Bernadette Marie Calafell, Karma Chávez, Devika Chawla, Lisa A. Flores, Nina Lozano, and Bryan McCann
On June 26, 2019, responding to the strong critique to the DS letter, Professor Carole Blair, a DS and a leading feminist scholar of Communication, wrote a response (pasted below). In this letter, Professors Bernadette Marie Calafell, Karma Chávez, Devika Chawla, Lisa A. Flores, Nina Lozano, and Bryan McCann respond to Professor Blair.
Dear Carole,
On June 26, 2019, responding to the strong critique to the DS letter, Professor Carole Blair, a DS and a leading feminist scholar of Communication, wrote a response (pasted below). In this letter, Professors Bernadette Marie Calafell, Karma Chávez, Devika Chawla, Lisa A. Flores, Nina Lozano, and Bryan McCann respond to Professor Blair.
Dear Carole,
After considering several possible ways to respond to your recent Crtnet post amid the disciplinary fallout regarding NCA Distinguished Scholars and Marty Medhurst’s editorial, we have chosen to address you personally--for the impact of your post and the silence that preceded it is personal, professional, and political. As we believe you well know, these three things are always intimately entwined.
We write to you as mid-career scholars working in various critical traditions. While our work differs in many salient ways, we share a common investment in scholarship and pedagogy that critiques power relations and centers the voices of oppressed peoples. Your writing and role in the field have been deeply impactful for each of us. You have helped cultivate space for women in communication and have been a pioneer in advancing theoretical traditions that significantly improved the field’s capacity to understand power and center the voices of marginalized groups. Many of us consider you a friend, as well as a mentor. For so many critical interpretive scholars and activists in communication studies, you are a role model.
It is for these reasons that your recent comments regarding the Distinguished Scholars and Medhurst affairs are so disappointing. Many of us waited two weeks to hear something substantive from you, hoping that you would join colleagues such as Mary Stuckey, Celeste Condit, Stanley Deetz, Barbie Zelizer, and Leslie Baxter (with whom you and Julie Brown co-authored the trailblazing 1994 essay “Disciplining the Feminine”). We were already deeply hurt to see your name as a signatory to the Zarefsky letter and hoped you would see in the resulting protests a mass expression of the very principles on which we presume you have built your career. Given our experiences with you as a scholar, mentor, and friend, many of us expected that you would lead your colleagues in the anti-racist work that this moment demands.
Sadly, you did not write such a response. Rather, you offered broad language about the necessity of listening and conversation, apparently forgetting that people of color and their accomplices in the field have been engaged in conversations about the discipline’s whiteness for decades. Now is not the time for talking, but for action. You are not only late to these conversations, but your comments function to erase those of us who have long been engaged in attempting to rectify the layers of disciplinary oppression. Let us be clear: We do not simply choose to do this work out of moral conviction. We must do this work in order to survive, and so that our students and junior colleagues can also survive.
Most disappointing is your characterization of our discipline’s current discord as one in which we all share complicity in the same manner. True as that may be in the broadest sense of how power circulates in professional academic spaces, there are clear boundaries of complicity with regard to the exclusionary nature of the Distinguished Scholar award, as well as so many other aspects of the politics of recognition in our discipline. We know who has played a role in stifling the advancement of marginalized scholars just as surely as we acknowledge those whose activist labor has cultivated more inclusive spaces in communication studies. In supporting Dr. Zarefsky’s letter, and failing to apologize and remove your signature, you have conspicuously aligned yourself with those who are part of the problem. We expected, and still expect, better from a scholar who “attempts to understand and intervene in the intricacies of structures of power.”
In “Disciplining the Feminine,” you and your co-authors wrote, “Perhaps, we need to locate and sanction new ways of judging our scholarly efforts and effects besides simply counting them up and arranging them by rank. No one denies that judgment is a component of our working lives, but we all might benefit if the discipline’s sanctioned grounds for judgment were reconfigured.” This was true in 1994 and it is true now. However, now, in 2019, critical scholarship and activism have expanded this operationalized definition of whom gets disciplined from simply “the feminine,” to the disciplining of people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, etc. We, as well as the authors of the “Open Letter on Diversity in the Communication Discipline,” and countless other individuals, groups, and divisions who have spoken out in the past several weeks have argued nothing less. Yet, it seems that your position has not evolved alongside the current political and material exigencies. Our disciplinary history demonstrates that the traditional normative criteria regarding merit and distinction continue to favor white scholars, mostly cis men. Your comments signal that those normative criteria continue to be widely upheld, even among alleged allies.
We are at a critical juncture in our discipline. Transformation will require, among other things, that those of us who have made careers from critiquing structures of power in civil society, and within our own discipline, are prepared to apply the same kinds of scrutiny to the spaces in which we occupy positions of power and, for many of us, thrive. Such critical work requires a spirit of accountability, self reflexivity, and humility. We invite you to reconsider your public position and join us in orienting this exciting, if also profoundly exhausting, moment in the direction of lasting transformational change.
It is for these reasons that your recent comments regarding the Distinguished Scholars and Medhurst affairs are so disappointing. Many of us waited two weeks to hear something substantive from you, hoping that you would join colleagues such as Mary Stuckey, Celeste Condit, Stanley Deetz, Barbie Zelizer, and Leslie Baxter (with whom you and Julie Brown co-authored the trailblazing 1994 essay “Disciplining the Feminine”). We were already deeply hurt to see your name as a signatory to the Zarefsky letter and hoped you would see in the resulting protests a mass expression of the very principles on which we presume you have built your career. Given our experiences with you as a scholar, mentor, and friend, many of us expected that you would lead your colleagues in the anti-racist work that this moment demands.
