Even as the notion that the mind exists apart from the body––otherwise familiar to us as Cartesian dualism and Rationalism––has been debunked by modern psychology and neuroscience, the academic humanities continue to cling to a disembodied ideal of “the life of the mind.” Humanistic research still happens in relative social isolation, without the teamwork and community-building that are often part of the lab sciences. Once published, our research exists timelessly as part of a “discourse,” quite apart from any physical being who may have written it (the author having been “dead” since 1967). We privilege the products of humanistic work that appear disembodied––the speech act of a talk, the monograph, the syllabus, the gravitas of a symposium with a universalist title––and devalue those that require a real body in real time in real space––namely teaching and the range of program-sustaining tasks labeled with the moniker of “service.”
If a “life of the mind” is possible, it is only through the privilege of being able to displace material tasks and care-taking onto lower-status bodies, most often gendered and racialized bodies. Indeed, the “life of the mind” emerges from white male upper-class Western European belletristic discourse and is increasingly implausible in, not to mention philosophically incompatible with, contemporary society. The opening up of access to higher education to women, people of color, first generation students, and students from lower socio-economic backgrounds in the past several decades has resulted in––among other things––the vital recognition of the unique ways in which different bodies experience the world. This panel aims to apply this intersectional lens to the discussion of our profession, particularly graduate education, to shed light on the ways in which the academic humanities codify, conceptualize, monetize, and mediate bodies and the bodily experience of humanistic work.
Graduate education in particular is a training in the denial of material and social needs––from the emotional impact of institutional structures to the denial of geographic and family factors in the academic job market. The simultaneous increase in student debt alongside the precarity of post-PhD life has turned a spotlight onto the ways in which material factors create marginalization and exclusion. This panel examines how certain people are excluded from the “life of the mind” and how we can re-conceptualize humanistic work to acknowledge the diversity of bodies and the contributions that these bodies make to the value we create as humanists.
To promote discussion of this topic, we will limit the talks to ten minutes and have only three of them (Hartman and Strakovsky will present collaboratively). All three presentations will take an interdisciplinary approach, combining theory, literary texts, and lived experience.
Miriam Gonzales will begin with a talk on “Networked Support for the Graduate Student Body.” Gonzales situates her discussion of labor and precarity within her own experience as a graduate student. She emphasizes the importance of recognizing the ways that “labor is displaced onto graduate students and other precarious figures,” as well as the fact that the student body of a given institution is made up of “actual student bodies.” Such student bodies, Gonzales notes, require “support, leadership, and guidance,” which is often lacking. Gonzales’s paper thinks through the impact of precarity on graduate student labor, and shares how particular communities of students react to institutional gaps by creating “informal networks of solidarity and support” to facilitate their own well-being and professional growth.
Hillary Kelleher will discuss the potential of the writing classroom to dismantle Cartesian dualisms in her piece “Writing as Ontological Healing.” She notes, echoing Robert Yagelski in Writing as a Way of Being, that writing “is both an embodied, ontological practice and an opportunity to reimagine self and other.” Kelleher will consider “the challenges and possibilities of creating radically alive, learning-rich spaces while navigating institutional demands to maintain hierarchies between mind and body, professors and students, content and form,” as well as the ways in which writing can be a way of “nurturing well-being—for everyone—while working to change the rigid structures of academe or at least finding a livable job.”
Redefining the “livable” in Kelleher’s concept of the “livable job” is at the heart of Yevgenya Strakovsky and Stacy Hartman’s collaborative talk, “‘No provisions will save me’: Imagining a Well-Nourished Humanist.” Using Kafka’s parable “Aufbruch” (launch or departure) as their starting point, Hartman and Strakovsky will address how the “career diversity turn” in graduate education has also opened up a conversation about what Gonzales calls “graduate student bodies.” They will focus in particular on the “possibilities and role of joy and human flourishing in graduate education,” connecting literary and psychological approaches. With an eye toward the tradition of the Bildungsroman and self-actualization narrative, they will consider the discursive frameworks that have shaped what we unconsciously imagine as the life of the mind. They will then draw on Martin Seligman’s work in positive psychology and propose different forms of nourishment required to sustain what “is, with luck, a truly monstrously long journey” (“Es ist ja zum Glück eine wahrhaft ungeheure Reise,” Kafka) of a career in the humanities.
All three papers challenge the idea that a “life of the mind” is something that we should all aspire to, as scholars of the humanities. All three papers acknowledge the importance of bodies as, in many ways, the origin of discourse. Finally, all three papers call for us to abandon, once and for all, Descartian dualism in favor of an intellectual life that is rooted in our physical, social, and emotional selves, and which supports and nourishes those selves, rather than draining them.