My reading challenge for 2018 has two components:
Read whatever feels good to read and will make me want to keep reading.
That's it.
More on the rationale behind these rules later.
Today in crazy on-brand for Kimberly, this NY Times Watching list of shows and movies featuring historical women getting it done.
I found my word for 2018, and it is LOVE.
In 2018, I will love myself as much as I love anyone else, and I will love my body as much as I love my mind and my heart.
In 2018, I will work to be sure my love is apparent to everyone I love. I won’t hide it out of fear of overwhelming them. I won’t let exhaustion and busyness keep me from expressing it. The people I love are strong enough to receive my love undiluted and I am strong enough to give it.
In 2018, I will show up with love in the world every day. Love is my own personal brand of magic and it always has been.
This year, I’ve really come to embrace love as my core value, and I have simultaneously grown frustrated with people - myself included - not matching their actions to their stated values. In 2018, I will become a human incarnation of love, a glowing manifestation of love.
In 2018, I will let my love light up the world.
Moira Hansen has written a beautiful piece here about academic spouses.
As I was reading it, I nearly teared up thinking of the amazing ways W. has supported me - for our entire almost-20-years-together (yes, we got together very young) - but especially in the past two and a half years.
There are of course all the amazing daily things he handles - dishes, laundry, grocery runs, takeout orders.
And standard academic spouse moments: listening as I work out a new idea, talking me through impostor syndrome, telling me that I should apply for conferences and grants even if I think my idea is dumb.
But also, like, crazy champion moments: making sure I eat in the middle of a paper writing marathon…
…and being my rock as I’ve been tossed upon the seas of impostor syndrome and anxiety that are so common among doctoral students.
So yes. Let's hear it for the partners of academics. They are amazing people.
Yes please.
This piece has me scrambling to read the Princess Leia novel & comics before I see The Last Jedi.
High school classmates reunite 20 years after graduation to perform Into the Woods on the premiere of ABC’s new musical special.
This show is crazy on-brand for me.
Hi. I’m Kimberly, and I just submitted my last coursework assignment ever (unless I take more after I advance to candidacy, which, let’s face it, is a very real possibility).
I feel like I should rest, but I also feel antsy. So I’m going to make a few public commitments and share a few thoughts about what happens now.
In terms of official officially what’s up…
Now I write a comprehensive literature review on topics related to my area of research interest, which include theory, methodology, and a few different Connected Learning topics. More on that as it proceeds.
Also, I keep working on Project READY.
But also…
I’m planning to publish e-prints of a few annotated bibliographies based on literature reviews I’ve been sitting on. Those literature reviews are the foundation of lots of research ahead of me, and I don’t want to publish my synthesis and analysis, but these are tricky topics where you have to dig into weird places to find literature, and I think it could really help other scholars to get those bibliographies out there. I’m not going to reveal the topics yet because I don’t want to accidentally hint at any conference juries that particular papers are from me.
I’m working with the UNC SILS Coalition of Youth Librarians to start a Triangle area chapter of the Harry Potter Alliance. To that end, I’m going through their Wizard Activist School program.
I’m submitting a proposal to the Connected Learning Summit.
And personally…
I’m going to be packing and purging stuff from my house. We’ve lived in it for five years and there’s definitely stuff that hasn’t been touched in that time.
I’m going to a twentieth anniversary reunion party for The Bronze posting board, the thing that made fandom a social activity for me.
I’m waiting to really dig into cosplay beyond the casual until I can get a good craft studio space set up.
I want to cross-stitch everything from weelittlestitches, but that’s not new.
I want to crochet myself a whole wardrobe of lacy things out of black yarn.
But really, what’s next?
A nap. Christmas decorations. Leonie’s 2018 Shining Year workbook.
Oh yeah, 2018! So that’s going to happen.
Yep. For several years now - probably inspired by Leonie but I’m not sure - I have selected a word of the year. I often find out around March that I picked the wrong word. My 2016 word was FLOW and it turned out perfectly. This year my word was WORK and it was the right word, but it didn’t manifest quite like I expected.
I’ve been searching for 2018’s word. I want to encompass healing, self-care. I had a revelation in the shower yesterday, as I was agonizing over whether my blood sugar would be good when I went to the doctor today (it was; I’m pretty sure that’s thanks to drinking crazy diluted apple cider vinegar, on the advice of the PCOS Diva). Showering and driving, the best activities for having good ideas.
Anyway, this thought came to me:
I want 2018 to be the year when I treat my body with the same care that I treat my mind and my emotions.
Obvi, I’ve invested more energy in my mind than in anything else in my life. And I tend to look after my emotions, and listen to them.
But my poor body. We have been enemies, thanks to chronic illness. I don’t treat it well at all. There are a lot of reasons. I mean, I don’t drink much or do drugs besides those prescribed to me/readily available over the counter. But I also don’t eat nutritious food as much as I’d like or move on the regular or take good care of my skin and hair.
I’m so sorry, body.
So yeah, I’m still working on finding out what word captures that feeling. It’s not HEAL.
I’m leaning toward GLOW right now, but how much that’s influenced by the Netflix series is hard to say. (By the way, Netflix… I need more GLOW merch. kthx.)
It’s what we’ll go with for now.
So, that was really rambly. What’s next, again?
I’m going to glow.
And take a nap.
It’s a Friday night at 10 pm. My toddler is sleeping beside me. I just spent the past hour browsing conference programs, finding potential colleagues on Twitter, and dipping my toe into the waters of academic Patreon. It’s 10 pm on a Friday and I’m engaging in activities some might classify as work. But to me they feel like play.
