In broad strokes, we may note that key elements of the good academic life for (aspiring) politically-engaged/minority discourse practitioners includes the belief that knowledge work is related to and can transform the world at large. So clearly and so long has education participated in social stratification, and so formative to the contemporary have been the legacies of the activist-scholars of the middle-late 20th century, that the university as a site of the socio-political and route of transformation is, I think, by now axiomatic. But in addition to this outward orientation, it seems to me that the idea of the university as a kind of refuge for non-normativity – a place that might accommodate unconventional desires and ways of being and perhaps even allow them to flourish – quietly operates.[…]
The act of applying is itself optimistic, an intentional act that cannot but be driven by fantasy and the wishfulness of the temporality of the what-will-have-been. […] Consciously and not, I harbor a strong attachment to the idea of a deeply and thoroughly diversified – racially and otherwise – academic scene, in significant part because a massive transformation in and beyond the university would have to have taken place for such a reality to have materialized.
[…]
I think for people of color, for minoritized subjects more broadly, there are so many ways in which misrecognition feels personal that it can be difficult, perhaps impossible, to remember that it really isn’t about you. The work of retraining the viscera, to use Berlant’s words, might be supported by modeling disinterestedness. Acknowledge fantasy and identify its conditions of (im)possibility; proliferate others and the conditions that might induce them.
“on (not) mentoring” by Kandice Chuh