Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board decided that graduate students at private colleges and universities can organize, much to the chagrin of university administrators around the country, including Yale's. In a letter sent out almost immediately after the NLRB's ruling, President Salovey wrote that "the mentorship and training that Yale professors provide to graduate students is essential to educating the next generation of leading scholars. I have long been concerned that this relationship would become less productive and rewarding under a formal collective bargaining regime, in which professors would be 'supervisors' of their graduate student 'employees,'" a sentiment that GSAS Dean Cooley echoed in her own follow-up email. 

This argument, often repeated by people opposed to the unionization of grad students, is a non sequitur. It jumps from the professor/student (i.e. mentor/mentee) relationship directly to the supervisor/employee relationship without justifying a connection between the two. It's a false equivalence, since the relationship between a professor and her/his student is primarily academic, while the relationship between the university as an institution and the student as a worker is primarily administrative. The latter relationship is what the NLRB decision addresses.

The (fear-mongering) claim that the role of graduate students within the university will drastically change ignores the crucial fact that our role has already changed, a shift that has been demonstrated countless times in the academic literature on the bureaucratization of the university and the rise of the administrative class. The anthropologists Marilyn Strathern and David Graeber, among many others, have written extensively about this phenomenon. 

The NLRB decision simply recognizes that a relationship exists between student employees and the powerful administrations of US colleges and universities. To suggest that my relationship with my supervisor, advisors and mentors is even remotely similar to my relationship with the group of highly paid university administrators who determine and regulate the conditions of my employment at Yale (including the conditions under which I have access to healthcare, a stipend, research funding, etc.) is intellectually dishonest and shameful, especially in an academic setting. While this isn't my area of expertise, a quick search on Google Scholar reveals a strong relationship between mental health and precarious labor (e.g., this article). We can tentatively conclude, then, that contrary to Salovey and others' claim that the relationship between students and their professors will be changed for the worse, improved working conditions for students will actually change that relationship for the better. 

Kudos to the NLRB for this important decision.

In William Faulkner's Light in August, Joe Christmas struggles with his racial identity. Born illegitimately, he was orphaned as a child because his grandfather couldn't handle the thought that he might have some black blood in him, despite looking unambiguously white (today we'd call him white-passing). At various points throughout the novel, different characters note that he appears to be white, and have only heard rumors (originating from Joe himself) that he might have some "n----- blood." 

There's a turning point, though, from rumor to fact when Christmas is accused of murdering his lover and burning her house down. He goes from being weird guy to a violent n-----.

The reason is clear enough, and almost a hundred years later (Faulkner completed the novel in 1932), it still explains why the almost daily slaughter of innocent black children, women and men goes unpunished and unstopped. Christmas's blackness didn't matter to the all-white political elite of Jefferson until after he was accused of murder, because non-white violence doesn't fit the racist narratives of most white people. Before the murder, his blackness was and could remain casual speculation, but after being accused of such a horrific crime, it only made sense if he was black.

Now, of course, we substitute "thug" for "n-----" (actually, not even), or in the case of Sandra Bland, we call her an angry black woman who shouldn't have challenged the authority of a bully cop. Sandra Bland didn't use her blinker when she pulled over. She refused to put her cigarette out, in her own car. She was annoyed that she was being treated like this. An activist, though, she must have know what could happen to her, and she must have been terrified. Then we look at other cases. Michael Brown was jaywalking and had stolen a pack of cigars. Tamir Rice had a toy gun that looked threatening. Eric Garner was selling cigarettes without a license. Freddie Gray was walking in a black neighborhood. Walter Scott had a broken tail light. 

The common denominator? Petty offenses, if even illegal, are propagated as justification for murder. Challenging power, challenging the status quo, is uncomfortable. For white elites, the victim has to be a criminal to justify punishment, and in that mindset, violence is inextricably tied to blackness. A racist will say, "Well, white people are killed by the police. Why doesn't the mainstream media report that? Where is Al Sharpton when a white policeman gets killed?" (etc.). But those stories don't get popular because they're uncomfortable to hear, difficult to consume. People don't want to see that because they don't know what to make of it. A good first step to understand internalized racism is to ask ourselves, Why are we more comfortable with some deaths than others? What words and stories do we use to make ourselves comfortable with murder? 

****
Thug. Bitch. Angry Black Woman. N-----. The white psyche demands words like this to fit smoothly into our narratives of criminality and to justify the mutilation of black bodies. Christmas' blackness was just as crucial as Michael Brown's thugness in the stories surrounding their deaths, despite the fact that Christmas was white and Brown was actually a nice guy who had just graduated high school. You can't lynch a white man any easier than you can shoot dead a kid just out of his graduation robes. That's why Christmas became black. It's why everyone knows the irrelevant information that Michael Brown had stolen a pack of cigars, and it's why we've heard repeatedly that Sandra Bland might have smoked weed earlier in the day. It's why we see Sandra Bland's mugshot (terrible questions about which have been raised on social media) instead of a selfie at work or a picture with friends. We construct irrelevant and often fictitious criminal histories over their non-white corpses in order to soothe white feelings. 

The difference, of course, is that Christmas was guilty of murder and was offered a trial, whereas black people today are regularly executed without recourse for petty crimes they often didn't even commit. The times are certainly a-changin': it's getting worse.

