Dear SCRAM,

In my last love letter to you I spoke about the stitching-as-community-building that we do across timezones and geographies in the space of our digital screens.  I used the metaphor of the everyday patchwork wrapping cloths made by women in Korea, who craft their “bojagi” from collections of discarded, overlooked and unused pieces of cloth, as a way to visualize how we craft our community – a digital patchwork made from “the collective scraps of intersecting concerns that structure the continual becoming of our group. Our digital bojagi is wrapping presence with each other, resisting the privileging of standard modes of authorship, rather, embracing acts of embodied co-creation – this is the way we build trust in transnational networks”.  This is the structural metaphor for the design of one of the tech platforms we created for world-making and well-being – Media Map and where we gathered together in May, 2019 to share our first letters.  We continue to create this digital patchwork from our situated and distributed places of living, through the act of being present, through the act of coming together periodically and often in asynchronous and piecemeal moments of time, when this act is as simple as adding a thread to a conversation in Slack.  This way of flocking together, in pieces, in small moments, has crafted itself into a greater whole comprising different patterns of presence over the past five years, patterns that express our community’s history, connecting the bits and pieces of what’s been happening in our lives into something that sustains us.  The way we craft our community with digital thread acknowledges the lineage of expression by diverse craftswomen including the narrative quilts made by artists such as Faith Ringgold whose quilts are “a tangible bond between present and past” and vehicles for telling community stories, connecting bits and pieces of life-stories into a whole. (1)  Each moment, each way that we flock together in digital place is a stitch and a trace that we add to our distributed community, in order to keep the connections in place.  

This flocking, this stitching in digital place has become even more precious and perhaps more precarious during the time of coronavirus.  Precarious because as we now spend so much of our time in front of screens, struggling and stretching to engage and be engaged with our students, institutions, and social lives, what does it mean to sustain ourselves using these neoliberal technologies whose relentless demands often seem at odds with the nurturing of body and spirit?  Precious because I find that being present with our community means even more during these times of deep anxiety and uncertainty.  Technology is a tool we may use to connect across our kitchen table but what sustains us is our collective presence expressed in the bits and pieces of our lives collectively shared, in stolen moments on different platforms we use agnostically as a means to keep our community in touch, especially now in these touch-less times.  This digital witchcraft works not so much through the technology itself but through the intent of conscious care and nurturing cast between us.

(1)  Dunn, Margaret M., and Ann R. Morris. “Narrative Quilts and Quilted Narratives: The Art of Faith Ringgold and Alice Walker.” Explorations in Ethnic Studies 15, no. 1 (January 1, 1992): 27–32, 27.

Dear AA, ACH, AW, KK, and GH,

As I put fingers to keyboard, I currently sit in a booth, in a suite, surrounded by you. When I deliver this, I will be in front of people, sitting at a table, surrounded by you. Over these past couple of days, we have been immersed in each other’s presence. We have eaten together, we have worked together, talked, and traveled together. The gift of our presence to one another is something we take seriously, we show up for one another. Sure, sometimes one of us will forget the new meeting time that we’ve explicitly agreed upon as a collective, while others will know the letters and numbers of our meeting URL by heart. And sometimes in the chaos of adjusting to a new job, in a new city, in a new office — all one can do is log onto Blue Jeans and be present. We are learning that this is enough. This is how we equitably govern ourselves across shifting geographies and institutional affiliations – getting comfortable with moving at the speed of agreement, consensus, or as Alex put it, consent.

But this is not the temporality of the institution. That tension – between our time and the institution’s time – is not unique to us. In fact, it’s a contradictory position that feminists of all sorts have learned to occupy, with varying levels of success, failure, bitterness and hope. That tension and its struggles are daily companions. So, when resources are made available, “we pick it up and put it in our pocket(s)” as our very own T.L. has described it, because we’ll need it. Even after the report has been filed to fulfill the conditions of a grant. We’ll need it even after we’ve decided we’re not actually an STS scholar, or a film studies or communication scholar, or an art education or digital humanities practitioner. We take on these identities with the trust and knowledge that with our names attached to a grant or project, we will not be betrayed. Even if we change our minds after we think on it some more, or after we read some more. Together, we can be bold. Together, we can take chances. Together, we have power we didn’t know we had.

