To clarify: This is a research project.
I am completing this in my spring semester as a second-year student at Colby College under the guidance of Professor Ashton Wesner in collaboration with two other very talented Student Research Assistants (SRA) and peers of mine, Miz Insigne and Jay Talmadge. I have undertaken this project as a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) SRA. The fact that this text and webpage are not “spontaneous” as getting up and going for a walk or waking up in the middle of the night to bake bread should not be something annulling its sincerity, applicability, or personal significance. It is something, though, that you should be aware of. I would feel disingenuous if I did not disclose this to you.
This is also, perhaps foremost and hopefully so, a resource. I devised this project not only as a personal undertaking but as a communal, sharable, and accessible body of knowledge intended to use my experiences as a queer student researcher to assist other queer student researchers.
Why does this resource exist? Research is difficult, all the more so if you exist in marginalized spaces or communities. The academic tradition does not always make research a healthy endeavor, or one that brings joy. Convention, bigotry, and inequity run deep in academia. As a queer and neurodivergent person of color, manifestations of these systemic injustices can make research frustrating, confounding, and painful for me and those of us who have been wronged for the sake of our positionalities. It is my hope, then, that this resource can provide some means to persist, even (and especially) when facing these injustices. It is My Little Queerbook, intended to help me maintain and express my queerness as a researcher. It is personal but not individualized; what is true for me can be true for others. Or perhaps not. This resource is not a panacea but a method, much like how water alone cannot grow a plant–you must have a seed, too.
This resource was not conceived alone. Instead, it is informed by a diverse and abundant collection of understandings and practices. I attribute much of the theoretical framework underpinning this project to Sara Ahmed's Feminist Killjoy Survival Kit from her 2017 publication Living a Feminist Life and much of the visual framework underpinning this project to the Web Revival Movement, both of which were brought to my attention by Professor Wesner and Miz Insigne, respectively.
This resource consists of reflective practices. I do not mean this solely in the sense they require introspection; rather, they are also reflective, looking at each other from across a mirror’s plane. You can turn each practice over like an ambigram and see what new and intriguing form it assumes. If a practice is not “doing it for you”, perhaps the inverse would serve you better. If you are cold, a blanket will keep you warm; if you are burning up, a blanket will put out a fire. And so on.
To begin: The most important thing I can understand is that I owe nothing to academia. It took me a long time to hear this. It took me a much longer time to internalize this. Of course, I can owe things to people in academia, though I do not enjoy using the word “owe,” if only because it characterizes my beautiful relationships of reciprocal knowledge, learning, and development as contractual. Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to say that I have answers to give, like cooking a meal for a friend after they cook a meal for me. But I “owe” nothing to academia, as an institution; why would I? When I am cooking for our friends and my friend is cooking for me, we would not keep ourselves beholden to cooking as an institution, as a practice. We have already given our time, our love, our effort. We had to put down collateral before we could get something in return. Could you really forget how hard you worked to get here?
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