“What changes would we have to make to doctoral education if the emotional wellness of our students were at the center?” Bianca posed this question to a room of students and faculty mentors during a session of the PublicsLab seminar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), in February 2020. In response, there were smiles, sighs, furrowed eyebrows, and blank stares; one student let out a “Yes!” in affirmation of the question. Bianca continued, “How might we train students differently—as humanists and social scientists—if we viewed their wellness as essential to their teaching, research, writing, and communication of knowledge?” After a few moments of silence, a student suggested that doctoral students would be fully funded and receive appropriate pay, as the lack of funding negatively affected health and wellness. Other students offered commentary about the types of mentoring they needed as they navigated the stress-inducing and often hidden rules of doctoral and disciplinary training. A faculty mentor discussed some of the structural barriers to coteaching and research collaborations with colleagues, students, and community members, acknowledging that the tenure and promotion process often penalized faculty members for this shared labor and knowledge creation. Throughout the discussion, participants talked about the ways various systems of oppression in higher education, like racism, sexism, and ableism, created an environment that led many to feel anxious, depressed, overwhelmed, disheartened, insecure, and incompetent.

However, the conversation hit a turning point as we, the authors of this essay, asked participants what had brought them to graduate school and why they were pursuing doctorates. Eyes lit up and voices became animated as participants spoke of the hometowns and communities they wished to serve, the research inquiries that had led them down exciting rabbit holes, the activism they had engaged in, the skills they wanted to acquire in order to address particular issues, and the changes they wanted to make in higher education and in various industries. As people tapped more deeply into their motivations, joy became mixed in with the heaviness in the room. Students and faculty mentors spoke transparently about being forced to push their initial motivations aside in order to fall into line with what is traditionally valued and rewarded in the academy. But they also shared stories about the work in service to multiple publics that had brought them joy.

This conversation about wellness, affect, public scholarship, justice, and doctoral education is essential to the work of the PublicsLab. The PublicsLab is a center focused on transforming humanistic doctoral education and providing graduate students with the professional development and support necessary to practice scholarship—particularly public scholarship—effectively. Here, Bianca, as faculty lead, and Stacy, as director, encourage graduate students, faculty members, and practitioners to trouble the oft-assumed boundaries between “the academy” and “the public” and to lean into the values, desires, commitments, and beliefs that made them want to pursue research in the first place. Over the past two years, as we have supported students in their public scholarship, we have been dedicated to paying attention to their affective experiences during the doctoral process. We recognize that their emotional wellness is crucial to their academic journey, particularly to their experience of joy. At the PublicsLab, preparing students to be great scholars requires us to take public scholarship seriously while also recognizing that emotional wellness and joy are necessities for doctoral education.

The PublicsLab was founded in 2018, when the Graduate Center received a $2.26 million, five-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation intended to “transform doctoral education for the public good” (“About”). The PublicsLab sponsors a robust slate of events and internships that serve the wider Graduate Center community. We also run a regranting program for departments with ambitions of transforming doctoral curricula to better serve the public good. But the centerpiece of our program is an interdisciplinary fellowship, composed of students from across the humanities and humanistic social sciences. PublicsLab fellows spend a year working together in community to consider the philosophy, mindset, theories, methods, and practices of public scholarship, which they then put into practice the following year through projects and internships at external organizations (see “Public Fellows”). As evidenced by their responses to the question of what had brought them to graduate school, many of the fellows have strong community connections and feel a deep-seated urge to uplift their own communities or to work toward a more just society in general; hence their projects are almost invariably justice-focused in some sense. Students have worked from their interest and knowledge in areas such as educational justice, legal justice, environmental justice, and human rights, to name only a few. As faculty lead and director, we provide mentorship and continuity, but the students are the driving force and the moral compass of our project. They hold us accountable and shape the program in ways that neither of us could have ever expected.

It quickly became clear when we began working together to create the PublicsLab that we shared a set of values related to acknowledging and centering the emotional wellness of our students. Bianca’s 2018 book, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism, examines happiness as a political and oppositional act for Black women and highlights Black women’s agency in the pursuit of happiness. Stacy’s dissertation looked at affect and moral reasoning and posited postmodernism and the rise of the hermeneutics of suspicion as an emotional response to fascism in post-1945 Germany. As scholars, we are both committed to taking seriously the emotional dimensions of life inside the academy.

