breaking rules to survive

I enjoy very much using a white girl's bus pass found in the street to commute to campus and pretend that i'm still one of the college kids every morning. There's something that feels really great when you break the order of the universe, even just something trivial like pretending to be a blond college student. I'm reading my future PhD advisor's (no i really wasn't stalking her) interview with a feminist group--it really blows me away. Ever since i knew i got into the program i had some sort of intellectual crisis with this discipline i'm going into. Oh psychology. My training at UW focused so heavily on the classics, strict experimental methods, and decontexcualizing reality to find the precise variable that would get your statistically significant data. I had to stop and ask myself if i really wanted to be a scientist who objectively stays behind the scene and believes that i could understand human mind and human behavior this way? FUCK NO. She says in the interview and i agree with her, that it's important to ask where the knowledge lies and WHO HAS IT. Almost always when knowledge lies on the bottom of social hierarchy is neglected by intellectuals. Such as a custodian knows how to work under the repressive management and redistribute her shift with her coworkers. Or like a lesbian plumber knows how to navigate in a male-dominant workplace but still remain her queer working-class cool. And this kind of knowledge is not articulated enough, not in grad school.

There is something really problematic with the way psychology categories its subjects. If we wanna study race, we go find 100 African American samples and sometimes Latino. If we wanna study women, we recruit 200 college-educated white women and give them Starbucks gift cards after the interviews, and we would be glad if we had 5 lesbians or 20 women of color and maybe 3 immigrant women to make the sample somehow representative. If we wanna study class, we go to the low-income communities, and we find all sorts of folks--blacks, immigrants, queers, youth--so are we studying class or race or sexuality or immigration or what? Most of us get panic. This kind of categorical understanding of social identity is very limited. We simply can't understand class if we just go out to survey poor people, she says.

The hardest part is that in this discipline, researchers who use the classical methods (often white men with good intention studying "minorities") are the gatekeepers and they are the standers of who psychologists are--which means who gets the funding, who gets to publish, and who gets the job. The way to understand social injustice can't be monopolized by a singular method--and this would probably be one of the biggest challenges for me at least in the next 5 years. How can i navigate the classical but also the critical method? How can i estabalish myself as a psychologist thinker but also a serious organizer and revolutinary? At least it seems like my future advisor can very much be some sort of an anti-zionist socialist femnist--that would certainly make my grad school life a lot easier.

(psychology's feminist oral history project)