The journey began a week ago. My dog and I got into my Honda Civic, packed full except for the passenger seat so my 13-pound pup could ride shotgun. We drove for two days straight–she post-surgery, me, post-Northern Virginia, post-job, post-notions of comfort and predictability of life.
We pulled into my Austin neighborhood at 8 pm. I unloaded; my dog sniffed. She liked the place; to me it smelled musty. That’s ok–the place had been empty for months. Just waiting, perhaps.
I’m switching (mostly starting) a PhD program at the University of Texas. I’ve moved 1500 miles from what used to be “home” (I keep making references to it and catching myself). What was a fairly promising career in a well-regarded school district is behind me, and the circle of possibilities has suddenly grown. I don’t reinvent–I evolve.
The program I’m beginning is Cultural Studies in Education. I want to use anthropological tools to poke, dissect, slice at questions of power. What do people do with their power? Do they recognize it? Do they chew on it like morning toast without realizing they’re devouring it? Do they scrape with their nails and climb up flesh to approach it?
With these questions I will connect to larger constructs–race, privilege, gender, class. I hope to connect these umbrella issues to the cellular level of individuals’ narratives. Narratives in some ways are so small but also seem to be the most elemental units of truth we can know. I’m always compelled more by the individual’s story and hope to find collective truths from them.
I’m here in a space larger than I need to live in, more calories in my stomach than many people throughout the world will have consumed in a day, and I’ve only taken my breakfast. I have these unearned privileges, and I hope to be both aware of them and use them for some greater good–a greater good I hope to enrich through this program of study.
And, also, in the meantime before my program begins, I explore the local context and feeling my identity shifting, growing. Evolving.
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