In the prompt we prepared for today, we asked “What are the problems of SCRAM? Are these our problems or are these the problems of being adjacent to capitalistic neoliberal academic systems?” We’re not sure if this is the question we’re most interested in any more. And as I took it on as a question I would address, I’ve been thinking about how we might reframe – identifying not our problems but giving words to the promises we’ve made to each other. This is inspired by the work of Ruth Nicole Brown, Blair Ebony Smith, Jessica L. Robinson, and Porshé Garner (who together form the musical group We Levitate). In their article for a recent special issue of American Quarterly about critically engaged digital practice. We Levitate and its originary project of SOLHOT (Saving Our Lives Hearing Our Truths) are dedicated to creating space to celebrate Black girlhood and Black Girl Genius. And they do that by valuing each other, committing to each other. Their promises are:

// QUOTE//

• “I love you in a space that says we shouldn’t,”
• “We are artists without form and scholars without method,” and
• “We are misunderstood and determined to persist.”

//END QUOTE//

With SCRAM I now feel safe enough to ask what we promise each other, what we owe one another, and how can I show my love for you not in a way that necessarily leads to outcomes or contribute another line to my CV – though sometimes that is how we demonstrate love – but first and foremost, how can we promise to continue to grow with one other? To provide room for experimentation, to provide possibility for the missteps, and mistakes necessary for growth? These are not usually afforded women of color in the academy, but together with this group and with the extended FemTechNet network, I feel how we are making this for each other and how those who came before us built it with us too. It is hard to give language to this love, this form of freedom and safety, this companionship.

What I sense is that this difficulty has to do with the fact that SCRAM emerged from a different project, with different aims, which ACH has already described – FemTechNet. I learned so much contributing to FemTechNet’s challenges to higher education innovation and new media presentism, manifested in an entirely new online course structure and an impressive archive of course materials historicizing the topic of feminism and technology. Though, some of the most transformative and significant lessons that I learned were connected with understanding how power works in university systems. As Sara Ahmed describes diversity work as feminist theory in Living a Feminist Life:  QUOTE we learn about the techniques of power in the effort to transform institutional norms or in the effort to be in a world that does not accommodate our being. END QUOTE (Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life, 2017)

 

 

Dear SCRAM,

In case you all didn’t know this. I freaking love you.

It’s been several years now, since we all found each other through FemTechNet … and I’m so glad I did. I think I remember being recruited to the network by Liz Losh in 2013 when I was a postdoc at UCLA. I was in an Asian American studies department and in a transnational studies postdoc program where no one did digital stuff. I was living in the Valley. All of my friends were really far away.

Frankly, I was pretty miserable.

In many ways FemTechNet gave me something to cling to. Maybe it was the same for you? I think we all, as women and non-binary folx of color, found ourselves in what was then the “Ethnic Studies Committee”, which later became the “Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Committee”, and then later transformed into our little haven, “SCR+M”. Even at its peak, there were never that many of us who regularly met in that group, and in a network of hundreds (over 2,000 if you count the members of our Facebook group), we’re the only ones remaining. We’re the ones who show up.

Every two weeks. We meet in virtual space—a Bluejeans room provided by the University of Michigan that feels like the swankiest virtual conferencing space because it was a virtual conference provided by the University of Michigan—from our respective time zones in California, Arizona, Texas, Minnesota, Michigan, South Africa, Singapore, Taiwan, wherever we are. For almost all of us, we’re the oddball “other” in our units, departments, or institutions. That one BIPOC woman or gender non-conforming person interested in race, gender, sexuality, and technology. This Bluejeans room is where we gather to plan talks, write projects, mastermind grant applications, conference proposals, digital projects; to share the latest drama in our lives, to squeal over the newest puppy, or to complain about the weather.

