Still trying to qual. Don’t ask.
Missed the two Fulbright dissertation fellowship deadlines this year, but am applying for another big fellowship that would make a huge difference in my ability to do the project I want, without going totally broke or insane trying to do it. No pressure, right?
Obviously, the proposal is only as good as the project behind it, but it’s been such a struggle so far to even write what that project is for this funding agency. I’m an interdisciplinary scholar working between many fields- history, critical geography, visual cultural studies, performance studies, feminist and queer studies. Notice something about all of them- that they’re not social sciences? Guess which fellowship I’m applying for? Now you know my pain.
I know what I need to write in order to be legible to the funders, and I’m trying to do this work of translation while staying true to myself and the ethics of my project. It’s a near-impossible task. My chosen methods and theoretical approaches come directly out of my knowledge that the social sciences and hard sciences were born out of a racial project to quantify, classify, and objectify the very communities which I am a member of and who I am in solidarity with; yet to position myself and my project as such would automatically send my application to the “discard” pile. I know the colonial, militaristic, and neoliberal underpinnings of the fields of area studies, political science, and economics– the very fields whose language I have to employ in order to make my work sound “empirical”; I can’t stand to write this way, but I also know that without this funding, I won’t be able to do any research in the field, the research that writing this dissertation depends on. Did I say this task was impossible? Scratch that, it’s just plain violent.
My problem isn’t unique– so many of us radical folks of color (not just in the academy, but in the nonprofit industrial complex, in grassroots movements and orgs, too) need to do this song and dance every day just to survive. And I’m not saying anything new here when I ask: What does it do to our spirits to have to throw ourselves and our communities under the bus momentarily in order to get the resources we need to help us thrive in the long-term? Doesn’t this necessary move also, unwittingly, keep us dependent on the very structures that continue to work against our interests, that ultimately drive us to premature death?
Of course I have no answers, I just wish I didn’t have to ask the questions.
