Bodies, Not Brains

My first run at applying to graduate school was unsuccessful for a range of reasons. I had no sense of what academic work looked like, nor did I have any sense of how to prepare for it. Most saliently: I was a bad undergraduate student. I struggled with the freedom granted by college course schedules. I skipped a lot of class, especially in the first year of my degree, and it took quite some time to learn how to study, how to write, and how to succeed at academic work. Without any PhD offers from my first run at applying, I enrolled in a terminal MA degree at my undergraduate institution. Those two years stand out in my memory as enormously stressful as I had to learn so much about academia’s curricula—explicit and implicit. When I applied once more to doctoral programs two years later, I was fortunate enough to receive some offers. I stepped off the plane for one memorable visit and was immediately confronted with an urgent question by the older PhD student who would be hosting me: “there are an infinite number of books you could read, and there is a finite amount of time each day. What do you with that?”

Later that evening, I remember staring at the ceiling of my host’s dorm room unable to sleep. What could do you do with such an irreconcilable problem? What did it mean for me, someone who was just getting started, who barely even knew what academia was, and who had no sense of how I fit in?

Around the same time in my life, I was moving apartments and binging the animated television series Futurama. I was struck by how much the science-fiction show resonated. In one plot line, technology has advanced such that heads can be preserved intact, entirely separate from their bodies. The most common recipients of this treatment are celebrities and politicians, most notably in the case of Richard Nixon who uses his new life as head in a jar to circumvent the constitution. When confronted with the knowledge that nobody could be elected president more than twice, Nixon responds: “That’s right, no body. But as you can plainly see, I’ve got a shiny new body” (Futurama 1999). Nixon reveals a robotic body meant to replace his old, human one, which had died centuries earlier, and he goes on to be elected President of the Earth. The recurring bit allows the show to implant references to any notable figure it wants to satirize, but it also serves as a trenchant commentary on the nature of identity and labor. Futurama’s vision of Nixon might be one of unchecked power, but it is also a nightmare of limitless work that carries on beyond the body’s ability to sustain it. The body breaks down until we’re left only with a head in jar. The work continues but at a cost.

As I stared at the ceiling as a prospective academic, I couldn’t help but feel the limitations of my own body. I felt as though I was being asked to be a head in a jar no matter the cost. For the aspiring faculty member, university careers can offer the allure of a career path ostensibly separate from the labor conditions found elsewhere in capitalist society—a life of the mind that, instead, values individual, intellectual achievement. The honors thesis, the dissertation, the tenure portfolio. Institutional reward mechanisms encourage this mentality in which the work inside the university is meant to be different from that outside its walls. Outside, capitalism sees you as one of many working bodies. Inside the walls of academe, however, you are valued as an individual thinker. Other careers mercilessly enforce rigid work days, but the academy can be a space where you make your own hours, where you can labor on your own terms. In practice, though, this means that the work bleeds over into all hours of the day and night. You work your own hours, but that work never ends. Too much to read and write; too little time in which to do it.

Framing academic work in this way masks labor issues that can often render it just as exploitative as work outside of the academy. As critical university scholar Katina Rogers has argued, viewing the life of the mind as a refuge from the material conditions of capitalism is only possible for a privileged few and papers over exploitative labor conditions within academia itself. In particular, the rhetorical framing of academic labor as a higher calling, as a matter of love, often has the effect of submerging the material conditions of work: “Emphasizing love in a context of labor is a tidy way of de-emphasizing things like wages, benefits, and working conditions—the material realities that, because they relate to bodies, seem somehow beneath the so-called life of the mind” (Rogers 22). Librarians working in and around this institutional context can fall into the same trap, becoming enmeshed in what Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe,” wherein a feeling of collective pursuit of high-minded academic achievement leads to individuals suffering the corrosive effects of toxic work environments. Ettarh writes that “Awe is easily weaponized against the worker, allowing anyone to deploy a vocational purity test in which the worker can be accused of not being devout or passionate enough to serve without complaint.” There is no real way to separate the head from the body, to work outside the material conditions of the academy. But rhetorical moves like these have the effect of rendering problematic practices, institutions, and pedagogies as beyond account.

A relentless push towards intellectualism and a beloved vision of academe at the cost of broken bodies actually creates learning environments narrowly focused on toxic and competitive individual achievement. We devalue teaching because of its limited utility for tenure and promotion. Don’t sleep, because your peers are working on their dissertation deep into the night. Don’t complain about your stipend size, because someone else will gladly take your place. The result is a system wherein rockstar faculty in positions of power can easily abuse vulnerable students physically and mentally while providing cutting edge research. For myself and others in my graduate student community, the labor conditions presented by endless work were a recipe for mental health disasters. I saw friends broken down by mentors in the service of building back their dissertations better; through tears, they expressed gratitude for the mental abuse visited on them. I lost friends to suicide, in part because the labor conditions in graduate school prevent regular access to health insurance and mental health care. These working conditions become undergraduate student learning conditions. A system wherein everyone is out for themselves leads teachers view students with suspicion and engage in what Jeffrey Moro calls “cop shit,” “any pedagogical technique or technology that presumes an adversarial relationship between students and teachers” (2020).

There can be another way. By treating teaching as solely the work of cultivating individual intellects, we actually create conditions hostile to collective flourishing. Instead of burnt-out teachers and students in competition with one another, we should be working towards teaching and learning grounded as communal, lived activities. In this chapter, I advocate for a pedagogy that refuses narratives about the life of the mind and, instead, centers bodies and laborers. By slowing down, embodying our teaching, and working with students rather than against them, we can develop the conditions for collective flourishing. In order to do so, I argue for two intertwined approaches to the classroom. First, I argue for a pedagogy of solidarity wherein teacher administrators work towards better understanding and advocacy for student living conditions through labor organizing. I then link this approach to a digital humanities pedagogy that brings rest into the classroom as an anti-capitalist tactic drawn from Black abolitionist thinking. When implemented together, these two approaches can re-center and recover the body by recognizing the centrality of living and working conditions to the work of teaching. By embracing the role of the body in the classroom—rather than denying it— we can create the conditions by which our students and teachers can flourish.

References

Ettarh, Fobazi. 2018. “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/.

Futurama. Season 2, episode 3, “A Head in the Polls.” Directed by Bret Haaland, aired December 12, 1999 on Fox.

Moro, Jeffrey. 2020. “Against Cop Shit.” Jeffrey Moro. February 13, 2020. https://jeffreymoro.com/blog/2020-02-13-against-cop-shit/.

Rogers, Katina L. 2020. Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom. Durham: Duke University Press.