These meetings are where we’ve engaged in what we’ve come to call, “hang-based pedagogy.” We like each other. We love each other. We trust each other. The collective learning and teaching we engage in together only happens through intentional sharing of time and space. To facilitate this hang-based pedagogy, we conspire to find ways to unite in person and produce teaching resources and scholarship—these are the things we have been able to leverage to bring us together, in person, at conferences and symposia. This is how we survive the academy, a system that would cannibalize us and our work if given the chance. This is the method to our “survival praxis.”

In the end, we’re the ones left to transform the network, break it, reorient it, and reshape it into the organization we need and want it to be. We keep coming back to the network that others grew out of or didn’t have the time or capacity to continue with. It perhaps started out of necessity because we needed the support network, the space to vent, but the work we’ve accomplished, the way we work, and the innovative ways in which we get this done (READ: hacking platforms and resources beyond their original intent) speak volumes about our commitments and politics:

I will bullet point four of those commitments here:

 

• We make decisions based on our needs, our abilities and capacities, and we do it with consensus, and not because of external pressures placed on us by others (our institutions, funders, our mentors, etc.)
• We moved FemTechNet’s summer workshop to the Allied Media Conference in Detroit as a single-day Network Gathering –transitioning away from traditional academic conferences and venues and into an open, inclusive, community-centered, collective environment that explicitly names its commitments to the racialized, gendered, class-based struggles of the people of Detroit.
• We diversified our funding structures beyond traditional institutional funding to support our work. 100% of this credit goes to Alex, who helped us reimagine fundraising as a commitment to each other and to the struggle by  hacking the Honeyfund.
• We reframed our own history, narrative, and archive through our bojagi MediaMap to produce a non-linear, selective, subjective archive of SCR+M that highlights those moments and achievements that are important to us.

Like the network itself, and the map, we are a work in progress. We will change as we change and grow. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll figure stuff out. But, we’ll do it together, and we’ll do it with love.

So, SCR+M friends. I’m proud of us. I love you all and I’m looking forward to breaking stuff and building things together for a long time yet.

Love,

Anne

 

This letter was harder to write than I imagined it would be. How do I write a love letter to you? How do I succinctly and affectively communicate what you mean to me and why you mean so much to me? How do I translate into words what is it that we DO? How do I ensure I do what we do justice with this letter? How do I ensure that the love I feel for you manifest materially along these lines? I am spiraling. I am anxious. I am letting external measuring criteria confine us. I am judging instead of loving. I am deviating from us. Let me try again.

This is a love letter to you. You, SCRAM, are a place to me. A place made up by familiar faces, warm bodies, affective energies, chill screens, visiting pets, connected signals, visual cues, shared locations, broken interfaces, generous intellects, cold drinks, vivacious laughter, confused looks, intimidating circumstances, horrifying stories, caring words, and time spent. You are a place where I spent a lot of time and a place where I want to spend more time.

Like those times. I am reminded to think and speak primarily to you, and you alone. Like those times, when you showed me that it is each other and the people we hold and carry by extension that makes our work matter. Like those times, when you taught me how to make the disembodied structures work for our survival instead of the other way around. Like those times, when I joined our scheduled meeting late because of other obligations and I was feeling completely annoyed at myself for not meeting the expectations of time keeping I have internalized and held for myself, I was not met with contempt but instead smiles. Like those times, when you told me, “you’re just in time!”

What does it mean to be just in time? What happens when we’re not in time? Time is a commodity. Time is measured to calculate our outputs. Time is managed to maximize production. Time is used to evaluate our worth. Time is a technology that is used to organize us and that we use to organize ourselves. We use this technology to project scripts for how we ought to or should orient ourselves from one moment to the next. It is a narrative we write to bridge past, present, and future. When combined with other technologies that prescribe priorities for capital accumulation and circulation, time is most often an internalized parameter for disciplining our bodies to serve. But the question is, serving what and whom?

