The Embodied Grad Student in Relation
This panel considers the importance of various forms of self-making, kinship, coalition, and allyship within the graduate student experience. With an attention to concepts of power and notions of identity, it seeks to explore how we survive and thrive in the academy variously as individuals, as part of communities, and in relation to our objects of study. Abstracts (200 words max) and CV to Christine “Xine” Yao (christine.yao@gmail.com) and Barbra Chin (barbra.chin@bison.howard.edu). This is a guaranteed session organized by the MLA Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities.
Possible topics and approaches may include:
- Examinations of intellectual investments and affective attachments to theory, methodology, texts, archives, objects of study, style
- Considerations of relationships with families, parenting, aging relatives, social groups, partners
- Working conditions, labor, emotional, and otherwise
- Explorations of identity, solidarity, self-care, and survival
- Projects of personal and professional self-fashioning
- Possibilities of digital spaces for conversations, community, self-making
- Building coalition and allyship between individuals, groups within and outside the university
- Engaging pedagogy as praxis
We particularly welcome approaches that attend to the nuances of race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability.