(or, reports from my recent conference adventures)
Recently, I returned from a trip in Michigan for Digital IDEAS, a summer institute for new media folks! I had a bunch of great conversations and experiences while I was out there—it felt like my academic cup had been refilled, and I was able to remember what it was like to be in academic community, to feel empowered to take space and dish out hot takes and be my most raw intellectual self. It did feel like the various misfit toys of different academic disciplines all coming together to hang out, and sharing in that was so so precious.
Even more recently, I presented on some of my computing history work at SIGCIS in Berkeley. Again, it was an incredibly heartwarming experience—I got to meet and talk to so many exciting scholars and hear about their work, and I heard them refract my work through their analytic lenses and questions, and again, I’m feeling that same sense of expansiveness, extroversion, openness and comfort. It feels really good!!!
I had a wonderful debrief call with my dear friend Chris about Digital IDEAS specifically, since we were both at the summer school, and I wanted to give y’all some thoughts on academia and reflections on the work I’m doing, both for the benefit of having it out there in the world somewhere, and for my own benefit so that I don’t forget what this moment felt like.
Independence & interdependence
As recently as the start of this year, I don’t think I was truly open to learning. To exposing myself to feedback on my honest work, or to show what I was truly thinking, and to receive feedback on that. Rather, I would work on things I wasn’t actually interested in, or I wouldn’t show my full hand in terms of what I’m thinking, in fear it wouldn’t be received well or wouldn’t be legible or, most importantly, that people would hear it and think, “oh… that’s not…”
The implication of hearing that (or even sensing that it could come out): that I’m a flop, that I’m stupid, that I’m embarrassing to listen to, that I don’t belong in that space, that I’m not a real computer scientist or a real humanistic intellectual or a real academic.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I did a humanities undergrad. And much of my grad school identity centered around, “I’m doing interdisciplinary work. I’m committed to CS and ethnic studies. And I know how to speak humanities, because of that ethnic studies experience.”
But I was always scared and insecure that I wasn’t a real humanities girlie! I’d never fully developed a rigorous reading or writing practice in that space, and I was able to get by relying on the fact that my computing stuff wouldn’t be legible enough to scrutinize or critique in the ethnic studies space, and vice versa. Thus, I was scared that if I tried doing humanistic work or started earnestly expressing my humanities-inflected opinions, people would discover that I’m a fraud and actually I don’t know what I’m talking about. But now that I’m actually doing grad school and actually attempting to have those crossdisciplinary conversations with folks who know how to do work at those meeting grounds, there’s no more running away from that fear and from scrutiny of my work. I want to take doing crossdisciplinary work seriously, and that means producing work that is serious, earnest, truthful to myself, and committed .
Recently, when I have felt those anxieties around “being found out,” I’ve been trying to feel that anxiety and embarrassment in my body, breathe through it, and open myself to the gift of not knowing and being able to learn something new. This is what it means to live, to do work that I have stakes in, that I care about. It’s scary because it matters to me that I do this right, and because I care about the people I’m engaging with—both my interlocutors and my intellectual touchpoints.
Having now done some engagements in more humanistic spaces and having had positive reactions, my new fear is that this “success” is purely contingent on relying on other people’s feedback and insights and taking them as my own. That my ideas “alone” aren’t sufficient, and that I’m reliant on “taking” other people’s refractions of my ideas. It’s scary from an ego perspective—that I don’t have any good ideas, or that my ideas wouldn’t be “good enough” without relying on feedback from a particular place.
And more broadly, I’ve always been fearful of asking for help from other folks! Maybe it’s that I don’t want to create a burden on other people, or that I feel like I’m doing a maximally good job if I burden other people as little as possible. And it’s scary from a reliance perspective. There’s that fear that I’ll fuck it up somehow, that something will happen out of my control that will make me lose this academic community. Or that I’ll do something that will cause this academic community to leave me. That mid-conversation with a potential collaborator I won’t know what to say and then it’ll be awkward and then I’ll have fucked it up with someone I was hoping to work with.
In response to that, one thought I have is that the only way to find out if there is true capacity for collaboration is to just talk and find out! Better that than to be avoidant and preclude myself from having the opportunity to engage with those folks in the first place. And what a privilege it is not just that I am able to engage with these folks and learn more about them and their world, but also that I’m not coming from a place of scarcity in these interactions anymore! I know myself more and more, and I know that I have peers who see and understand me.
Another reflection that I’m holding onto, especially from SIGCIS, is that I’m not the child looking up wondrously at all these academics anymore. These are my peers. I deserve to be here, I have things to say, and these folks have questions to ask of me. And I want to hold that and feel that and move through the world with that!
