Reconciling Tensions

I spent most of today doing what I used to do on Saturdays which is trying to relax and think through things. But because this week was a bit emotionally and cognitively intense, I spent most of it in bed listening to podcasts and trying to avoid thinking about the topic of the blog post this week. It did not succeed, because I have been carrying this deep disappointment in so many people that I used to consider academic international colleagues that I haven't really known what to do with my feelings. I've written poems, but that disappointment still clings and stings.

You see I am trying to reconcile the tensions I am finding around me. And I know I am not the only one working through these tensions. I have a few Zoom calls lined up tomorrow with other people in HigherEd also working through these same tensions. Because that is what you do when you find yourself at odds with the "community" you are supposed to be a part of, you find the real people, who really understand what is at stake, and you strategize about steps, support, and care you can give yourselves.

It is so hard to reconcile the work that educational development is, when folk want to just uphold and aspire to status quo, and not really do the roll up your sleeves work of cross-institutional, international solidary about issues that impact all of HigherEd. I find myself time and again asking, "what matters in faculty development?" and more importantly "who are we letting set that agenda time and again about what matters?" 

Gone are the days of Personal Learning Networks (PLN) where folk would collaborate on real change. All of that seems too hard for so many folk. Instead because of the trauma of what we have lived through over the past 4 years, groups and their members will go for the easiest road, not the most ethical one, the complicit road, not the most holistically inclusive. Because ultimately it is still systems that exist within systems right? And until you are comfortable enough to declare the system as flawed, as ableist, as racist, as homophobic, as toxic, as violent, regularly, and always make that clear in your communications, in meetings, in action points, it will continue to be what it is.

The work of working within the system for real change is the work of calling the system what it is, every time, and taking time to realize where it is actually harmful to so many to continue to work within the systems that actively hurt others that you gleefully call "community" or "peers" when really that is not the case. You don't see us as peers or community, you other us with your actions and inaction. 

This week I stopped and watched someone explain time and again what they would be willing to lose for art, and articulate it in ways that hit so deep, to then turn around and see what was being proposed as action on a long standing exclusionary design practice which amounted to "I'll sign a thing." This is what I am willing to put on the line for art that people should see vs this is what I am not willing to do for people who are supposed to be "community."

Academics have so much to learn from real grassroots community action and organization. But they will resist it time and again, for being too hard, too unlike what we do in higher ed. So I am left here thinking about all the tensions I have to work with and try to reconcile to be the person I am in professional association spaces. Geographically excluded. Dismissed. What you are asking for is too hard they say. Because what they are really asking is, "how would you cite a mutiny on a CV?"