Sadly, you did not write such a response. Rather, you offered broad language about the necessity of listening and conversation, apparently forgetting that people of color and their accomplices in the field have been engaged in conversations about the discipline’s whiteness for decades. Now is not the time for talking, but for action. You are not only late to these conversations, but your comments function to erase those of us who have long been engaged in attempting to rectify the layers of disciplinary oppression. Let us be clear: We do not simply choose to do this work out of moral conviction. We must do this work in order to survive, and so that our students and junior colleagues can also survive.
Most disappointing is your characterization of our discipline’s current discord as one in which we all share complicity in the same manner. True as that may be in the broadest sense of how power circulates in professional academic spaces, there are clear boundaries of complicity with regard to the exclusionary nature of the Distinguished Scholar award, as well as so many other aspects of the politics of recognition in our discipline. We know who has played a role in stifling the advancement of marginalized scholars just as surely as we acknowledge those whose activist labor has cultivated more inclusive spaces in communication studies. In supporting Dr. Zarefsky’s letter, and failing to apologize and remove your signature, you have conspicuously aligned yourself with those who are part of the problem. We expected, and still expect, better from a scholar who “attempts to understand and intervene in the intricacies of structures of power.”
In “Disciplining the Feminine,” you and your co-authors wrote, “Perhaps, we need to locate and sanction new ways of judging our scholarly efforts and effects besides simply counting them up and arranging them by rank. No one denies that judgment is a component of our working lives, but we all might benefit if the discipline’s sanctioned grounds for judgment were reconfigured.” This was true in 1994 and it is true now. However, now, in 2019, critical scholarship and activism have expanded this operationalized definition of whom gets disciplined from simply “the feminine,” to the disciplining of people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, etc. We, as well as the authors of the “Open Letter on Diversity in the Communication Discipline,” and countless other individuals, groups, and divisions who have spoken out in the past several weeks have argued nothing less. Yet, it seems that your position has not evolved alongside the current political and material exigencies. Our disciplinary history demonstrates that the traditional normative criteria regarding merit and distinction continue to favor white scholars, mostly cis men. Your comments signal that those normative criteria continue to be widely upheld, even among alleged allies.
We are at a critical juncture in our discipline. Transformation will require, among other things, that those of us who have made careers from critiquing structures of power in civil society, and within our own discipline, are prepared to apply the same kinds of scrutiny to the spaces in which we occupy positions of power and, for many of us, thrive. Such critical work requires a spirit of accountability, self reflexivity, and humility. We invite you to reconsider your public position and join us in orienting this exciting, if also profoundly exhausting, moment in the direction of lasting transformational change.
Sincerely,
Bernadette Marie Calafell
Karma Chávez
Devika Chawla
Lisa A. Flores
Nina Lozano
Bryan McCann
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Dear NCA Members,
I hear the anger, and I know it is warranted. No one can spend much time doing the kinds of work (whether that work is advocacy, analysis/critique, service, or activism) that attempts to understand and intervene in the intricacies of structures of power, without hearing and feeling the depth of the anger, and without arriving at the conclusion that it is a righteous response. Academia has been very slow to change in general, but especially with regard to its willingness to actually act in consequential ways that would embody its words of support for diversity. The entire academic complex—NCA included—has rarely taken anything but frail action in support of its supposed commitments.
It is not just structures and complexes that have failed to act, of course, but people, who sometimes have given up, perhaps paralyzed by anger, or at other times grown complacent. And also, of course, we know there is the equal possibility of some simply not hearing the anger. Well, we have all heard it now.
At this particular moment, as one member among many, the best action for me—certainly out of both obligation but also desire—is to pledge myself willing, and indeed eager, to join the kinds of conversations that figure out better ways to do the work of this community, even when those conversations are complex and difficult ones. And I will try my best, as a member, scholar, teacher, and advocate, to help make our community one that is more just and that values more overtly each of its members.
I was struck by the wisdom of the open letter from graduate students, posted on CRTNET on June 20, in offering to us all their admirable view for the future: “What those in power have enjoyed is a fraction of the flourishing we know we can create when everyone has the chance to be their full selves and thus, do their best learning, teaching, and scholarship.” We all have a stake in trying to make that future.
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Dear NCA Members,
I hear the anger, and I know it is warranted. No one can spend much time doing the kinds of work (whether that work is advocacy, analysis/critique, service, or activism) that attempts to understand and intervene in the intricacies of structures of power, without hearing and feeling the depth of the anger, and without arriving at the conclusion that it is a righteous response. Academia has been very slow to change in general, but especially with regard to its willingness to actually act in consequential ways that would embody its words of support for diversity. The entire academic complex—NCA included—has rarely taken anything but frail action in support of its supposed commitments.
It is not just structures and complexes that have failed to act, of course, but people, who sometimes have given up, perhaps paralyzed by anger, or at other times grown complacent. And also, of course, we know there is the equal possibility of some simply not hearing the anger. Well, we have all heard it now.
At this particular moment, as one member among many, the best action for me—certainly out of both obligation but also desire—is to pledge myself willing, and indeed eager, to join the kinds of conversations that figure out better ways to do the work of this community, even when those conversations are complex and difficult ones. And I will try my best, as a member, scholar, teacher, and advocate, to help make our community one that is more just and that values more overtly each of its members.
I was struck by the wisdom of the open letter from graduate students, posted on CRTNET on June 20, in offering to us all their admirable view for the future: “What those in power have enjoyed is a fraction of the flourishing we know we can create when everyone has the chance to be their full selves and thus, do their best learning, teaching, and scholarship.” We all have a stake in trying to make that future.