Making emotional wellness a central tenet of the program has been a means of resisting what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have called a “professional and critical commitment to negligence” in the academy (41). Furthermore, we emphasize the affective dimensions of graduate education—the affective labor involved in teaching, mentoring, and, yes, even administering a program like this one. This interest in affect is connected to how we—the program’s administrators and fellows alike—have come to think about “the public good” as something more radical than the project’s original mandate would suggest.

Drawing on Harney and Moten’s essays in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and on the cultural theorist Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included, we here consider the ways in which the PublicsLab engages in “the undercommon refusal of the academy of misery” (Harney and Moten 118); how it attempts to center “study,” as Harney and Moten conceive of it; and how, in doing both these things, it seeks to create a doctoral education that is social, joyful, and committed to justice.

Defining the “Public Good”

The question of what, exactly, the public good is is one we have encountered frequently in the last two years. What public—or publics? Whose good? Do we mean “a public good,” as in public ownership, or “for the good of the public”? And who are we, administrators and fellows, to decide what’s good for anyone? Are we not, ourselves, a public?

“Public good” often appears to be a politically neutral phrase, although many institutions long considered to be “public goods” in the United States have become politicized, from the Centers for Disease Control to the postal service. Our mission statement conceives of the work of the PublicsLab less “as a public good” than “for the public good.” The shift in language from a noun to a verb implies that the university is in service to and yet still separate from a broader public and invokes vague, comforting feelings without encouraging too much examination of the relationship between the university and its publics. Furthermore, it does not force the university to examine the racism, sexism, and classism inherent in its institutionalized assumptions about what constitutes good scholarly work. The assumption is that doing service work for the public is good and may be impactful, but, as it remains marginalized at many universities, it is not viewed as the “real” work of the university and therefore seems unthreatening at first glance.

In short, “the public good” as a phrase hides the fact that so much of what we do in the PublicsLab is about addressing systems of power. Work that addresses systems of power is not politically neutral. It is justice work, and it is deeply, unapologetically political. For something to be “a public good” or “for the public good,” it must face, understand, and address the inequities that are prevalent in the public and within publics. Centering racial equity and social justice is essential to doing work that is effectively public and good.

If we understand that working for the public good is political, then it becomes easy to see how the programming, institution building, and knowledge production we do is closely aligned with what the academy labels “diversity work.” It is true that not all who work for the public good do so with a critical eye toward racism or any other form of oppression. However, because of our values and research interests (and those of our fellows), we bring specific political commitments related to justice, equity, and anti-racism to our work at the PublicsLab. We are constantly asking questions about who benefits from particular histories, narratives, and methodological choices; who has access to which resources; which types of knowledge are valued or dismissed; and which communities get erased and why during the doctoral education process. We engage in similar conversations about access, belonging, difference, and power as diversity workers in other parts of the university. Ahmed writes, “Diversity workers work from their institutional involvement. Diversity practitioners do not simply work at institutions, they also work on them, given that their explicit remit is to redress existing institutional goals or priorities” (22). As we participate in mentoring and curriculum changes that challenge the power differentials underlying traditional doctoral education, we find ourselves frequently working on the Graduate Center and higher education more broadly. Though the mission statement declares that our focus is on the public good (with our lens facing outward), in reality, much of the PublicsLab labor leads us to do significant work on higher education (with a lens focused inward).[1]

This work on the university requires us to address not only the ways in which higher education has failed but also the ways in which it has succeeded in perpetuating unjust systems of power even while it critiques them. It is possible, if you are white and working with a predominantly white student population, to take the mission of the university itself for granted as fundamentally good, if flawed in its implementation. It is possible, if you are white and working with a predominantly white student body, to not see, or ignore, the ways in which the university harms particular students who are racially marked and marginalized. However, at the Graduate Center, the student population is more racially and ethnically diverse than at some other predominantly white institutions, and within this community students are often aware that their relationship to the university is different from that of their white peers. Students of color drawn to the PublicsLab are frequently vocal about their experiences with, and analyses of, the inequities within higher education. If one takes seriously the affective, emotional dimensions of life inside the academy, and hopes to center emotional wellness for one’s students—especially students of color, queer and trans students, first-generation immigrant or college-educated students—then it is impossible, or at the very least unconscionable, to ignore the harm that the university can and does do.

To be clear, very little of this was conceived of in the grant whose language still defines the PublicsLab to various publics. It is not wholly obvious from looking at our website, for example, that the PublicsLab supports and promotes not only public work but specifically justice work. Part of our project in this essay will therefore be a public rethinking of the PublicsLab’s mission statement to encompass the development of our own thinking about the institutions in which we are embedded and our at-times fraught relationship to them.

Our Starting Point: The PublicsLab Mission Statement

Mission statements are a curious genre. Ahmed notes that “mission talk” is “‘happy talk,’ a way of telling a happy story of the institution that is at once a story of the institution as happy” (10). Such statements leave no room for ambivalence or for critique of the institution itself. They are, in effect, the very opposite of what Harney and Moten attempt in their essay “The University and the Undercommons.”

Harney and Moten always come at the undercommons sideways, out of the corner of their eye, rather than head-on, as though it might vanish if one ever tried to look at it squarely. They describe the undercommons as the imaginative home of the subversive (Black) intellectual. It is the university’s “refugee colony . . . where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.” It is born out of an ambivalent or even adversarial relationship between the university and the intellectual, an acknowledgment that an institution is incapable of love or care. Harney and Moten write:

But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, . . . to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university (26).

The question, “What is the undercommons?” is probably the wrong question altogether. “Where is the undercommons?” doesn’t quite work either. “Who is the undercommons?” seems closer to the truth—that the undercommons exists primarily in scholars’ relationships with each other and in their relationships to their own institutions. It encompasses the “Maroon communities” of “composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers” (30).

The undercommons emerges out of ambivalence toward and critique of the institution and as such has no mission statement. The PublicsLab was conceived as having a mutually beneficial relationship to the Graduate Center, so it would be going too far to call it a true undercommons. And yet what has emerged in the recruitment of the first and second cohorts, and over the course of the first two years of study, is that the PublicsLab is, for many of our students, a refuge from the supposed refuge of the university. It is a place where they come to escape the neglectful aspects of their programs and where the experiences of students of color and queer students are foregrounded in a way that they are not in the wider university.

This work is not evident in our mission statement. The PublicsLab mission statement, as presented on our website, is pulled more or less from the grant proposal, with only light editing, and was institutionally coauthored by a committee on which neither of us sat. It reads as follows:

The PublicsLab has two broad goals. The first is to ensure that The Graduate Center’s humanities doctoral programs prepare students for careers both within and outside of academe. The expertise required for humanistic inquiry is vital to understanding the world around us. Through fellowships, internships, workshops, and curriculum enhancement, we strive to provide students with skills and opportunities that will allow them to thrive in academic and non-academic professions. The second goal is to encourage doctoral students and faculty to engage in scholarship that is accessible to the public, deepens our understanding of burning issues, and might even spur social change. The PublicsLab seeks to incubate and promote socially-engaged learning and creative, community-based research and to attract scholars who are committed to generating new knowledge that contributes to the key issues of our time (“About”).

The lack of allowance for critique and ambivalence in mission statements makes them troubled and troubling documents for those of us undertaking organizing work in the academy. There is no room in this mission statement to note that, while it is perhaps true that humanistic expertise is vital, the push for PhD “career diversity” is rooted in the current academic job market crisis for humanities and social science students. It also cannot acknowledge that the CUNY system, with its overreliance on adjuncts, contributes to that crisis (“Facts”). There is no space in this mission statement to note that the Graduate Center has suffered from severe austerity, along with the rest of CUNY. Although multiple CUNY campuses are regularly named in the top ten in the United States for upward social mobility (Reber and Sinclair), the state and the city have deprived the institution of the resources necessary to do its work for years now. CUNY is a public university that serves a vast and diverse student body, and yet even as that student body has grown and diversified, public support in the form of taxpayer dollars has diminished (“Addressing”). To describe these conditions is not proper “mission talk.”

What is especially curious about the construction of the PublicsLab mission statement is that the two goals are separated out so distinctly, when they are in fact closely intertwined. As leaders of the program, we aren’t inclined to distinguish the preparation for public scholarship from the preparation for careers beyond the academy. Preparation for public scholarship is preparation for careers outside the academy, and not only because it involves learning new skills and ways of communicating. Thinking about public scholarship as not only translational but foundational and critical—not only an add-on but a requirement—transforms that scholarship, and it raises the ethical stakes of the work in ways that may lead students down a variety of pathways, both inside and outside the academy.

And yet we are aware that the tenure and promotion system of the university does not value work that is too public. The prestige economy of higher education resists work that is relevant, accessible, or activist and often punishes scholars who do it, especially scholars of color and queer scholars. It does so by denying or delaying tenure, leveling empty but damning phrases such as “lack of academic rigor” at them in justification.[2] Such accusations of poor quality—difficult if not impossible to refute either in dissertation defenses or in the tenure and promotion ­process—are rooted in assumptions about who does public work, what that public work does, and, indeed, who the public is. If the public at large is presumed to be unintellectual (or even anti-intellectual), then work done with them must also be less intellectually valuable.

Even more curious than the split between these two goals, however, is the phrase “might even spur social change.” We detect in this phrase a note of ambivalence—rare, as we have said, for a mission statement—about whether work conducted within the bounds of the university can spur “social change.” This ambivalence is revealing. First, it marks the desire not to overpromise and underdeliver, as no one wants to be held accountable for “spurring social change,” which is difficult to measure in terms of programmatic success. It also belies a very real concern about the relevance of humanities work, as well as the desire not to appear “too political” in the project’s reach. More subtly, however, this ambivalence may mark uncertainty about what “spurring social change” might do to the university itself. The result is a palpable anxiety on the part of the institution.

Resisting Neglectful Professionalization

The reason for this anxiety becomes increasingly clear as one spends more time considering the depth of change that a substantive commitment to “the public good” might bring to a university. Much in the same way that a substantive commitment to diversity would be transformative and disruptive, for the university to insert itself into public life (beyond preparing a workforce for deployment or catalyzing social mobility) would transform the university into something it does not yet recognize. The university would have to take up a different set of responsibilities and priorities and dedicate itself to a form of education that is hallmarked by care.

Imagining such a scenario would be easier if the relationship between neglect and professionalization were not so clearly about the imbrication of the university with capitalism. The university has traditionally been a refuge for those who wish to avoid the more overtly brutal forms of capitalism, and yet it has always produced a workforce for capitalism. It has done this by encouraging a highly individualized and isolated form of scholarship. Achievement within the university is individual; this is especially true in the humanities, where single-authored work counts above all else. Therefore, while the humanities think of themselves as antiprofessional (if not unprofessional), they remain quintessentially professional by Harney and Moten’s definition: “It is professionalization itself that is devoted to the asocial, the university itself that reproduces the knowledge of how to neglect sociality in its very concern for what it calls asociality” (40).

It is our view that professionalization need not be neglectful but that neglectful professionalization within the academy, and especially within graduate education, is, in Ahmed’s terms, institutionalized. It has become “second nature” or “natural” (24); neglectful professionalization has receded into the background and become—like institutional whiteness, or, indeed, in conflation with institutional whiteness—business as usual. It becomes obvious only when someone or something comes along to disrupt it, triggering a sort of affective immune response. The disruptive element—often a scholar but sometimes a program or even an emerging discipline—is told that they are not the right “fit,” or they are not performing scholarliness correctly. Their work is too creative, too public, too collaborative, too practice-based. It is “unprofessional” and it does not belong in the university.

An astonishing number of students, especially queer students and students of color, receive such messages, either implicitly or explicitly, in the first two years of their PhD programs. Many of them leave, to the detriment of us all. Some stay and work for change but do so too often at the expense of their physical and mental well-being. Whether they stay or leave, they are frequently seen as unprofessional and unmotivated or as unsuccessful in navigating perfectionism or impostor training.[3] Instead of viewing these disruptions as opportunities to engage in deep reflection about disciplinary and departmental values, or taking steps toward institutional change that incorporates caring and innovative ways of knowledge-making, the academy carries these narrow, neglectful notions of professionalization forward, with little recognition that at the core of this type of professionalization is institutional whiteness.

When I think about the way we use the term “study,” I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. . . . The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present (Harney and Moten 110).

Study, in Harney and Moten’s conception, is not institutionalized. It is social, based in care, disruptive, and “unprofessional”—or perhaps “more than professional” (30). To reorient professionalization within the academy toward the social would be to reorient it toward care, affect, and equity.[4]

Harney and Moten’s concept of study and the ways in which it subverts and resists institutionalized neglect inside the academy bears some resemblance to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s concept of “generous thinking.” Generous thinking, Fitzpatrick says in her book of the same name, is “a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, collaboration over competition, and lingering with the ideas that are in front of us rather than continually pressing forward to where we want to go” (4). This idea of generous thinking reconceptualizes the university “not as a giant nonprofit organization, focused on the fiscal sustainability required to provide services . . . but instead as a site of voluntary community—a site of solidarity—forged with and by the publics we seek to engage.” This reconceiving of the university would allow us “to begin to develop new models, new structures, that could help all of us reconnect with and recommit to a sense of the common good” (13). If we can reassert our values, we can successfully transform the university, bringing about what Fitzpatrick refers to as a “paradigm shift” in higher education toward a model that is neither based on elite research universities nor on blunt workforce preparation for a capitalist economy. Rather, the university as Fitzpatrick imagines it would be a community “grounded in an ethic of care” (208).

The story that Fitzpatrick tells about the “Golden Era” of the American university is familiar from the field of (white) critical university studies and the work of scholars such as Christopher Newfield (Boggs et al.). In contrast, Harney and Moten, and others writing about higher education—particularly scholars of color—resist the urge to rehabilitate the university. Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein argue in “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation” that this way of thinking, endemic to critical university studies, elides the systemically racist and exclusionary history of American higher education; it ignores that many if not most universities were built on slavery and that the origin story of land-grant universities is rooted in the seizure of land and the displacement of Indigenous peoples (see also la paperson; Wilder; Porter; and Williams et al.). By conveniently forgetting the extent to which government support for the American university of the mid-twentieth century was tied to national defense and the Cold War, this narrative also has the effect of distancing the institution from “genocidal domestic and foreign policy.” Abolitionist university studies underscores the ways in which this narrative about the midcentury public university “relies on a periodization . . . that produces the appearance of justice by cropping out the violence constitutive of the institution itself,” and it retells the history of the American university as one of violent accumulation—of capital, of land, and of labor, including slave labor (Boggs et al.). Such an institution, these scholars argue, may not be redeemable or recuperable.

In the first PublicsLab seminar, held in the spring semester of 2019, a number of students of color offered a strong critique of Generous Thinking. Though Fitzpatrick cites Black scholars such as bell hooks and Tressie McMillan Cottom and offers scenes from her classroom, the students felt that experiences like their own in the academy and pertinent scholarship from disciplines like Black studies were erased or not taken into account. They felt that many of the ideas of solidarity, collaboration, and the centering of the public that anchor Fitzpatrick’s framework of generosity had been theorized and advocated for in decades past by Black organizers and scholars who had been punished and marginalized within academic spaces precisely because they encouraged these practices. Students were frustrated in two different ways: first, they felt that only certain people with racialized, gendered, and classed privileges were able to practice Fitzpatrick’s generosity in a way that would be recognized as valuable by the academy, even though others without those privileges had been practicing and advocating for it for years; and, second, they felt that people of color’s critiques of texts, disciplinary practices, and doctoral training were often righteous and that Fitzpatrick’s call for generosity would be used by others with more power to silence, ostracize, and dismiss them.

In the end, these students argued that the absence of a critical lens toward race and racism in Fitzpatrick’s discussion of generosity (in contrast to the explicit analysis of race in Harney and Moten’s work) demonstrated how even some of the most well-intentioned efforts at making the academy more inclusive and welcoming could result in exclusion, neglect, and further marginalization. Through this critique, the students questioned us as leaders of the PublicsLab about our commitment to equity and generosity and held us accountable. That seminar taught us some powerful lessons about the different positionalities and critical lenses students brought to the PublicsLab and served as a reflection point that made us revisit how we practiced our values and commitments in future courses and programming.

Taking all this into consideration, we are left with a number of difficult questions: What does it mean to work within and on an institution that should not or perhaps cannot be rehabilitated? How do we imagine study and generosity in ways that do not reify the institution itself or reproduce past and present inequities? Finally, if the institution will never care for us in the ways we need and want it to, then how do we ensure that we care for each other?

The critiques that PublicsLab fellows frequently offer about the university contain elements of the critiques offered by Harney and Moten, Boggs, Meyerhoff, Mitchell, Schwartz-Weinstein, and other scholars of color; the fellows are all too aware of the ways in which the system is functioning as intended—in ways that do harm, even violence, to them. And yet they find themselves inside the university anyway. Some students are there because they wish “to sneak into the university and steal what one can” (Harney and Moten 26), but for others, the decision to remain—at least for now—contains a complicated and at times painful hope that the university can be transformed. Although this dual perspective is not currently foregrounded in the mission statement of the PublicsLab, we believe it should be. It is precisely within noninstitutionalized spaces like the PublicsLab that this sort of tension can be navigated and that the potential for true transformation exists. It is our intention to foreground this tension in our new mission statement.

Centering joy and equity in the mission of the PublicsLab requires us to focus on process rather than product. Our original mission statement clearly articulates the two broad end goals of the project: to prepare doctoral students for a range of careers and to support scholarship that engages the public, with the tenuously expressed hope of spurring social change. However, it is in making decisions about how to accomplish these goals that we are able to create opportunities for more joy and greater equity in graduate education. The PublicsLab therefore has the goal of providing graduate students at the Graduate Center with the opportunity for study, in Harney and Moten’s sense.

Centering Joy and Equity: The New Mission Statement of the PublicsLab

Public scholarship requires students to think of their work as a social and collaborative endeavor in which different forms of expertise are valued equally. We model this by providing a space for students to be their own selves and to build on what they already know rather than assuming a blank slate or an empty vessel. Students bring with them commitments to their communities, to their politics, and to their families. We support students as they explore ways of fulfilling these commitments through their scholarship. We do not ask students to disentangle their identities and selves from their academic work but rather acknowledge that academic work rooted in community, identity, and politics is often more rigorous, more sustaining, and more publicly relevant than work that is not. We demonstrate this by regularly asking ourselves and our fellows during class sessions and programming, “Who is your community? To whom are you accountable? How does your research demonstrate this commitment?”

We are collectively committed to the idea that no one knows everything and that cocreating and cothinking allow us to create new knowledge together. We are committed to building a generous and trusting space that includes practicing public humanists from outside the university. In inviting practitioners to join us, we honor the different personal and professional choices that PhDs have made and acknowledge the many and varied needs and desires each of us has. We learn from the diverse and creative ways these practitioners produce, communicate, and teach their knowledges.

We make space for ambivalence, doubt, and critique of our own methods, purpose, and institutional engagements. We engage in a generative and thoughtful process of experimentation as a community. We make visible different forms of labor, including the care work and emotional labor that are necessary for generosity, and we acknowledge the uneven distribution of such labor across lines of race, class, and gender. We advocate and organize, in small and big ways, against the systems of power that enable these inequities to continue. By rendering visible the dysfunction that is inevitably present in any relationship between an individual and an institution, we are able to reimagine that relationship as one that is more generous, more nurturing, more equitable, and more joyful.

As we write this, it is summer 2020, and life at the Graduate Center and in New York City more generally has been completely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Only a few weeks after the seminar discussion in which we talked about centering joy and wellness in graduate education, we were all sent home to continue the semester in isolation from one another. Our students have been able to meet only virtually since March 2020. CUNY was hit harder by the first wave of COVID than any other university system, suffering thirty-eight reported deaths of faculty members and staff members as of this writing (Valbrun). Furthermore, the nation has been roiled by a renewed conversation about race, policing, abolition, and the systemic undervaluing and dehumanizing of Black lives.

In such times, we have all rediscovered, everything is heightened. Both privilege and inequality become more apparent. The consequence of decades of neglect of CUNY on the part of the state and the city—neglect that is itself a consequence of systemic racism—has become heartbreakingly obvious through its impact on students who do not have abundant family and community resources to fall back on. Discussions about access to health insurance that would have been unthinkable at either of our own doctoral alma maters have become a daily occurrence as we scramble to meet the most immediate needs of as many students as possible.

Under these circumstances, we at the PublicsLab have found ourselves revisiting the question that hangs over every grant-funded initiative: institutionalization. To become institutionalized has many advantages, the most obvious of which is funding. But it is more than that; when an initiative is funded not by grants but through the institution where it lives, something novel is brought from the margins into the center. It is deemed “mission critical.” Institutionalization allows for longevity, the retainment of staff, and stability. However, it also has the effect of making something less visible. “When things become institutional, they recede,” Ahmed writes. “To institutionalize x is for x to become routine or ordinary such that x becomes part of the background for those who are part of an institution” (21).

The fact that our initiative is not institutionalized yet in a traditional (or fiscal) sense is useful or even essential in this: since the PublicsLab isn’t taken seriously yet by some at our institution, the community is able to hold on to joy, generosity, and care. All three concepts are connected to students’ being invited and encouraged to bring their whole selves with them to their study if they so desire. We make room for their whole selves, even as we recognize that for some, this may not feel safe just yet, especially during a pandemic that has rocked our worlds. For, as we discussed elsewhere in this article, these whole selves are not seen as unproblematic by the institution. “Study,” in Harney and Moten’s sense, is subversive.

Even at the most basic level, if these whole selves are invited, then the institution must be prepared to respond to the needs that will arise. Responsiveness is certainly easier when there are resources at our disposal. In April 2020, while the lumbering bureaucracy of CUNY struggled to respond to students’ needs, the PublicsLab was able to implement an emergency grant program within weeks to help students whose publicly oriented research agendas had been completely disrupted by the pandemic. Some of these grants covered what we traditionally think of as research expenses, such as stipends for study participants or new technology. But some of them covered costs that fell well outside the traditional bounds of that category—child care, for example, or the cost of housing in New York City relative to where a student had intended to live over the summer. This consideration of students’ whole lives would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, under conditions of institutionalization.

It would be going too far to say that we conceived of our community of fellows and their faculty mentors with Harney and Moten’s principles in mind, or that we were deliberately resisting institutionalization. Instead, we came to the project hoping to create a community where doctoral students felt supported in their work and professional lives; where wellness was centered and people felt nourished intellectually, physically, and emotionally; where we were generous with each other and our publics; where hierarchy was as flat as possible and prestige was not the coin of the realm; where we had fun and engaged in activities that were intellectual, social, and joyful. We wanted to strip away the performative, professionalizing, neglectful aspects of doctoral study and create a community where a diversity of positionalities and therefore a diversity of scholars were nurtured.

Things that are possible on the margins are not always possible in the center. At the PublicsLab, we have embraced the notion that research can be affective, justice-focused, and transformative, and we believe that new knowledge often comes from practices based on collective brainstorming, asking good questions, and experimentation rather than an individualized, linear process. Moreover, we have both come to question, especially under COVID-19, as we watch administrators at CUNY campuses make cuts in anticipation of austerity measures (Lerner), whether institutionalization is always a step in the right direction.

This is a difficult reckoning. Marginalization is painful in many ways and choosing to remain joyful on the periphery feels counterintuitive. But power is not only present in the center, and so much of the influential work being undertaken on the margins, by those marginalized, in various publics and communities deemed unimportant, proves that to be true. When change comes, it often does not come from the center; rather, change happens on the margins, and then, through careful organizing, moves inward.

Notes

[1] We hesitate to use the framing of inside and outside, because we spend a great deal of time trying to complicate this binary that anchors so many conversations about the academy and publics. While literal or figurative barriers often block access to universities, spaces between these two sites are sometimes more porous than many imagine. Throughout the CUNY system, some students, staff members, and faculty members come from marginalized communities or other publics that CUNY imagines it serves. These CUNY community members may face institutional barriers to equitable access to power and resources within the university system; nevertheless, they frequently fight to ensure that their voices, and those of the publics they represent, are included in the system’s mission and affairs. The boundaries of inside and outside are always in flux, blurred, and contested. As a result, we encourage students to remember that the academy itself is a type of public—one that is often deciphering whom it is speaking to and with as well as to whom it is accountable.

[2] Patricia A. Matthew’s edited volume Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure delves into this phenomenon in detail. In particular, Matthew notes that “it is often difficult for faculty in more traditional fields to fully appreciate and assess the value of scholarship in emerging fields” (xii). This is true for interdisciplinary academic fields but perhaps even more true when a colleague’s work is explicitly public in nature.

[3] Mike Mena, a PhD candidate in anthropology at CUNY, encourages researchers to use the phrase “impostor training” instead of the traditionally used “impostor syndrome” because it draws attention to the racist and elitist practices that undergird academic training, which often marginalize and disempower students of color, queer students, and working-class students (“What”).

[4] For more on prosocial forms of professionalization, see Jenna Lay and Emily Shreve’s essay in this volume.

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