I submitted the last of my parental leave work today. I will finish my last bit of coursework next week.
Today I wrote two research prospectuses, both related to game-based learning in libraries. Earlier this week, I planned a partnership to leverage fandom for making the world a better place.
I am done with the tyranny of other people’s syllabi and it feels amazing.
I have had excellent professors who taught excellent courses and I have been either fortunate or strategic about following my interests in fulfilling my assignments. And yet today, when the only work I have to do is the work I have designed (because even my assistantship is something I was part of designing), I feel lighter. Like after two and a half years of getting by, I can finally manage to do the work I started this degree program to do.
I told myself that I would take a true break from work over winter vacation, but now I know that’s not what I want. I want to get moving on this work - work that fills my cup rather than emptying it, work that feels like play, work that keeps me up past my bedtime because I want it to.
I am aware of how academia works. I know this feeling won’t last.
But today… Today I’m filled with excitement about what comes next.
Last Thursday night, I attended the workshop “From Stories to Action: Inspiring Heroes for Our Own World” at the American Association of School Librarians conference. The workshop was presented by Janae Phillips, Director of Leadership & Education for the Harry Potter Alliance. It was the highlight of the conference for me. I left energized and eager to get involved.
The event began with an introduction to HPA - who they are and what they do. Their tagline is “We turn fans into heroes.” Their focus is on fan activism, which they define as “engaging in activism through storytelling and fandom by drawing parallels between popular media and real world social issues.”
Janae shared her background in leadership development, describing the social change model of leadership development as the model she used:
With a quick Google I discovered that this model is commonly used for student leadership development in higher education. If you want to read about it, there’s a lot of scholarly literature out there. From what I can tell, it was first introduced in this book.
Janae then pointed out that most of the stories that inspire modern fandoms hew pretty closely to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey:
You can read more about this in so many places, but I hear people talk about The Hero with a Thousand Faces the most. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read it. Maybe I’ll try and squeeze it into my dissertation literature review somehow. (Here’s the part where I admit that this Hero’s Journey aligns closely with Western literature, and naturally has some limitations with respect to its value for analyzing stories cross-culturally.)
Janae introduced the idea that literally overlaying the leadership model on the Hero’s Journey illustrated the promise of using the power of stories to create activist leaders. You can line up the Individual part of the model with the beginning of the journey, see how tests, allies, and enemies might align with group values, and then the Society/Community part aligns with the resurrection and return. (I couldn’t really see if this is how Janae’s version lined up, but I think it probably is.)
Now that we had a theoretical foundation for connecting stories and social change, Janae introduced the innovation adoption curve and discussed the fact that most activist efforts target innovators & early adopters, leaving middle and late adopters out. These individuals - who might be ready to be activists, if they are just introduced to it the right way - can be approached via their own fandoms.
[caption id=“attachment_3288” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]
Janae’s version had adorable Harry Potter theming with the Dark Mark over on the Laggards end. I got this version from Jurgen Appelo of management30.com.[/caption]
She likened middle and late adopters to Neville Longbottom, who at the beginning of the Harry Potter series is overwhelmed and not really sure how to help in the fight against Voldemort, but by the end of the series is protecting the world with as much strength as any of his peers.
Janae explained that someone who feels they lack the expertise to have a grounded discussion of a social justice issue like racism might be more ready to have that conversation if it is grounded in their own area of expertise - their fandom. She offered here the example of using how Muggle-born and the children of Muggle/Wizard pairings are treated in Harry Potter to get at the idea of racism.
She also pointed out that stories can serve as inspiration for specific actions. For example, in the world of Harry Potter, eating chocolate is an antidote to a dementor attack. Harry Potter-themed chocolate is a real-world product. Janae shared the “Not in Harry’s Name” campaign, in which the HPA lobbied Warner Brothers to ensure all HP-branded chocolate is ethically sourced:
Next up was the workshop part. We divided into groups by fandom (Buffy, Hamilton, Star Wars, HP). First we discussed WHY we loved the texts from these fandoms. THEN we brainstormed possible activist projects that could come out of those. (I was the one who kept calling for a Buffy group, and I got my wish.)
We closed with a sharing, a recap, and information about how we can get involved in the HPA.
Janae finished with a couple of key points that really resonated with me and made me feel energized about my work as a scholar looking at connected learning and culturally sustaining pedagogy, finding ways librarians can leverage youth interests and culture to learn, grow, and make the world a better place.
First, JOY itself is an act of resistance. The bad guys, whomever they may be, want us to be down and defeated. Doing things that make us joyful is part of resisting them.
Second, connecting your activism with something you love gives you the energy to keep going. Social justice work is hard. It’s demanding and exhausting. It’s easy to feel like it’s too hard and we should quit. But if your activism is grounded in a work of art you enjoy and a community of other people who also love that art, that can give you what you need to stick with it.
Finally, I want to close with a question that came up in my group: how do you know which fandom to have motivate activities for the youth you’re serving? The answer, of course, is whichever fandom excites them. You don’t have to know about Dementors or Neville or Muggles or House Elves to find ways to connect Harry Potter to activism, because people who love it, when talking about it, will share with you things that will naturally fit. Let kids share with you what they’re into - find ways for them to bring it in - and as you learn about it, you will find ways to help them think through its connection to the real world and how they can use that to make the world better. To decrease worldsuck, if you will.
Kimberly Hirsh