Networking?

For many of us, the term networking can sound like a dirty word.

As a working-class student entering higher education, it carried a strategic, self-serving connotation. It conjured images of professionally dressed, socially awkward people milling around in hotel conference rooms waiting eagerly to introduce themselves to some well-renowned scholar that might, by mere contact, succeed in elevating their own status. (“If I can just touch the hem of…”) It sounded like a word better suited to the local Chamber of Commerce or a business “after-hours” than academia. And, somewhat uncomfortably, it reminded me of the mysterious world of secret handshakes and old boy networks that I had always imagined gave middle-class students an upper hand in every social setting back home.

Not wanting to perpetuate or reproduce that dynamic, I often refused to participate in this so-called networking. And why not? If my work is good enough then it will speak for itself, right? Seven years later I am writing to advocate for networking. Well, at least a radical and redefined definition of it for those of us living and working on the margins of institutions.

A few years into my graduate school experience, I realized that while networking was often used for narrow self-serving reasons, for many others networking was  a desperate response to the socially, intellectually, and politically isolating experience of academic life.

For people that arrive in graduate school straight out of undergrad the solitary character of academic life and the absence of any real personal support networks is often overwhelming. For those of us that are first generation college students, that transition can be even more difficult and alienating. In this context, the concept of networking can seem like one more foreign soulless professional practice that you are encouraged to master on your journey to become an “outstanding” and “respected” scholar of global acclaim. (i.e., The end goal of your life now that you have sold your soul to the gods of higher learning.)

Some people encouraged me to network unthinkingly; like they did it everyday. I wondered whether they were networking with me right now by telling me to network with others; and whether they networked with their family and friends when they left the office. Others begged me to network even though they acknowledged it would make me feel dirty. “It’s just the way things are, you know?” “It’s a business.” “You’ve gotta get your name out there.” “It’s sad, I know, but we need more people like you in academia.” In fact, the latter has become a kind of business lately as tenured radicals take pride in giving “hard advice” to idealistic young scholars trying to scrape one of the few remaining spots at the post-apocalyptic university. There’s a common thread in their pleas – “You are going to have to be willing to do a lot of things that make you feel dirty to be here.” I wonder whether anyone can keep doing some of those things and still have a sense of who they really are at the end of it all.

While I am still skeptical about a lot of this… Networking needs to be salvaged. And by networking, I mean investing conscious and deliberate energy in cultivating relationships with people that are politically, intellectually, culturally, or spiritually like-minded. If we are planning on sticking around on the margins of academia, or the church, or our unions, or any other institution…. then we are going to need networks to survive let alone have any influence on those institutions.

When you get to graduate school you don’t get training on how to do develop or maintain these kinds of networks. You probably figured, like me, that you were a pretty interesting person and that people would just naturally gravitate to you and that your life would be just as full and vibrant as it was before you arrived. False. Most of us have to go out of our way to actively construct new networks and contexts for these kinds of interactions. Graduate school will suck you into the isolation chamber where you will work alone at your desk for long periods of time. Sometimes you will find yourself studying at a coffee shop just to see other human beings and possibly speak to one for a few minutes during the day… but not too long or your chapter will not get finished. At times, Facebook will come to function as a real source of human interaction despite your best intentions. And when you finally come out of the isolation chamber you will find that most people are still in there and don’t have too much interest in leaving. We are all afraid that we won’t meet the deadline; that we won’t finish the chapter; that we won’t have the reading done on time for class.

Actively combatting that mindset and striking a balance between periods of necessary isolation and periods of intellectual and social engagement, solidarity, and rejuvenation is absolutely critical.

For those of us that choose to be on the margins for political reasons –  because we are committed to making our work matter in the everyday struggles taking place in our communities – cultivating these networks is even more important. The hyper-competitive nature of graduate school is tough even at the best of times but, if you are making sacrifices to ensure that you work is accessible or that it is translated into action through local politics, social movements, etc., you are going to need people that reaffirm your sacrifice and help you draw boundaries. And, you are going to need people that remind you why what you are doing really matters. Plenty of people (mentioned above) are ready and waiting to tell you how to succeed professionally by sacrificing, at least symbolically,  your political commitments and your sense of personal ethics. You are going to have to find other people to counter-balance that well-intentioned  advice and help you know where to draw the lines. Staying in institutions is all about knowing where to draw the line.  And yes, you are going to need someone to give you a hug when you have worked 80 hours that week trying to be excellent at both things and failing in the attempt.

Maybe you aren’t like me. Maybe you are superwoman and you don’t need this kind of support to survive the trials and tribulations of academic life. But if we are serious about transforming our institutions then we need each other. Our collective influence is greater than any individual contribution. Networking doesn’t have to be viewed as self-serving. Networking should be an act of solidarity. We support each other in transforming the spaces we occupy.

I became much more comfortable with the concept of networking once I realized that I was actively doing it in my political work all the time. Building alliances; contacting new people;  having coffee with activists from other cities – none of these things seemed cynical when connected to an important political goal. I am convinced that this is part of what makes academic networking hard for scholar-activists. They often feel that their own careers and academic work are not worthy causes in comparison to the battles they are fighting out there everyday. Sometimes it feels selfish to talk about yourself. It seems kind of self-indulgent. And so you struggle to find your voice. Making that tie between the different aspects of your work – both the scholarly and activist components – will be an ongoing issue. But, if we are staying in these institutions for the foreseeable future then we need to make sure we are sane, energized, and collaborating with each other.

