disorienting to goals

While I recognize the importance of goal setting, I also have often found that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The normative orientation of a life to an easily segmented linear trajectory towards static achievements, well defined by credentials and neoliberal understandings of success feels incapable of capturing the lived experience of ambition, desire, and dreams.

As such, I draw here on Martin and Rosello’s (2016) conceptualization of disorientation as resistance. As another way of opening myself up to the hap of happiness and happenstance (Ahmed 2017). Disorientation as a practice involves the opening up of oneself to the inability to ‘go straight’ towards a specific cognitive, affective, or physical landmark (Martin and Rosello 2016). I lean here towards a queering of the linear trajectory, drawing on the inherent disorientation I feel in the academy as someone for whom it was not designed. As such, I release the supposed readily followable map of academic climbing and seek to see the contours of the system I’m within while ‘unseeing’ its normative impulses. In this way, I take up disorientation as an “ethical role” of recognizing my enmeshment “in an unevenly composed world of common vulnerability” (Martin and Rosello 2016: 14).

That being said, I also recognize the value in having a shared object to orient towards in the spirit of creating a common ground from which to draw on and understand each other through. As such, I offer both a high-level semesterly overview of a tentative timeline of my time in the program, as well as a summary of what I am orienting towards. However, I offer these with the caveat that this are the very things to which I am open to being disoriented from and a radically incomplete picture of the drivers, motivations, and ways in which I wish to be.

orienting towards a future

I envision a future where I remain in academia, with a desire to continue to research and teach in ways that carve out spaces for critical work and vulnerable relationality within the University while simultaneously hospicing it towards its end. I dream of being in, not of, the institution, and of using its resources to generate spaces, places, and resources that serve those outside its walls and rooms. I dream of teaching, of mentoring, and of continuing to ask curious questions with people who are just as willing to explore the world. I desire to make art that educates, to involve my communities in the stories that they get to tell about themselves.