Since beginning this job a little over two years ago, I have felt really constrained in the kinds of activism and community engagement that I’ve been able to get involved with in New Haven and Connecticut. An illustration: I teach a cultural geography class here, and last fall, as part of a lesson on cartography, I required my students to draw mental maps of their daily lives in and around campus. I drew my own mental map as well, and I remember being astounded at how narrow was (is) my daily path through the city. My map showed, literally, just two perpendicular lines connecting three locations: my house, P’s daycare, my office. My route showed a four-mile drive down Whitney Ave to daycare, a five-block walk from his daycare to my office; then, eight hours later, the reverse path with nary another stop on the way, except maybe for coffee. While completing this exercise with my students, I almost felt tears well up in my eyes. It was such a different way of engaging the city than I was used to. I felt depressed.
As I’ve written before, when I lived and worked in Kalamazoo, I was deeply engaged with urban life as an activist and an advocate. I attended weekly meetings of a local union of poor and homeless people at the central park downtown; I testified often at city council and county commission meetings; I worked with the county sheriff to design a study; and I helped organize rallies and other community events for immigrant rights, affordable housing, and more inclusionary policies for people returning home from prison, among other issues. When possible, I incorporated my students into that work as well. For example, just six months after I moved to Kalamazoo, I led 26 students in producing a documentary film about the struggles that people with a criminal record faced in securing housing, employment, and transportation upon returning to Kalamazoo. It was exhilarating (and often exhausting) work, and through it I felt a strong sense of ownership to and belonging in the city.
Of course, all that was before I had P, and certainly before I became a single mother.
Since then, and since moving to Yale, I’ve struggled with a palpable sense of not contributing to the life of my new department, my new campus, and my new city. So much so that I felt great relief at being asked to serve on the graduate admissions committee – ordinary work that we all do; it’s no great thing that I was able to do what is expected of all faculty. That, too, was mildly depressing. But other forms of engagement have proven elusive.
That is, until recently. One of my goals for this year, when I’m on leave from teaching, was to find new ways of engaging with the public that can work within my constraints as a single parent. Originally, I thought that would mean teaching in prison, and I did, in fact, submit a proposal to teach a course in a men’s prison near here, which was accepted. However, I withdrew when I learned my course would be scheduled for the winter. The prison where I would have been assigned is almost an hour away on country roads; given what I already face with snow days and daycare cancellations, I decided to give myself a break and put my own sanity first.
But other opportunities for public engagement have nonetheless come along. First, a few months ago I was hired as an expert witness for a lawsuit involving redevelopment of a property in LA’s San Fernando Valley, the place that I wrote my first book (and dissertation) about. For the past two months, I’ve been conducting archival research and preparing a report that will be used in the legal case. I can’t share details since I’ve been sworn to confidentiality (that’s kind of fun to write), but I will say this: it’s interesting work, the outcome of which is important to lots of people in the Valley, and it is PAID – generously.
Second, I was selected to participate in a yearlong fellowship through the Public Voices program, which trains people with underrepresented voices (mostly women, as well as people of color) to write, pitch, and place op-eds and other kinds of media. I attended the first convening of that group this past weekend, and today I wrote and pitched my first story, which is also about a property in the San Fernando Valley (I’m sensing a theme here). It hasn’t been accepted anywhere yet (in fact, the first place I sent it rejected it in under an hour – a new professional record for me!), and it may never get published, but I put myself out there and I tried something new. It feels good. And, like the expert witness role, it is a way of engaging publics that I can do within the constraints of my current life. As I told the other women and men gathered at the Public Voices meeting last weekend, there are a lot of things I can’t do in terms of activism. But this I can do.
Part of me feels conflicted about these new roles/ways of engaging publics. Both of these opportunities have come my way only because of my Yale affiliation. In the case of the expert witness role, they need someone with the right “credential.” And the Public Voices fellowship, for its part, is expensive – the kind of program that can only be paid for by a wealthy institution. Equally important, both of these roles are largely about engaging with institutions of power – courts, land-use commissions, and mainstream media – from within, rather than by working with activists from the outside, as I was accustomed to doing. And in the case of the lawsuit, my work, though important to ordinary people, ultimately serves a very wealthy property owner/developer. In these ways it is a different, and somewhat uncomfortable, means of engagement.
But here’s the thing: in my former position, I was involved with a lot of community work, but almost none of it was successful. As activists without a seat at the table most of the time, we didn’t actually change much of anything for poor people, immigrants, and people of color in the city. I’ll never forget working with the sheriff for months to design a study of homeless people’s experiences of the county jail, only to later find out he had hired an outside “objective” agency to conduct it; even then, his office never did anything with the results. The structures of power there, as everywhere, were extraordinarily resilient. But now, with my Yale affiliation and all its resources behind me, I may just be able to make an actual difference. It remains to be seen. I’ll keep you posted.
singlemomintheivyleague 