I admit, I didn’t and don’t always use time to serve you, me, or us. I have come to realize how much I am bounded by time, or perhaps the lack thereof. I am scared, a lot of the times. I am scared of standing out when I interrupt the room full of people for arriving late. I am scared that my brother will wither away there while I am lost trying to find my way here. I am scared that I am doing this wrong. I am scared that one semester is not enough to convince my students that representation in games does matter. I am scared that I am a traitor for spending time over here instead of over there. I am scared of that tenure clock that keeps ticking while I can’t get words out onto pieces of paper. I am scared that I am not working hard enough and fast enough to stop harm from happening. I am scared that I am working too hard and too fast that harms. Most importantly, I am scared that I am not using enough time to serve those I love and believe in, like yourself.

What does it mean to be just in time? More importantly, what does it mean to be told that you’re just in time when other markers of time indicate otherwise? It provides validation for one’s presence and that presence alone. It disregards other preconceived notions about time to emphasize the present. It stops time in the sense that it disentangles time from other technologies that we devise to serve an ambiguous end. It recenters time to serve the bodies that are present. It calls our attention to recognize that we made it to share this moment in time and this time is not granted. Instead, it is a present. It demands us to forgo previous expectations, disciplined responses, and internalized critiques about time to consider what we want to and could do with this found time. You made it! Yes, and?

Love,
Ann

Hang-based pedagogy is:

1. a navigational mode. It is wayfinding through the outdated wardrobes of institutional otherness into the academic outfits of collective dreams.
2. an antidote to institutional diversity. It emerges from the belief that equity work is, and should be, colonizer work and is therefore irrelevant to the tasks at hand.
3. enthusiastic consent to the conditions that create possibility, especially when those conditions require showing up looking thirteen kinds of raggedy brilliant, which is itself a form of accountability.
4. liberation adjacent. Capitalist neoliberal academic systems can, sometimes, reflect the shine, but can never absorb it.
5. radically vulnerable. It is kinship, not network. It is not an alternative to settler heteropatriarchy and institutionalized ablism because it is not subject to the harsh white light of pathologized departmental examination. It is fundable, but only when it demands funding.
6. a redistribution of clock time, because to hang is to suspend time. It is dropping the conversation thread to go find the one who’s not here yet. It is multiple platforms conveying feelings when one time just won’t do.
7. practice, practice, practice. Also, location, location, location.
8. transformative listening. It is holding your head at an angle like this ‘/’ when someone tells a story about some foolishness that went down and now everyone has a ‘wait, what?’ to bring to their next administrative meeting of academic tricksery.
9. super queer.
10. The brainchild of feminist technological interventions ON ITSELF.

We ride the bus.

Lisa Nakamura gave us this analogy referring to Cherríe Moraga’s preface to This Bridge Called My Back, where she describes all the different ways she’s taking public transportation here and there to meet with all the other radical feminists of color putting this anthology we love so much together. She was in process, in transit. We are metaphorically in process, and literally in transit to see each other.

We ride the bus.

I write this shuffling along on an airplane, on the way to our annual SCRAM get together. Feeling really lucky that we have made kin, where we prioritize each other and together time and doing all the things. I’m also thinking about my other panel that had to cancel because the people who make up the precarious labor that the academy runs on don’t have the thousands of dollars it takes to do our jobs. Especially in a world where we’re supposed to be out there promoting solo authored academic achievements that bring benefit to our institutions (there’s literally a question on my travel reimbursement form asking how my trip benefitted the university), we carve out a Moten & Harney Undercommons-esque space for ourselves between the lines of professionalism- making the most of our travel funds to be together. Can we call this feminist per diem hacking?

We ride the bus.

