Entwining

ID: A set of four A4 reports opened and layered on top of one another against a red background to offer a glimpse of its contents connected to transdisciplinary research in postgraduate studies at the Just Futures Co-lab. Image courtesy of Kush Patel (July 2023).

Welcome to Felt Notes, a monthly letter about the work of the Just Futures Co-lab, and the co-labouring worlds of research and teaching in design and the digital humanities that it scaffolds, furthers, and amplifies. The letter writing will translate the ever so negotiated nature of this space and the discourse and scholarship on equity and justice we produce through critical pedagogy; archives and databases; digital storytelling; and queer-feminist media technologies and infrastructures. 

In relation to the Co-lab’s current form and location, and a corresponding web page that introduces its vision, values, and project spaces, I felt the need to pause and ask: What might be the lab’s more communicative presence on the internet? How might this presence acknowledge its underlying vulnerability? And what might we do in lieu of building and maintaining a new site or duplicating the already published information online? A periodic letter to subscribers, I hope, offers an intimate alternative, structuring notes and ephemera connected to the lab’s core inquiries; inviting interests and additions from friends, colleagues, collaborators, and community members along the way; and collating opportunities and announcements for past and present members to access and stay connected.

It was during my recent meetings with Shamanth Joshi that I rediscovered the connection I had to writing tiny letters, or how I made sense of one of my previous academic roles through a set of rotating monthly messages involving folx in similar “alt-ac” positions at other institutions [1]. It was also at this meeting that Shamanth and I discussed thoughts and questions about websites and newsletter formats that could possibly embody the very queer and makeshift experience of this project, as well as the care networks it has inspired over the last two years [2]. Receiving and reading newsletters from Anne Cong-Huyen, Ruha Benjamin, and A.L., for example, have been life-saving for me [3]. Writing and sharing the bi-annual lab reports with students and colleagues have similarly been orienting and reorienting practices for me [4]. Neither of these works, however, are standard academic forms—and yet it is in their scholarship-based and community-centered details that I have felt both rooted and joyful amidst persistent institutional and interpersonal shifts. 

Felt Notes is born out of this entwining. 

I hope reading this letter and its upcoming dispatches are a meaningful experience for you. If you aren’t subscribed yet, you may do so here. If you are already subscribed, I would love for you to share the link with friends and fellow warriors as we make sense of our relationships to technology as well as our relationships to each other via technology. If you would like to write or co-write a letter in the future or share any announcements, please feel free to get in touch with me — Kush.

Notes:

[1] Hi Amy Howard and Elizabeth Goodhue: I am thinking of you and the “Musing from the Middle” pilot involving our shared goals to “foster connection, support, and a sense of community among intermediaries” via e-letter musings. I miss us, especially as I reflect on what it means to steward the Just Futures Co-lab both academically and in community-centered ways. I wish to also add here that the term “alt-ac” was first used on Twitter in 2009 in a conversation between Bethany Nowviskie and Jason Rhody as a shorthand for “alternative academic” careers with a PhD, or in Nowviskie's words, “a pointed push-back against the predominant phrase, ‘nonacademic careers.’ ‘Non-academic’ was the label for anything off the straight and narrow path to tenure” (2010). Over the years, “alt-ac” has come to refer to full-time positions such as public historians, academic librarians, program directors, museum curators, independent scholars, and professional writers in and connected to postsecondary education in the US and Canada. Anne Cong-Huyen and I, however, challenge the implicit whiteness of this term and its embeddedness in the US body politic in our piece on “Precarious Labor and Radical Care in Libraries” in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Science through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, The MIT Press, April 2021, pp. 263-282.
[2] The entwining of experience and feeling with analyzing or reconfiguring a technological object in its community or use context has been a consistent focus in my teaching, research, and lab mentorship at Srishti Manipal Institute. In this opening post, I cite one of my earliest conversations with Shamanth about “sensed archives,” about how the form and depth of a queer bibliographic database might center feelings. Shamanth’s “Felt Bibliography” transdisciplinary inquiry in Monsoon 2021 came out of this engagement and culminated into their Capstone game design titled, “There's Always Room To Be You.” You may learn more about these works on Shamanth’s personal website and portfolio!
[3] Among a range of newsletter subscriptions to important change-making work happening within, beyond, and alongside academia, the letters by Anne Cong-Huyen on “Digital Scholarship,” Ruha Benjamin on “Seeding the Future,” and A.L. on “Queeries” continue to enrich the meaning of feminist generosity for me by not only offering thick summaries of their ongoing practices, but also placing those practices within a web of co-constitutive relations and discourses.
[4] The postscript at the end of each report states: “The work of shaping and running the Just Futures Co-lab is labour-intensive, joyful, deeply embodied, and demanding not in response to any external pressures, but rather from within itself, especially given: a) its commitments to enriching the academic and professional development of participating members; b) its refusal to normative and exploitative lab or research practices in academia; and c) its accountabilities and responsibilities to involved as well as collaborating communities and publics. The work of sustaining this Co-lab is also extremely challenging, considering the long history of gendered workload inequities in institutional spaces, involving those of us who are untenured, always precarious, and living outside the system’s cis-heteronormative defaults.”