There is also an inherent egotism in assuming that any work at any time just comes from myself. My work comes from my lived experience, and my lived experience is always influenced by the people around me. And all of my work has always been a product of my community. Certainly, all the CS papers I’ve ever worked on—and really, my career as a researcher up to this point—were hugely collaborative.
As I’ve also mentioned before, part of the shock of coming into grad school is realizing I’m not actually the first person to have an interdisciplinary (computing) thought. And it’s scary thinking about if I have anything new or interesting to say to any intellectual field that hasn’t already been said before. But I think part of what I bring is a willingness to learn and be vulnerable with the incredible community of folks around me. To name names of friends briefly: I wouldn’t be the scholar I am without Eric’s generosity in engaging my ideas with seriousness and rigor and commitment, or Sunnie’s generosity in her incisiveness and in offering me a higher conceptual register to think about my work, or Chris’ generosity in teaching me what it looks like to be a radiant and earnest and grounded scholar, or Harry’s generosity in affirming and uplifting my writing practice. And (within reason ofc), being in academia means to freely gift and receive refractions on refractions on refractions of ideas, to be open to taking on someone else’s lens on my work, offering it to the world, and being willing to pass it on to the next scholar.
My work is to be in conversation with lots of folks and hold their perspectives in me. And I want to embrace that.
Labor & practice
One of the persistently difficult things I’ve struggled with in academia is the formlessness of our work. The charge of our work is to think never-before-thought thoughts and imagine never-before-imagined imaginaries, but the actual milestones, deadlines, and requirements that pace our work are very few and far between. Nobody forces you to read or engage outside your discipline or to connect with folks who inspire you in unexpected ways, And yet the most interesting work comes out of the serendipitous, the unexpected, the surprising; the “work” of moving outside the on-paper requirements of getting a degree.
The conceptual bounds of my work now are informed not by the CS papers that are given to me as our discipline’s canon, but from the happenstance, serendipitous encounters I’ve had with other minds and other thinking. My conversations with artist friends made me see my PhD not just as labor, but as its own [artistic] practice . My oral history exchanges with Asian American elders and my wushu practice have informed my thinking on improvisation and serendipity that form the theoretical and conceptual core of my language building work now. And my reading in Asian American studies and Black studies and (Dis)ability studies and everywhere else—and my time spent organizing and in life-affirming academic spaces like Digital IDEAS—provide the political and spiritual grounding that inform the sensibility of my work.
One thing that’s been very inspiring coming from this conference is seeing how seriously people take their own academic practices. I spent a lot of the conference watching people struggle through articulating their own ideas. In full-group workshops and in question sessions with keynote speakers, I watched my peers open themselves to intellectual vulnerability, theorizing and working out their ideas in real-time, continuously performing a faith that the rest of us would be willing to hold their messy and unformed and in-progress and live ideas with tenderness and care and generosity. People took themselves seriously, and were willing to take risks because for them, the impetus of honoring their own intellectual and emotional selves was worth risking illegibility for. It was incredibly inspiring and I hope this sense remains: that if other people can take space and Just Say Things, I Can Too.
One byproduct of this is that people are very well read! Folks are incredibly willing to take in texts from across a wide array of sources to try to inform how they are thinking about their work. The other CS girlies are reading Saidiya Hartman and the Film and TV studies folks are doing close readings of technical reports. And everyone is reading Freud. We have a shared resources doc that the cohort has been working on over the week: it is twelve pages long. There is such a vast array of literature and scholarship folks are engaged in—and it seems like constantly engaged in, not just in a just-in-time way for whenever they need to submit to conference or journal, but in a way that lets them sit in the soup of ideas. That kind of reading practice—the muscle of constantly reaching outward into spaces unknown to pull theories, concepts, method, analytical frames—that is what I want to have for myself.
Again, people honor themselves and their own ideas very seriously. One
memorable quote I remember hearing is that writing theory is a writing
style and that style is just swag. Being a theorist means
confidently Just Saying Shit! In that frame, the point of being
well-read isn’t just to say “oh x person says this, therefore I have
the license to say z.” It is to confidently and boldly claim that z
is true, and then to be able to point to x and to y and to whoever
else as corroborating evidence that speaks to your academic truth.
Often times, this
means being willing to do the work even when it’s unpopular or illegible
in your own discipline. Several of the speakers we had expressed that
during their early academic careers, folks would advise them not to do
the work that has now defined their careers.
Up to this point, I’ve realized I haven’t fully taken myself seriously as an academic. Part of that is because I haven’t taken computer science seriously as an academic discipline. Part of that is because I’ve had lots of friends who are non-academics, and I didn’t want to watch myself disappear into the ivory tower and become alienated from my friends; I wanted to stay relatable, and initially to me being relatable means a kind of anti-intellectualism: making fun of academic jargon, undermining the seriousness and precision of the work that I’m supposed to be doing. But being an academic and using the jargon isn’t just about performing knowledge and navel-gazing. It’s about honoring the genealogy of where all these terms come from, of enacting a citational politics. And it’s about talking with precision in our field. And even if it is a little navel-gazy, I’d like to care for myself enough to give myself permission to take space and navel-gaze every once in a while!
One concrete outcome of this workshop series is that I want to take myself seriouly as an academic. Being an academic is a labor, and it is a practice. And part of that means taking seriously what this practice entails. I’d like to develop a more consistent and conceptual research, reading, and creative practice and be more comfortable taking space, being brave, and trusting my own sensibilities in academic settings. Materially, that means writing a little bit every day, maybe starting my day with 30 minutes or an hour of writing to keep that muscle strong. It means a more committed reading practice, where I’m blocking in reading time as a daily part of my schedule!
With reading in particular, I’ve always struggled mightily with reading practice. I think part of it is the affective side—it feels scary and draining and high activation energy-ish to do academic reading. This is the despite the fact I do regularly read! It’s just I’m reading The Verge and lobste.rs. Maybe it feels emotionally vulnerable—the stakes of not understanding an academic reading feel higher. The topics are more personal and it in my head it feels like it reflects more on my own capacity as a researcher. And it’s more likely I won’t understand since the work is so conceptual. Maybe it’s because I’ve been scared to let go of an internalized anti-intellectualism, to peg myself as an academic and take it seriously as a job and immerse myself in the jargon and norms and mores of the field. Maybe it’s that fear of taking myself seriously. Regardless, I’ve been avoiding the full vitality of feeling that comes with seriously meeting these texts where they’re at. Reading deeply requires confronting the avoidant part of me that is scared of engaging with a text and falling down while trying. Reading a text that speaks to our present political moment involves truly feeling the frustration, fear, and anger that comes with living through reemergent fascism.
Being an academic is an awesome responsibility. To think and read and write, and to aspire to move the world with my thinking and reading and writing. I want to honor that responsibility. I want to honor myself and my own ideas. And I think honoring myself in this way will require a transformation in what I see myself to be doing and who I see myself to be in conversation with.
Vulnerability & space
I’ve been in conference spaces previously where it’s felt like I’ve needed to coerce myself into feeling good. The situation of, “I feel really dislocated and unmoored at this conference, but if I just go to one more mixer or one more event, that will be what changes my experiences and lets me create the academic connection I’m looking for.”
This wasn’t true at this event! I think part of that is learning to listen to my body and what I’m feeling. Basically 100% of the time, this is a signal that I’m in fact not having a good time, and that what I need is rest and time to ground myself, not to force myself into interactions where I’ve felt unmoored previously. Part of that is having more security in myself and knowing what I need/like to do, and part of that is that everyone had this shared sense of security. Some of us preferred spending social time closer to Ann Arbor, some of us preferred spending social time doing more adventurous things; all of us were confident in our own choices and didn’t feel the need to jostle for where “the most networking would happen” or perform in that way. My friend Chris describes this as a kind of social curb cut effect—when individuals feel empowered to do their own thing, it makes space for other folks wanting to do that thing but feeling less brave or audacious in that moment.
More broadly, I think a big part of this was that it felt very safe to take space, work ideas out in public, and be intellectually honest about what did and didn’t feel compelling. For the most part, we were coming from intellectually similar (but disciplinarily distinct) places, and so we were able to trust that our hotter takes would be received with kindness and a shared understanding. And when we were offered challenges or provocations, we could trust that it was coming from a place of generosity, not of cynical nitpicking (the “well actually” of it all). Again, this is a kind of social curb cut effect—because we feel comfortable and affirmed in the space, those of us normally less inclined to speak on our hot takes feel empowered to do so.
