Me Too Political Science by Nadia Brown

Author:Nadia Brown [Brown, Nadia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367857066
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 53103279
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

Transforming poli-sci

Despite these experiences with discrimination, participants in this panel provided multiple suggestions for coping with hostile spaces and for transforming them. Christina argued that finding friends who would provide strategies to deal with particular incidents has helped her. The suggestion about finding people who would support you was supported by other participants. Nick explained that using “his magnets” to find people like him has helped him. This is particularly important in his case, given that he can easily become invisible—by hiding those markers that make others perceive him as out of place. Tiffany talked about the importance of her “sisters” when calling out and confronting experiences of discrimination and exclusion: their presence, and the fact that they validated her feelings and her experience, were fundamental for leaving the toxicity of certain experiences behind. Friendship was also central for fighting hostile spaces for Juliana. She also mentioned how making the conscious effort of only attending APSA panels and events where she feels welcomed and safe as a strategy for coping with the hostility of the meeting. This, of course, has implications for professional development and networking. (Shauna suggests also that we find allies who may not necessarily be friends, but who can understand the experience of feeling like an outsider; she frequently thinks about a comment by University of Maryland women’s studies professor Michelle Rowley, who at an October 2017 feminist meeting, urged participants to “learn how to inhabit a pain which is not our own.”)

Another individual mechanism to deal with hostile spaces was to use those experiences as fuel to prove those who make spaces hostile and exclusionary, that they are wrong. Other suggestions were more subversive. Tiffany told two stories that illustrate how spaces are made to be hostile and how can we can work together to subvert discriminatory practices. During a 2018 trip to South Africa, where she has been conducting research for the past two decades, she met a group of graduate students from New York. They realized at some point during their graduate school years that they were recruited specifically to compete and fight with each other. They decided to be anti-competition and pro-cooperation and prioritized building their friendship, which made their scholarship better. They showed pictures of their friendship in the midst of scholarly presentations, which was very subversive to those who wanted them to compete. In another department, graduate students were being ranked and paid different amounts. They decided instead to pool the money and lived together (Patel 2014). This produced a particular type of scholarship and knowledge production that is very damaging for the existing order. This type of recruitment for the purpose of pitting emerging scholars against each other seems to be widespread through the discipline. At top ranking political science doctoral programs, faculty and administrators develop “algorithms”5 that rank students by assigning numerical weights to various “achievements” with the idea that students would compete and the “cream would rise.” In the aftermath of high-profile pressure and outcries by doctoral students, some of the programs have recently committed to giving all entering students some basic funding.

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