We pool resources when we get them and stretch gifts from generous play cousins- after all, it’s our 3rd anniversary of SCRAM getting married to The Struggle. And lucky still, because we can meet in the real world, and be in public together.

We imagine the ways that we publicly perform “work.” In this fast moving grants-based, outcome-oriented capitalist machine, we’re fairly adamant that our process IS the work. So us publicly thinking out loud together IS the product. Which has become our second tenant: we move at the speed of consent. I’m sure someone else is going to talk about our first tenant: hang-based pedagogy. I want to like you before we work together. The timeline of consent is not grants-timeline friendly, yet here we still are. And maybe that’s what we’ve learned because the relationships, and not the projects, come first. We take time, the hour-ish every other week for years adds up. SCRAM is the faculty meeting I want to be at. And that to me are/is the presents/presence we are talking about. Our presence to each other is the present.

We ride the bus.

One of the strengths of us is that we are the progeny of Octavia Butler’s understanding that the the only lasting truth is change. And we don’t operate from a place assuming institutional or geographic stability. We’ve learned to mother ourselves. The question about equitably governing ourselves, and one of the things I feel the most happy about is that we haven’t really ever had to talk about how we govern ourselves. And more than anything, I’d be afraid to betray the relationships- and that’s why we move at the speed of consent. So our network of care stretches beyond geographic locations and jobs. And maybe it’s the size we keep? In a world of innovation meaning scaling, we’re actually not trying to grow. We’re thinking about how to facilitate space for other people to develop their own kin networks (bring on the SCRAM ultra lounge!) rather than expand beyond our own capacity.

We ride the bus.

And maybe our mundane is why we are an alternative to capitalist neoliberal academic systems. I don’t think we’ve ever tried to be the best at anything. We operate small, but we care big. Inch wide, mile deep, right? And we think about what it means to have enough. And in every little grant we’ve won, its always been enough. Not enough to counteract settler heteropatriarchy– but enough to show everyone a sense of value. I’m really proud that everyone who worked on Media Map got paid. From our music to our sound engineers to ourselves (!), everyone got something. Again, not enough to counteract settler heteropatriarchy, but if money is an energetic exchange, we’ve been always trying to keep up good vibes all around.

We ride the bus.

The design for Media Map emerged from an earlier project mapping the cultural history of Koreatown in Los Angeles that was presented at the last FemTechNet confererence – Signal/Noise at University of Michigan in 2016. The design metaphor was the “bojagi” – a traditional form of textile craft made exclusively by women in pre-modern Korea in which scraps of leftover or unused silk, ramie or cloth are stitched together to form a patchwork used to wrap presents, decorate the home or sometimes for ceremonial ritual. The resulting patchwork cloth is uneven, asymmetrical and unique, reflecting the iterative form of community building and becoming practiced in SCRAM. The bojagi thus becomes an appropriate reflection not only of the design and interface of this platform but the way in which this collective comes together. I think of it as a form of digital placemaking for our group where we inscribe a place for ourselves in digital space where collaborative community building is possible…crafting a digital bojagi together from the collective scraps of intersecting concerns that structure the continual becoming of the project and our group. Our digital bojagi is wrapping presence with each other, resisting the privileging of standard modes of authorship, rather, embracing acts of embodied co-creation – this is the way we build trust in transnational networks.

Much of this work of co-creation happens not just instrumentally from meeting at conferences like this one but behind the scenes and over years of getting to know each other informally, being present in different ways with and for each individual and the group. Being present in our demanding and dispersed schedules means we are there by whatever means available whether in person (ideally), or even by simply sending positive reinforcements of good intent iteratively as you stitch and weave the relationalities that build intimacy and trust.  What happens in SCRAM is iterative, not just a one-off moment so finding ways to be present, to connect physically or digitally even if not that regularly is an integral part of the continual act of becoming…of building and sustaining the brilliantly magical and generously powerful group that we have here.