Part of that is honoring the messy and “ugly” feelings of marginalization and the academy: there’s lots of discourse around making space for care and rest, but what about for hatred and rage? It is those uglier feelings that were the most cathartic to share in. Much of what I got out of the week was hearing from other computer science survivors—folks in or graduated from computing programs—who gave me the language to articulate the experience of alienation from being in computing. The lived experience of being in this kind of field is incredibly hard to articulate, and it was a shared, lived hatred and anger that sutured us together and bound us in community. In my own personal life I’ve been trying to let myself be messy around others—to trust that I will be held even if I communicate in a way that’s unformed, unpolished, and potentially sharp to the touch. And it was beautiful getting see other folks taking the leap of faith to hate! To not try to predict beforehand if it would be safe or socially acceptable to do so and just express themselves in their rawest form. And to watch other folks, myself included, feel empowered to hate in the space they
When Chris and I were processing this afterwards, we were reflecting on what it means that we’ve been able to find an academic space that makes us feel like we belong and where we don’t feel the need to perform or coerce ourselves into enjoyment. For me personally, I’ve found that this conference has encouraged me to go seek those life-affirming spaces locally. Knowing and feeling that better things are possible is a powerful feeling that no hostile person or space can take away from me. At the same time, for many of the less affirming academic spaces I’m already in, it’s lightened the load on them to need to provide what Digital IDEAS has given me. I know what it feels like to belong, I’m not yearning for these spaces to do what I know and have felt they cannot, and I’ve released the sense of sunk cost fallacy that I need to repeatedly throw myself at these spaces to try to discover some heretofore undiscovered seenness within these spaces. And that is okay! I just need to do the work of finding those spaces myself.
I think now, I’m thinking about letting myself be drawn to spaces that are for me. Instead of thinking about it as “I need to force myself to talk to this person” or “oh no, am I missing out by not talking to this person,” I’m trying to think through
Politics & otherwise
One question that came up repeatedly was what it means to do political work in and through the academy. Is there space in the academy to do political work? The most glib (potentially uncharitable) version of this is the succinctly stated: “This theory was great. So what do we do?”
There are a few ways scholarship can be “political.” One possible definition is that the scholarship provides concepts and language to speak to the experiences of the subaltern. Another possible definition is that the work is literally contributing to material change in subjugated peoples’ lived experiences. I think with humanistic traditions, it’s very easy to conflate the latter with the former. Unfortunately, writing the book alone will not abolish the prison.
When I entered the PhD, I wanted my computing work to do both and more. I want the work to not just materially affect change in subjugated peoples’ lives, but to materially disrupt the systems that create the conditions for the subjugation in the first place—that’s why I chose computer science. I also wanted the work to have something theoretically interesting to say about marginalized folks’ experiences with the digital. On top of that (and I didn’t fully recognize this at the time), I also wanted my work to be theoretically interesting and rigorous in a computing capacity as well. My Achilles heel has always been being interested in twenty-five different things and wanting to be perfect at all of them, and my initial PhD goals were a manifestation of that: I wanted a project that was theoretically sound in both a humanities and computing register while also creating material change for people in the real world. And in my own experience, I’ve found that project incredibly difficult. In some ways, this is a benefit I have over the humanities girlies—the nature of my field makes it impossible to pretend.
Because I do programming languages research, part of the day-to-day of my research practice involves building programming tools. One initial theory I had coming into this field was that if I could find the perfect people to codesign with—the completely grassroots organizers with the maximally feminist, abolitionist, decolonial, anti-ableist, etc. etc. goals—I’d be happy, since I’d be working in a political place that felt super aligned with my own politics.The issue is that most grassroots organizations don’t need novel programming tools. They need resources and bodies on the ground . Today, I do spend some time organizing outside of any work capacity. While I feel very theoretically aligned with those groups, technosolutionism has nothing to give to them. They don’t need programming tools; they need me to show up at the meetings, the marches, the actions.
A lot of the folks who do need novel programming tools are generally folks
trying to make large quantitative arguments at scale. The nature of these folks’
work is, for the most part, trying to collect large corpora of data, generally
to make some systemic argument for a phenomenon that marginalized folks
themselves likely already have intimate awareness about. Making tools that
address that challenge in particular tends to produce tools that (i) don’t have
a particularly inspiring vision of futurity while also (ii) lending themselves
to potential misuse. As an example, for a while I worked on a tool that would go
through PDF documents and extract information from those PDF documents, like
names, addresses, and so on. This was a tool that was informed by a real-world
use-case. And yet, I don’t think a world where people can easily extract
information from PDFs (or even a world where people can make their own tools for
extracting information from insert your favorite semi-structured data format here) feels like a particularly compelling vision of a speculative
(decolonial/liberatory/feminist/your favorite word here) future. Moreover,
“getting info out of PDFs at scale” is the kind of task that many not-so-great
people—insurance companies, militaries, and the like—would love to
automate. This kind of work was uninteresting to me
from a computational perspective and uncompelling to me from a political
perspective. Trying to make a tool that did real-world political work limited
my own imagination of the kinds of interventions we can build and imagine.
