Today we are joined by the remarkable Deja Rollins, speaking about performative allyship. Deja, a graduate student in Communications at UIUC, was the standout star of Karen’s TedX event hosted by U of Arkansas Monticello, and we’ve been working on getting her on the podcast for almost a year. In this conversation Deja talks about how white folks, particularly in the academy, talk the talk of “allyship” (especially during summer 2020) without taking any meaningful action, or sacrificing any of our money, ego, status, or institutional power.  She makes the point that identifying as an “ally” is a self-identification actively claimed BY certain white folks (and not requested by Black folks), and, she says, if we’re “about that life then it’s on us to actually show up and do the work.”  Don’t wait for Black bodies to be headlines to show up with hashtags.  Don’t tell Black scholars their work on Black trauma needs to be “sexier.”  White people: Recognize our continued possessive investment in whiteness, especially in academic spaces. We own space all the time; so the task is sit down and listen.  White people: we own spaces of ease, so feel uncomfortable. Prioritizing white folks feeling “safe” (in all the endless anti-racism workshops) is a further violence and silencing.  White people: we own the standards of evaluation, so vocally question the standards by which you are evaluating graduate students, job candidates, tenure candidates. Deja’s message: “If I can’t say outright this is bullshit, whiteness as a normative structure is whack as hell, a lot of performance and no action, if you can’t hear that, if i make you uncomfortable, that’s not where I need to be.”

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Dr. Samira Rajabi, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at U of Colorado Boulder,  joins us for a discussion of navigating ambiguous grief and trauma in the pandemic academy and the rest of life. Drawing from her research for her new book, All My Friends Live in the Computer: Tactical Media, Trauma, and Meaning Making, as well as her own personal stories, Samira talks with us about the importance of social media communities in navigating suffering, and ways to interrupt capitalist narratives of productivity and success/failure, in order to reconnect with genuine loss, and move through and past it to what comes next.  Sometimes all it takes is a kazoo!

[Become a supporting member for just $3.99 a month and get access to our subscriber only goodies like a permanent 50% off code for almost all webinars and courses, free monthly webinar recordings ($50 value), AMAs, the chance to suggest topics, and early access to the podcast video that we record in our house in Oregon, all on our dedicated podcast member page on Mighty Networks!

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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:32:54 | Recorded on November 9, 2021

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We are deep in interview and grant season and so this episode we devote to the unseen but critical aspect of your candidacy: your ability to quickly and factually articulate yourself as a scholar and expert: what you do, how you do it, with whom you’re in conversation, and what you produce. So many interviews go off the rails in desperate-sounding, emotional, self-involved narrative, and framing that diminishes your actual standing and expertise. It comes down to unconscious habits of language. Karen and Kel walk you through Karen’s Foolproof Grant Template* as a structure of language that works in interviews as well as in a multitude of professional settings, in that it forces you to speak with conviction and authority. Grappling with “who am I?” delivers the forest (rather than trees), the 30,000 foot view that you need to sound like the expert you are.

*Work with us editing your grant proposals or prepping for interviews! Just email at [email protected].

[Become a supporting member for just $3.99 a month and get access to our subscriber only goodies like a permanent 50% off code for almost all webinars and courses, free monthly webinar recordings ($50 value), AMAs, the chance to suggest topics, and early access to the podcast video that we record in our house in Oregon, all on our dedicated podcast member page on Mighty Networks!

Not ready to support monthly? Donate here to send along some one-time support.