#FemFog Medievalism: Lessons Learned

by JONATHAN HSY

Two ITM postings in one day! This posting began as a set of reflections on a public Facebook status update but I'm reposting it all here as a kind of archive (and it's especially appropriate for MLK Day). Brief context: medievalists were engaged in important conversations on social media this week in response to the discovery of distressingly anti-feminist blogs/blog postings by established medieval scholars. Here are some initial thoughts on where we might go from here.

[UPDATED January 28, 2016: For more context on #femfog conversations since this post was made, see Dorothy Kim's post on ITM, this curated archive of #femfog tweets by @OldBooksNewSci, and coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Jezebel (and read our note of thanks to Dr. Zuckerberg and our own affirmation of values).]

#FEMFOG MEDIEVALISM:

LESSONS LEARNED + PROACTIVE STEPS

What can we (medievalists) learn from Frantzen-gate and Fulton-gate, and what proactive steps can we make to change the field (and our world) for the better?

Some initial thoughts:

1. EVERYONE is implicated. Gay men can be mysogynist, and women can reaffirm patriarchy (and white hegemony). Retired profs can be toxic—and so can grad students. You can be disadvantaged in one way but also exert power/exclude in others. We all need to be aware and look out for each other (male, female, queer, white, nonwhite, nontenured, tenured—everyone).

2. KUDOS to courageous people. Thanks to Dorothy Kim for launching an extended private conversation on the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Facebook page about enduring harmful scholarly (i.e. medievalist) fantasies of whiteness. I will give some credit to Rachel Fulton Brown (author of one of the blogs in question) for at least engaging with the criticism she is facing and making some efforts to understand. (Meanwhile the stridently masculinist Allen J. Frantzen did not engage any of his critics and un-friended people on Facebook after his viewpoints started circulating. ‪#‎GYB‬)

3. INVITE unexpected voices into conversations. This applies to conference sessions, seminars, blogs, scholarly collections and journals. Nominate many kinds of people to your leadership structures, advisory groups, editorial boards, conference organizing groups. (On that note, check out this GREAT wide-ranging slate of candidates for the BABEL Steering Committee. If you consider yourself a BABEL-er, vote by Friday!)

4. SUPPORT the work (scholarship and labor, physical and affective) of marginalized people in your social spheres. The meaning of “marginalized” or “minority” differs from context to context, but in any case build structures to support people who find themselves “outside the advantaged majority.” Do not amplify the voices of toxic people and do not help to advance the careers of people who are jerks.

5. MORE DISCOURSE, not less. When toxic views are published, especially by established scholars who hold positions of power, we should all be willing to respond to such discourse with more of our own. The conversations this week were not just about “individuals” but their blogging as symptoms of much broader structural and cultural issues we need to address for the sake of our field and our society more broadly. I’m glad that men and women (such as Peter Buchanan and Carla Jardim) offered timely, thoughtful, and forceful blog posts in response to Frantzen. Both humor and earnest critique can be powerful weapons.

6. MORE ALLIES. We need more white people to address white supremacy and white fragility (thanks for instance to Monika Otter and Suzanne Edwards on the SFMS thread and thanks to Jeffrey Cohen for the strong response on twitter and through this posting here on ITM calling out Frantzen on his scholarly and public misogyny, and thanks to Karl Steel for his post on ITM earlier this morning). We need more men (gay/queer and straight) to speak out against misogyny. We need more white women to point out problems with mainstream feminism. Rhetoric “lands” differently depending on who is speaking, and at times allies can do really important work.

7. RECOGNIZE that there’s a lot of energy/time/labor involved in responding to and educating people whenever this sort of thing happens. It really should not just be the “usual suspects” chiming in when these sorts of things happen and having the burden of educating people. Senior scholars should be able to educate themselves.

8. EXAMINE your own behavior and practices. If you receive criticism for your rhetoric or behavior, think about how to meaningfully change how you do things in the future (this could apply to the classroom, conferences, personal interactions, online communication, etc.).

9. USE YOUR AWESOME POWERS for good. Make medieval studies (and the world) more open, aware, inclusive.

10. DECIDE today what you can do to transform the profession and the world. It might be scholarship, serving on a committee, organizing a conference, curating a conversation, mentoring a student/colleague. If we want medieval studies to thrive, then we are all in this together.

#Kzoo2015 Blogroll

by JONATHAN HSY

[UPDATED May 30, 2015]

It's been just over a week since the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies (Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI) and quite a few blog posts relating to the conference have appeared online already. I'll be posting some of my own reflections on this site soon, but in the meantime check out this list of post-Kalamazoo links.

In addition to links to blog postings and transcripts of individual paper presentations, this list includes archives of tweets, public notes from sessions, Prezi and YouTube presentations ... and an alliterative poem.

Have I missed anything? Comment below or on my public Facebook thread and I'll update this list ASAP.

[Items listed alphabetically by title; each author/creator named at end of parentheses]

50th International ICMS Day 4 (curated tweet archive, Peter Konieczny)

50th International ICMS Day 3 (curated tweet archive, Peter Konieczny)

50th International ICMS Day 2 (curated tweet archive, Peter Konieczny)

50th International ICMS Day 1 (curated tweet archive, Peter Konieczny)

Best Tweets of Build IT Together (curated tweet archive, Garrett Wegner)

"Ascolat to Camelot, Guildford to Winchester: Narrative Travel in Malory's Morte d'Arthur" (paper presentation and reflections on session "Sacred and Secular Road Trips in Middle English Romance," Kristi J. Castleberry)

Bayeux Tapestry Pics from the Zoo (photos from premiere of “The Bayeux Tapestry: The Stitches Speak," Christopher Monk)

[Bayeux Tapestry] The stitches spoke! (review of Daisy Black’s dramatization of the Bayeux Tapestry, Christopher Monk)

Debatable Rule: (Re)assessing Medieval Statecraft, Power, Authority, and Gender (tweets from roundtable Session 291, Yvonne Seale)

Gower and Medicine (tweets from Session 469 sponsored by the Gower Project, M Bychowski)

I’m not dead! (blog post at The Public Medievalist, Paul B. Sturtevant)

Kalamazoo 2015 (blog post discussing Session 8, Session 153, Session 229, Session 360, and Session 535 with links to archives of tweets from additional sessions, Yvonne Seale)

Kalamazoo 2015: Congress 50 (tweets from Old English/Anglo-Saxon sessions including Session 36, Session 63, Session 113, Session 211, Session 270, Session 325, Session 356, and Session 420; also Session 464: "What Can Medieval Studies Bring to Ecocriticism?" by Nicole G. Discenza)

Kalamazoo [2015] Friday Update - Social Time and Not Farming Naked (blog post at Medieval History Geek, Curt Emanuel)

"Kalamazoo 2015: Human-Plant Assemblages in Cornish Ordinalia Plays" (Medieval Ecocriticisms blog posting about session on "Secret Lives of Medieval Plants" with transcript of paper presentation, Rob Barrett​)

Kalamazoo 2015 Round-Up! (esp. the session on Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics org. by the BABEL Working Group, Leila K. Norako)

Kalamazoo 2015 Saturday Update and Wrap-up (blog post at Medieval History Geek, Curt Emanuel)

"Kalamazoo has come and gone" (alliterative poem, Stephen Hopkins​)

Looking Back AND Looking Forward: The Material Collective at Kalamazoo 2015 (blog of the Material Collective, Jennifer Borland)

"Lost At Sea / Forlornly Hopeful" (presentation at the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute's "Lost" Roundtable, Eileen A. Joy​)

Medieval Data: Prospects & Practices (Session 153 tweets, Kalani Craig)

#MedievalDonut (curated archive of twitter meme, Jonathan Hsy)

Medieval Materialisms Day 3 (forthcoming, Angela Bennett Segler)

Medieval Materialisms Day 2 (blog post, Angela Bennett Segler​)

Medieval Materialisms Day 2 (tweet archive, Angela Bennett Segler​)

Medieval Materialisms Day 1 (blog post, Angela Bennett Segler​)

Medieval Materialisms Day 1 (tweet archive, Angela Bennett Segler​)

Medieval Round-Up: KZOO 2015 (blog post mostly about sessions regarding medievalism in popular culture and public engagement, Sandra Alvarez)

Medieval Texts in Digital Environments: New Directions, Old Problems (Session 17 tweets, Kiera Naylor)

"Mental Disabilities and the Saint" (Prezi presentation with transcript, in session on "Disability in Medieval Saints' Lives" org. by the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages, Kisha Tracy​)

Moving More Online: Strategies and Challenges for Using Technology in the “Classroom” (tweets from roundtable Session 93, Yvonne Seale)

Moving Women, Moving Objects II (Session 558 tweets, Yvonne Seale)

My IMCS @ Kalamazoo 2015 (tweets from many sessions; note especially the Pseudo-Society event and "Ye Next Generacioun" roundtable featuring younger scholars, Anna Wilson)

The Nature of the Middle Ages: A Problem for Historians? (tweets from roundtable Session 226, Yvonne Seale)

"Neighboring Wastelands in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (presentation in "Ecocatastrophes" session, Richard H. Godden)

Nunneries in Medieval Europe: New Historiographical and Methodological Approaches I & II (tweets from Session 404 & Session 463, Yvonne Seale)

On Owning the Word “Medieval”: My Approach (not really about the conference itself but still interesting, Daniel Franke)

Out of chaos, some sort of order: the International Congress on Medieval Studies at 50, May 14-17, 2015 (blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas, Elizabeth Biggs)

"Paradigms of Literary History" (presentation at session "Old English Language and Literature," Eric Weiscott)

"Prosthetics and the Dismodern Body in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (presentation at session on "(Dis)Abilities in the Pearl-Poems" org. by Pearl-Poet Society, Richard H. Godden)

"The Provenance and History of the Manuscripts Formerly in the Phillips Collection" (slideshow in session "Networks of Transmission: Histories and Practices of Collecting Medieval Manuscripts and Documents," Toby Burrows)

Richard Utz’s Kalamazoo 2015 Plenary, “The Notion of the Middle Ages: Our Middle Ages, Ourselves” (tweets from plenary, Material Collective)

"Source Study: A Retrospective" (public notes on Session 269, Kristen Mapes)

"Source Study in a Digital Age" (presentation at session “Source Study: A Retrospective,” sponsored by the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture, Brandon Hawk​)

"Students, Period" (collaborative YouTube video, in session on "Unsettled Marks" org. by the Grammar Rabble, Kisha Tracy)

"Transhistorical Transnationalism: Constance’s Conversions and the Globalization of English" (presentation at session "Transnationalism Before the Nation?" by Shyama Rajendran​)

"Unconfessing Gender: Dysphoric Youths in Gower's Iphis" (presentation at "Gower and Medicine" session sponsored by the Gower Project, M Bychowski)

Women and Power to 1100 (tweets from roundtable Session 99, Yvonne Seale)

NOTA BENE:

Kristen Mapes​ offers a link to an archive of tweets using the #Kzoo2015 hashtag and an interactive network visualization of #Kzoo2015

The Material Collective's excellent list of 50 Questions for Medieval Studies (these questions were crowdsourced before the conference and also circulated at the Friday metasession "Medieval Originality: Looking Forward, Looking Back") [posting by Karen Overbey]

Medievalism + Trans-Medievalisms

by JONATHAN HSY

[There has been much bloggery at ITM about BABEL in Santa Barbara: see here, here, and here. I'd like to touch on a few BABEL-related matters here through a post with two keywords: Medievalism and Trans-Medievalisms.]

MEDIEVALISM

Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, eds. Emery & Utz (Brewer, 2014).

Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Boydell & Brewer, 2014) has just been released! My chapter on "Co-disciplinarity" reworks my earlier ITM posting after the BABEL conference in Boston in 2012. The editors kindly asked me to contribute a chapter after reading that blog post, and in the expanded/adapted chapter in this volume I turn to queer theory to think about the fluid and nonlinear approaches to temporality that discussions of medievalism invite. I also suggest how approaches to medievalism can create experimental spaces that unbind academic disciplines and domain-specific approaches to knowledge. The chapter (like my original ITM blog post) ends with a utopian call for us to work together across our respective bailiwicks and to open ourselves up to the risky, unanticipated possibilities that emerge in the process.

What makes me so very excited about Medievalism: Key Critical Terms is precisely networked quality of its chapters. Here's the blurb from the publisher's website (and click through to see the names of the contributors full table of contents):

The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Yet such approaches - organized by time period, geography, or theme - often lack an overarching critical framework. This volume aims to provide such a framework, by calling into question the problematic yet commonly accepted vocabulary used in Medievalism Studies. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, define and exemplify in a lively and accessible style the essential terms used when speaking of the later reception of medieval culture. 

The terms: Archive, Authenticity, Authority, Christianity, Co-disciplinarity, Continuity, Feast, Genealogy, Gesture, Gothic, Heresy, Humor, Lingua, Love, Memory, Middle, Modernity, Monument, Myth, Play, Presentism, Primitive, Purity, Reenactment, Resonance, Simulacrum, Spectacle, Transfer, Trauma, Troubadour.

This volume in a certain way stands in for an entire networked community. The book has a lively Facebook page and many contributors in this volume have been actively involved in the "Medievalism" series at University of Rochester Press, Studies in Medievalism, and the medievalism studies community more broadly. Recent onferences such as The Middle Ages in the Modern World (MAMO) in St. Andrews in June 2013 (see my posting on ITM and Candace Barrington's posting on the Global Chaucers blog) and much more recently Medievalisms on the Move at Georgia Tech (October 2014) are just two examples of how medievalism studies is increasingly bringing many different kinds of people together in a shared space of exploration. *

Left: Karl Fugelso's "Continuity" features Dante in visual medieval and modern art.
Right: Carol Robinson's "Gesture" discusses medieval practices and contemporary ASL scholarship.

I'm learning so much from the other contributions in this volume, and I appreciate the surprising reconfigurations of knowledge and perception that emerge when we no longer "segregate" different kinds of media or artistic traditions into separate chapters. For instance, Karl Fugelso's chapter CONTINUITY showcases how medieval and modern visual traditions interlace over time through Dante. Carol Robinson's chapter GESTURE bridges medieval practices and contemporary scholarship on American Sign Language (ASL), concluding with a discussion of a nonspoken adaptation of "Gawain and Dame Ragnelle" by acclaimed Deaf storyteller Peter Cook.

TRANS-MEDIEVALISMS

My view from the moderator's chair. "Trans-Medievalisms." BABEL conference at UCSB, October 2014.

This question of how medieval material moves across media brings me to the BABEL conference in Santa Barbara. Candace Barrington and I organized a session on "Trans-Medievalisms," and we set out to consider what happens when "the Middle Ages" (whatever we mean by that term!) traverses cultures, languages, material forms, and media. Our call for proposals and/or manifesto was as follows:

What happens to the Western Middle Ages when it crosses into diverse, concurrent times, languages, and cultures? How does “medievalism” take shape in multiple spaces across the planet—including cultural habitats where the Western Middle Ages are no longer the “‘zero point’ of orientation” (to reroute a phrase from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology)? What cultural work do “the Middle Ages” perform as they infuse modern-day modes of global media and cultural production—textual, visual, musical, performative, cinematic? Our session is inspirited by our work on the Global Chaucers project, a utopian scholarly endeavor that seeks to gather, back-translate, and analyze all non-English translations and adaptations of Chaucer’s work. Our scheming with scholars around the world has so far revealed Chaucerian adaptations in places as far-flung and interconnected as Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia), East Asia (China, Japan, Korea), Europe (Denmark, Flanders, Spain, Hungary), the Middle East (Israel, Iran), and Africa (Nigeria, South Africa), as well as works in re/invented languages (Esperanto, Neo-Latin).

For this session we aim to gather participants working on Chaucerian adaptation in non-English contexts or any aspect of medieval appropriation in “global” contemporary culture (however conceived). How might plurilingual, transoceanic, and intercultural orientations provoke new modes of engaging with the past? How can we create a dynamic, multi-site community of cross-temporal scholars and enthusiasts, a fluid collective that thrives across disciplines and borders? We welcome non-medievalists, amateurs, and enthusiasts, including creative work by poets, playwrights, musicians, and/or interpretive dancers. We highly encourage collaborative submissions.

The session resulted in four strikingly divergent yet enticingly intertwining presentations.

• Raúl Ariza-Barile: Chaucer’s Spanish Accent: Impossible Poetry? Raúl's paper offered a brief background of Chaucerian translation into Spanish, suggesting (among other things) how a careful consideration of Latin American contexts might shift our conversations about the aims and practices of modern translators; the presentation ended with a debut performance of his own translation of the opening lines of Chaucer's General Prologue into rhymed Spanish verse.

• Shyama Rajendran: The Impossibility of Locating The Ramayana. Shyama's presentation traced the movement of the ancient epic Ramayana across many cultural traditions and performance contexts beyond South Asia, attending to a plurality of reception histories across time and space; she ended with a careful consideration of the political implications of the Ramayana's narrow appropriation for the purposes of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India.

• Carol Robinson: Expressing Loathly Ladies—Explicitly Noncompliant. In this presentation, Carol featured the work of two of her former students who created a collaborative video adaptation of the Wife of Bath. Each student had recorded a dramatic monologue: one performance used ASL to engage with Deaf culture, relating the episode when the Wife is rendered deaf; a "political dramatization" by a queer student (in drag) incorporated contemporary debates about polygamy and marriage.

• Elaine Treharne: TEXT Technological Transformations: the Inexactitude of a Medieval Unreality. Elaine's talk suggested the possibility of cross-cultural comparative analysis across seemingly disparate contexts including medieval Western and East Asian (Chinese) texts. Her reflections not only considered the rich materiality of textual production but also suggested its importance as artistic performance.

These presentations richly showcased the heterogeneity of cultural/artistic/linguistic materials that we might call "medieval" (thinking expansively beyond the contours of Latin-speaking Europe). At the same time, these perspectives collectively invited us to think more creatively about what new modes of medieval appropriation and comparative analysis actually might enact and enable.

Medievalism studies has certainly "arrived" in the academy and it is also clearly breaking down the boundaries between what lies within and outside of institutional and traditional academic structures. The ITM blog is one such community among many, including other digital spaces like Medievally Speaking, Global Chaucers and the Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization (MEMO). We're in a very exciting time for medievalism studies now and I hope that these networked communities will continue to thrive, grow, interconnect, and adapt.

[EDITED November 22, 2014] The next MAMO conference will be held in Lincoln, UK, from June 29-July 2, 2015. Deadline for the call for proposals is December 12 (see this site for the details)!

* NOTE: In our MAMO 2013 presentation, Candace and I drew upon our experience working with many collaborators on the Global Chaucers project. A roundtable and polyglot performance at the New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavík, Iceland, brought together scholars, translators, and poets (and scholar-translators and poet-translators!), and a chapter drawing from our various collaborations will appear in our "Global Chaucers" chapter in Gail Ashton's Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2015); more here.

On Empathy and What We Do ... Together

by JONATHAN HSY

Hello ITM readers! I'm just on my way to the BABEL symposium in NYC (#cla2013) by way of Oceanic New York (#ony2013)—of course more about this on ITM after this weekend. But first, in this posting, I'd like to quickly comment on a few buzzworthy online items that might at first seem unrelated—but are actually intertwined by an important common thread.

On Contingency: Earlier this month, MARY KATE returned to ITM with this thoughtful blog posting entitled “On Contingency.” In a large part “giving props” to her medievalist community during her time teaching at Yale, Mary Kate offers one positive example of professional experience as an adjunct, and she illustrates the importance of working in an environment in which one is valued as a peer and well supported on all fronts (emotionally, intellectually, and materially). I found it so striking that soon after Mary Kate’s posting, this truly devastating “counterpoint” began to circulate regarding the experience of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a dedicated teacher and adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University for 25 years (see “Death of an adjunct” HERE). This story has been picked up and re-circulated by the NPR, Huffington Post, CNN, BuzzFeed (and I’m sure many other outlets) generating righteous outrage—and sincere discussions about the adjunctification of higher education continue to reverberate online and in the corridors. The inherent pathos in this story of the suffering of Margaret Mary Vojtko is not without a certain literary (almost hagiographical) tinge: in some respects she becomes a kind of modern-day “martyr” for the case against our profession’s increasing dependence upon (or even exploitation of) contingent faculty. This concern about the adjunctifation of higher education is something we've been thinking about quite a lot on ITM: Jeffrey and Eileen, most noticeably, have attended to issues relating to what Jeffrey has called the “precariat”; and see the comments on Mary Kate’s posting by Ben Tilghman and Myra Seaman on their own experiences as adjuncts and the need to find a “home” as a scholar, teacher, and fully valued peer. 

On a related note, read Rebecca Schuman’s excellent posting on “Horrible Job-Market Platitudes and How to Retire Them,” which provides some tips for mentors and job placement officers on avoiding well-intentioned but ultimately unproductive words of “comfort” for people who haven't landed tenure-track positions. Many of us who act as academic mentors are products of a culture that still codes non-TT status itself as “failure” and this posting goes one step toward changing some of these attitudes and sentiments.

Declasse Academics: You may have seen this posting making the rounds over the past week on "declasse" academics, a link I first saw posted by KARL on Facebook (see the link by @WernherzBear HERE). In this list, this blogger reveals a certain implicit assumption that all academics come from a privileged (and Northeastern US) background. I feel many items on this list don't quite apply to people of color and/or folks who grew up outside of the US, but what this posting suggests is that unstated social codes (i.e., the implicit norms of WASP culture) still underpin many aspects of (North American) academia. Everyday interactions can make even TT-faculty “insiders” feel like perpetual “outsiders,” people who don’t “belong.” There are many ways in which people can feel “othered” in the profession beyond class of course (gender, race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, disability), but the posting draws attention to something we can be so reluctant to discuss openly.

Serious Literature (No Women or Chinese): This is a much newer story (really only “broke” yesterday and last night). I’m closely following the ongoing reaction to a recent interview with David Gilmour—an author and apparent literature instructor who (now notoriously) reveals he doesn’t “love” literature by women or by “Chinese” (?!) and is instead most invested in teaching works by “serious, heterosexual guys”—and the apology/interview making up for the original interview didn’t help matters. I’m not linking to the original interview or follow-up here, but you can see that the posting has swiftly generated both online rage and mockery, with this spot-on parody HERE and response HERE, an awesome open letter by Anne Thérault HERE, and a devastating point-by-point takedown HERE. The comments on the Facebook event page for Serious Heterosexual Guys For Serious Literary Scholarship (created by Miriam No, on twitter @imposterism) are pure COMEDY GOLD (and track #SeriousReads and #GilmourReadMore on twitter RIGHT NOW for the ongoing University of Toronto community response).

On Empathy

So what ties together all of these items? In his very insightful response to the Gilmour story, early modern literature professor Holger Syme offers these remarks on the importance of empathy:

Good teaching requires empathy — an effort to understand things, ideas, and people totally unlike you. Some of those people are your students. Some of those things are of the past. Some of those ideas are the ideas of authors from different cultures than yours, and yes, shockingly, even of a different gender. Engaging with those people, things, and ideas is not just what research means, and why research is necessary, it’s what reading is. 

This statement beautifully showcases how empathy is not only the key to good teaching but also a feature of research and scholarship, including (as is the case in medieval studies) people who seek to understand a culture or worldview that is distant and “alien” to one's own. I would extend things to say that empathy is, of course, a key part of human interaction in general -- which includes one's treatment of students, mentees, and coworkers of all kinds (regardless of rank, social affiliations, or employment status).

I will end by stating why I believe that online communities like the ones cultivated here at ITM and the BABEL Working Group—and other forms of social media—are so very important. In a lot of cases, being a medievalist means being “the only medievalist in the village” (so to speak), and in these instances many turn to online venues a way to stay engaged with a broader community of people who share their scholarly and intellectual interests. Moreover, the field-specific isolation one might feel as a medievalist can certainly be compounded and complicated by so many other factors (most noticeably, contingent status). What I hope ITM and BABEL can continue to foster is this genuine sense of community and support for people who might physically be far apart, and I hope (collectively) we can create non-hierarchical forms of community that not only think beyond discrete academic disciplines but also break open the very idea of “the university” and the world that surrounds and sustains it.