Five College Consortium

July 22, 2020

Dear FC Feminist Communities,

I write to you as the new director of the FCWSRC, grateful for the connections, relationships, and possibilities the Center has nurtured for three decades and profoundly aware of what it can mean to have access to spaces where our struggles to work within and transform our institutions become intimately and locally collective. Relationships matter. The privatization of wealth and care wrought by settler sexuality often leaves us isolated and under-resourced. Around the proverbial table, sharing what we can, we are wiser and more powerful. What can happen at the Center’s big, old table is the reason I stepped up to direct. It has been a place to slow down, think together, check each other, organize, strategize, argue, hold space, and imagine accountability. A reprieve from insisting that there is work to do, and a chance to get down to it. I believe in feminism as a site of struggle and feminist scholarship as a critical-creative project of undoing and/as worldmaking. When feminists make space to fight with and for one another, we are building things.

The contributions of Black feminist theorizing to the movement to defund the police and reallocate those resources, for example, highlights the importance of how we narrativize. If all research is storytelling and we are a community of researchers and we know the stakes of how we story our worlds are often literally life and death, we have work to keep doing. Not only our individual work, but the citational, pedagogical, and always political work of advancing the insights of transformational scholarship. This often means challenging narratives that make certain outcomes seem inevitable and others unrealistic within our institutions. 

If you are reading this letter, you likely already know that the FCWSRC has been defunded for the 2020-2021 academic year. Moments of financial crisis in higher education are of course ripe for pushing through institutional decisions that impact marginalized scholarship and scholars, staff, and students and would in other moments be indefensible. Many feminist and other critical activist-scholars have pointed out that the crisis of Covid-19, the pretense for closing the center, is more than biological. The scale of this crisis and its unequal distribution of harms - especially in the US - is the result of gendered racial capitalism and the eugenic logics that undergird the differential valuation of lives in this country. Rather than ceding that the damage of a crisis largely created by anti-feminist, racist, capitalist decision making can be mitigated by more of the same, we are called now to insist on fundamentally rethinking the priorities of our societies and, from our vantage point in the academy, our colleges and universities. The spaces we have created over decades for the critical work of making sense of where we are and imagining otherwise are being gutted of resources and their stewards asked to participate in the violence of pretending that we’re all in this together. 

Whatever measures we take in a given instance, we must make strange the administrative narrative that would have us continue to pretend that crises in the fiscal sustainability of higher education can be addressed through austerity measures that defund programs, centers, and services we need. Critical university studies have provided us ample resources to understand the bloated administrative budgets the labor of staff and faculty and debt of students supports. This is not a time to “come together” and accept the stripping away of hard-won resources in the interest of a “greater good” that has never included those most vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in our institutions. To say that we stand in solidarity with those protesting structural racism and the ongoing history of anti-Black structural violence in the US while quietly accepting a narrative that naturalizes the dismantling of infrastructures that support activist scholarship at our institutions is unconscionable. Feminist research has taught us better.

The Five College area is an historic hub for feminist research and activism and has played its part over decades in helping define both beyond our local community. The stakes of defining feminist work as transformational and actively challenging its cooptation as handmaiden to liberalism and white supremacy are high. Over the month since I received the news of the Center’s defunding, I have been in conversations about how to proceed with previous directors, faculty representatives on the steering committee, and other comrades and mentors in the Valley who share this conviction. I’m sure it’s no surprise to you, fellow feminists, that the question of whether and how to respond and program this year is a site of contest, without simple sides or easy answers. Context is everything, and the context in which we find ourselves is one of largely unprecedented challenges and possibilities. As we grapple with anger, disappointment, and concerns about the nature of the Center’s ongoing relationship to the consortium, it is clear that insofar as the FCWSRC is the networks we’ve been building to support the reworlding work of feminist research, the center is far from closed. 

I hope you’ll join us at the virtual table for our first town hall meeting on September 11th at 4pm. 

In solidarity,

Angie