stumbling towards another world

I arrive on this page as a working-class white uninvited settler, a nonbinary lesbian, and a queer-trans, multiply-disabled activist-artist-educator, who believes deeply in rigorous, relational, and accessible knowledge dissemination as a path to collective liberation. I offer up my potentially confusing multi-hyphenate identities that I often stumble over verbally to locate myself first and foremost as someone who cares deeply. I lead with this, because care is what I consider the core of all my work, and the work of scholarship more broadly–a commitment to community, to relationality, and to collaboration.

I return to the notion of stumbling to orient myself towards my vision for a future. To stumble is to do something in a way that is awkward (read: non-normative), with difficulty, and often with repeated fumbles or mistakes. I have spent the vast majority of my life scared of stumbling, and often rightly so; the academic world and my material reality are not always kind to those of us who are pressing through with difficulty. This, ironically, exists at odds with the ways in which I stumble physically through my reality as a part-time cane user. However, in arriving in this program and envisioning the future(s) ahead, I wish to lean into the stumble, and to allow myself to fumble with mistakes, towards ideas, towards people, and towards ways of existing otherwise.

As I lean into this non-normative (read: awkward) approach to academia, I hope to prioritize and centre relationality and multiple knowledges, learning from the ways that others exist within, across, through, and beyond systems. Through this, I hope to strengthen my knowledge translation and mobilization skills, with the idea that the mobility of knowledge too, might be prone to stumbling. I aim to learn contribute to knowledge in ways that allow for different access points in, avenues out, and collaboration with those who have vested interests. Above all, my priorities are to learn how to carve out space within flawed systems, through research, pedagogical, and knowledge practices, that allow myself, those I care about, and those who may come after to exist in ways that support our stumbling (providing a metaphorical cane perhaps)?