person so that her gifts and those latent in her culture can be lived out in society. I am asking, then, that our Ph.D. programs-those most vulnerable to being fully absorbed into the dehumanizing aspects of academe because most prestigious and most committed to producing a culturally-defined elite-be examined in terms of how they help students transform thinking into consciousness-that is, how they help them integrate their ideas with their feelings, imaginations, and sense of social responsibility. I think complementing knowing through the head with knowing arising from the unconscious and with knowing through the heart and body has a chance to help us participate in the transforming of the psychological responses to injustices transfixed in history, to do so in our own lives with one another. TOP |
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