PhDivas

April is the cruelest month! It's a rough time in higher ed: originally our theme for this episode was just "being tired." Work, travel, bills, dying houseplants. We push through our exhaustion to talk about the musical Hamilton, Get Out, Ghost in the Shell, and that awful Pepsi commercial with Kendall Jenner. The PhDivas just came back from their visit to Earlham College where they gave talks on their individual research and on bridging the STEM/humanities divide. Connecting with students and our listeners helps to give us energy! ...but we still need to get enough sleep. You can view our joint talk at Earlham College on Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/EarlhamPsychology/videos/1090781751068369/

Are graduate students workers? Liz and Xine explore this debate by interviewing Jackqueline Frost from Cornell Graduate Students United. We discuss issues of graduate student labor at Cornell and higher education in general -- power dynamics, fear, funding, and differences between humanities and STEM in approaches to work and work dynamics. Should graduate students of the world unite? Do we have nothing to lose but our chains?

What if? With every BA/PhD/postdoc/job application we open so many possibilities for our academic journeys and lives in different places and even fields of interest. Xine and Liz speculate about some of these alternate realities, from family histories to career paths. How do we imagine our pasts and futures in this uncertain world? Who are these other Lizes and Xines?

Discussing "truth" across the STEM/humanities divide! Liz explains p-values to Xine. Xine teaches Liz what close reading means. Together, Xine and Liz examine the shifting standards of evidence in popular culture and recent events around police brutality.

If the master's tools can never dismantle the master's house, what can we build instead? Since emotional labour is racialized and gendered, what if minoritized people say 'no'? Listen to several brilliant WOC scholars discuss PhDiva Xine's new book DISAFFECTED: each of them was given a chapter of the book to respond to in order to give the audience a sense of the overall argument as well as a chance for each scholar to discuss their own research. 170+ people attended from around the world! 0:00 to 6:15 Xine's overview of the event and Christine Okoth's introduction 6:15 to 26:50 Xine reads a section of DISAFFECTED's argument 26:51 to 38 Chapter 1: white sentimentalism, unsympathetic Blackness, and Herman Melville's Benito Cereno Respondent: Christine A Okoth (King's College London) is working on a brilliant manuscript that will revolutionize ecocriticism: _Race and the Raw Material: Black Aesthetics as Extractive Form_ 38:10 to 53:04 Chapter 2: on Black-Indigenous counterintimacies, science, and global revolution in Martin R. Delany's work Respondent: Rianna Walcott (King's College London) who researches Black women's identity formation in digital spaces. She co-founded projectmyopia.com which promotes inclusion in academia and decolonised curriculums. She co-edited The Colour of Madness, an anthology about BAME mental health. www.riannawalcott.com and @rianna_walcott on Twitter 53:05 to 1:02:35 Chapter 3: on queer frigidity, medical science, the limits of white feminism, and the subgenre of (white) women doctor novels Respondent: Lara Choksey (UCL) who works on STS, critical race and decolonial studies with particular interest in speculative fiction. She is the author of Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds (Bloomsbury 2021). https://www.bloomsbury.com/.../narrative-in-the-age-of.../ 1:03:50 to 1:13:35 Chapter 4: on Black women doctors, transformative love, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy Respondent: Jade Bentil (Oxford) is a Black feminist historian whose first book REBEL CITIZEN uses oral history interviews to explore the lived experiences of Black women who migrated to Britain after WW2. Forthcoming from Allen Lane. https://www.jadebentil.com/ 1:13:31 to 1:26:25 Chp 5: Oriental inscrutability, Chinese diaspora, the first Asian North American woman writer Sui Sin Far Respondent: KerryMackereth(@CambridgeGender) works on racialization of AI, AsAm studies; co-host of @TheGoodRobot1 @KerryMackereth on Twitter 1:26:30 Coda: Toward a Disaffected Manifesto Beyond Survival. PhDiva Xine highlights respondent Lucia Lorenzi who was unable to attend. Lucia trained as a Canadianist and trauma theorist, working on how artists and writers use silence to reshape, resist, reimagine experiences of violence. Their artwork is featured on the cover of the book! @empathywarrior on Twitter and Instagram DISAFFECTED won the Duke UP Scholars of Color First Book Prize. For a 30% discount use the code E21YAO on the following sites North America: https://www.dukeupress.edu/disaffected UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific: https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478014836/disaffected/ You can read the intro for free here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/disaffected Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/phdivaspodcast