Separately, I’ve found that my experience of computer science as a field has been unfriendly to conceptual play. In “technical” fields like programming language (PL) research, we are taught to discipline the poetic, the affective, the lyrical, and the personal out of our writing. Our writing is meant to be dismebodied and universal. PL papers are meant to deliver truths of the computational universe and to read as if they are written by God. The field would see my own experiences of politics or marginality as preposterous to include in any “serious,” “technical” writing.
One of the feelings I’ve been working through during this week is a Foucault-flavored internalized self-discipline, the disembodied voice of The Field constantly discouraging me from contributing or speaking because I probably haven’t read enough or don’t know enough, or because this messy and unformed conceptual idea I have in my head is a bunch of foo-foo bullshit that doesn’t make any sense and isn’t worth saying, or because there’s no way to take that conceptual idea literally and instrumentalize it towards Building A Programming Tool. During the past week, I spent most of the discussion time watching as my peers would bravely and vulnerably work out their ideas in front of us, talking through a turn of phrase that popped into their head or felt very taken by. I watched the beautiful struggle of folks swimming in their ideas and their respective canons, trying to draw together their past readings and coursework and scholarship to articulate an idea from the intellectual future and wrangle it into our present. Meanwhile, it was a challenge getting myself to speak up in any capacity—across every keynote and large group discussion, I spoke twice: once to ask Ruha Benjamin a question, and once during the semi-mandatory end-of-week presentation.
The most insidious part of this self-discipline is it covers its own tracks. To even write about this now—to articulate the texture of this spiritual violence—is tough when it’s become so deeply ingrained that imagining an otherwise feels impossible. I think one thing I really enjoyed about this academic space was that it felt like a realization of an otherwise—an academic space that was open, where people felt willing to be vulnerable and take space and try out a sentence or a phrase, and where the facilitators were generous and encouraging of us trying to encourage what was previously unformed. Where we were not constantly disciplined at the altar of practicality or legibility.
I suspect that being in computing makes it easier to realize that my work can’t encompass my entire political and spiritual life. The disciplinary norms of computer science—particularly a “technical” field like programming language research—makes it incredibly difficult to pretend like my academic work embodies my full self, or that my academic work is doing real political work entirely aligned with my own political goals and values. It’s easier for the person in the humanities writing about late-20th century Asian American resistance movements to feel that their academic work is capacious enough to contain their spiritual, political, and intellectual selves than for the PL person writing a paper on a new type system. In my own experience, trying to make a computer science paper do political work ends up doing a disservice to the political part and the computer science part, and that has freed my intellectual work from needing to do “real” political work. And I think this is a lesson that the folks were noodling on generally—it is very different to write about organizing than it is to organize! The constraints that apply to work in computing also, in different ways, apply to folks doing work outside of computing.
The lesson is that I don’t need to take my work as literally needing to make political change . And in doing so, my work is free to be imaginative, to sit in an otherwise outside “can we make PDF data extraction marginally faster” and to imagine another way of being with technology, to be interesting computationally and weave in my conceptual inspirations—my friends’ artistic and archival practices, my own conversations with my elders, and the new interlocutors I’ve found here—in ways that feel lived and aren’t constrained to the hyperliteral. I want to do work that speaks to marginality in computing in the same way a close reading of the Cancer Journals would speak to disability and queerness, in the same way Bodyminds Reimagined reads theorizing of Blackness and disability in Black speculative fiction. And at the same time, I am under no pretenses that this intellectual work can be conflated with the real, material work of creating solidarity and liberation and otherwise in the real world.
There is a distinction to be made between doing committed intellectual work and valorizing the academy as the only place to do committed intellectual work. Simultaneously, there’s a distinction to be made between doing personal intellectual work and needing your intellectual work to fulfill your entire person. Part of what made Digital IDEAS feel so safe is that folks had an oppositional relationship to the university. I’ve found it easier to build trust with other folks who, despite being in the institution, still hold that sense this hatred and anger towards the institution that comes from a lived experience of marginalization. And regardless of the criticality of the work people do, it does make a difference if folks see themselves as in the university or of the university; whether they see themselves as a professionalized academic within academia, or whether they see themselves as an organizer or movement worker or creative outside it. The university is of the fabric that weaves state violence and exploitation, and it wants to create a slippage between institution, academic, and intellectual/researcher. It’s exciting to find a community of thinkers whose practices disarticulate these, whose home—whose otherwises—exist outside and beyond it.