Please feel free to comment with your ideas on how to build stronger relationships and networks.

Remembering King: From Survival to Protest

Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking in church during the Montgomery bus boycott. Churches played a key role in organizing the boycott. Here, Martin Luther King, Jr. is encouraging churchgoers to continue the boycott. 1956. Source: © Dan Weiner, courtesy of Sandra Weiner.

Over at Religion Dispatches today, Paul Harvey, Anthea Butler, Ed Blum, and myself participate in a roundtable on the topic of “Martin Luther King in the Era of Occupy”. In my brief statements, I focus on  ”the peculiar genius” of Dr. King. Namely, his ability to reorient existing religious beliefs toward social action. Far from being inevitable, the Black church’s support for the modern Civil Rights Movement had to be secured through a sophisticated process of cultural negotiation, re-framing, and mobilization. Shifting religious discourses from survival to protest was critical to this process.

For those of us that attend evangelical congregations today, pushing our churches to step out in support of movements for racial change and social justice is often an uphill battle. The evangelical congregations I have attended over the past thirty years – both here in the United States and in Britain  - have performed critical, albeit limited, charitable or survival work. In the broader context of our current economic crisis and eroded governmental protections, local congregations are frequently the last line of defense in meeting the basic survival needs of working-class people in the form of food, health, and housing security.

Unfortunately, for some evangelical congregations, charitable work is underpinned by a neoliberal political theology that obscures the systemic character of racial and economic exploitation ascribing both blame and responsibility exclusively to the individual. Charity, in this context, is considered an act of Christian service and grace in the face of human sin often designed to say more about those who give than receive. In contrast, survival work suggests a more collective struggle to “survive” and persevere in the face of tremendous obstacles. The acknowledgement of these obstacles also points outside of a framework of individual blame and responsibility and toward more structural and institutionalized forms of oppression and exploitation. The church becomes an important refuge or sanctuary from a sinful world that denies the full humanity of God’s people. Both of these approaches are underpinned by a set of scriptural references that grant them legitimacy and solidify their dominance as a response to social inequalities.

In the postwar era, a new generation of southern Black ministers pushed their congregations to move beyond survival and toward protest. As I suggest in my post, this was achieved through the reorientation of existing theological traditions, emphasizing scriptural references to  justice, reconciliation and nonviolence. In an important sense, King’s ability to do this rested on his privileged position  as a formal and charismatic leader within the Black church. As a prominent Black minister, King was situated at the center of Black religious institutions not the margins. From the pulpit, he was able to disseminate his views to a broader audience legitimizing lay involvement in protest work in a way that others, particularly Black women, were more constrained from doing. However, from their positions on the margins of Black churches, women often played key roles in preserving activist traditions through their work for both religious and secular organizations. Some of this work came in the form of protest but much of it also constituted the survival work previously described  reinforcing the intimate bonds between survival and protest.

In this context, I wonder how we go about pushing our churches toward a more activist ministry in the context of a politics of charity or survival. For those of us that are on the margins of institutional church life – often because of our gender, class, race, age, or political views – how do we use the limited influence we do have to carve out spaces of survival that might lead to protest when the time comes? Should we devote our energy to building spaces within congregations or to secular groups outside of them that require less compromise? When social movements emerge to address systemic inequalities how do we encourage broader solidarity and support from our marginal position within the institutional church?

On the flip side, in my activist work I find that a lot of organizers not rooted in evangelical church traditions are often surprised and frustrated by the failure of church leaders to support local struggles against racial and economic injustice. They assume that the ties between such battles and a vaguely defined sense of “Christian mission” are logical and essential. The failure of churches to participate, thus, becomes a further indictment of Christian hypocrisy and church irrelevance. However, what this perspective fails to recognize is that religious institutions, like all institutions, must be recruited into the movement – a reality that requires considerable time, energy, and labor.

Occupying Marginality

We often understand marginality as a position of exclusion or confinement. To be marginalized is to be relegated by others to a position of unimportance, obscurity, and subordination. But in another sense, marginality can also be a position that we consciously occupy in protest of dominant practices, trends, and beliefs. In this context, marginality offers an alternative to exile or separation. It is a refusal to leave and an assertion of the democratic right to remain within and apart. Accordingly, it is a position fraught with both tension and creativity.

This blog explores “the marginal life”…

More specifically, it explores the experience of activists, broadly conceived, that are situated and situate themselves on the fringes of institutional life. From their positions within churches, labor unions, political organizations, universities, etc., they strive to  transform existing institutions from the bottom-up. Their words and actions often place them at odds with the dominant assumptions, frameworks, and goals of the institutions they occupy. Indeed,  it is through the promotion of a culture of oppositionality that the prospect of broader societal transformation presents itself.

However, marginality - as the term suggests – also carries a “cost” for those that occupy it. Experientially, it can be isolating and exhausting as well as professionally and socially unrewarding.  Therefore, I hope to examine the ways in which activists build structures of self-care and support as well as remain centered on their values, goals, and aspirations.