****
Say their names. 

Sandra. Walter. Michael. Tamir.Clementa. Ethel. Cynthia. Depayne. Myra. Sharonda. Susie. Daniel. Tywanza. Dontre. Freddie. Deven. Eric G. Eric H. Feras. The list goes on....

Cry for them, then do something about it.  I'm reminded of Dr. King's eulogy for Jimmie Lee Jackson, where he incriminates politicians, preachers, congregants and citizens for their indifference and irresponsibility toward Jimmie Lee's murder and toward the struggle for civil and human rights more generally. Who murdered Sandra Bland? 


We did. 

It's always a treat to sit in the exit row of a crowded plane. There's more leg room, it's convenient, and you feel a bit of a moral superiority to the people sitting in coach; you're there to help people in the event of an emergency landing, a gatekeeper of the plane's welfare. But there's always a slight uneasiness associated with sitting in the exit row. What if the plane actually goes down and I actually have to coordinate an escape effort? Uh oh... 

And so it is with Merkel, Schäuble, Dijsselbloem and Juncker sitting comfortably in the Grexit row, smug and entitled, but increasingly nervous. A Grexit, to say nothing of its impact on Greeks, would reveal the European project as a sham. (I remember an intro to European politics class I took in undergrad, where the professor began by saying "There is no such thing as Europe.") And as Thomas Piketty has pointed out, the European response so far, and the continued moralizing of Germany et al., reveals the blatant hypocrisy and short-term memory of Europe's leaders. 

Aside from the patronizing nature of German austerians' self-professed "moral supremacism," it's also bad economics. As John Aziz notes in an essay for Pieria, Germany is rich today because their post WWII debt was forgiven, allowing them to re-establish their industrial supremacy. The free movement of labor and capital facilitated by the EU and eurozone only bolsters Germany's standing, by letting it attract the best workers and investment, often from its southern neighbors. 

For a lot of Germans, though, it's nevertheless an issue of local culture and ethics. Aziz cites Jürgen Stark, who claims that, "in contrast to many eurozone countries, Germany has reliably pursued a prudent economic policy. While others were living beyond their means, Germany avoided excess. These are deep cultural differences and the currency union brings them to light once again." What makes this so cringe-worthy, in the same way as the callous indifference of many of Germany's leaders (see, for example, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble's comments on debt restructuring here), is the pompous ignorance of what has allowed Germany to thrive--not in spite of, but relative to and because of, the rest of Europe. 

Schäuble's Wikipedia entry is just as damning: "Schäuble is also of the view that Europe's problem is not the European Union, but rather certain national governments that cannot resist the temptation to make the EU and Europe the scapegoat for their own national problems." 

What's happening now, of course, is the exact opposite of Schäuble's analysis. Europe (Germany, in particular) is using national governments (Greece) as a scapegoat for structural problems inherent in Europe's design, while Greece's left-wing government has admitted and begun trying to rectify precedent governments' corruption. But the convenience of blaming Europe's problems on Greece, just like the convenience of sitting in an exit row, comes with the risk of choosing between saving yourself or helping your fellow passengers, a risk increasingly realized European political elites as the plane plummets toward the ground.

...you hear a 14 year old girl screaming "Call my mama!" and "You're hurting me!" and you twist your knee even harder into her back.

A few more: 

You know you're a monster when you are an adult woman tormenting kids with racist, classist slurs, and then physical violence. As a side-note, the woman who apparently started this whole thing by telling black kids to go back to their "section 8" housing is allegedly a home loan officer at a local Bank of America branch. I wonder how many unbiased loans have been granted to black people under her tenure...

You know you're a monster when you're a grown man, standing by, watching, refusing to interfere, as another grown man beats the shit out of a little girl, whose only "crime" was being a little sassy.

You know you're a monster when you try and justify an armed policeman pulling his gun on two unarmed teenagers trying to help their friend.

You know you're a monster when you see patterns of state-sanctioned violence aimed at black men, women, children and even babies, and you not only accept it, but you deny that it's a systemic problem that you can help fix.

Applying for funding is a nightmare. Every application requires days of work to say basically the same thing in a slightly different format, for a slightly different audience. Fellowships from Fulbright and the NSF (the two I'm currently working on), for example, require you to navigate impossibly bureaucratic, and often contradictory, mazes of paperwork, formatting guidelines, checklists, etc.. And for what?

Anthropology developed as a discipline studying foreign (different) cultures and societies. In the beginning, these cultures were "savage" - romanticized for their exoticism and ways of life unpolluted by the West. Of course, anthropology in practice is built on an irony, since the study of these untouched societies was wholly mobilized by a colonialist desire to control them.

Over the years, of course, anthropology has become hugely critical of colonialism (and its flurry of pre- and post-fixes) and exceedingly attuned to issues of class, gender, race, etc. Its methods - primarily long-term fieldwork and participant observation - are particularly adept at illuminating these cleavages. And yet, fundamentally, they remain the same - go somewhere, observe someone, come back, and write about it.

Fellowship programs like the NSF, Wenner-Gren, Fulbright, and SSRC IDRF perpetuate this idea that we need to go somewhere to write meaningful, ethnographically informed theses. Sometimes we do, of course, but the disciplinary imperative to formulaically conduct fieldwork (and the additional requirement that your fieldwork be funded by a handful of so-called prestigious grants) is absurd. It's interesting that the unspoken rule of "minimum nine months to a year" of fieldwork as a PhD student fits so perfectly within the time frame of these dissertation grants. It's also interesting how quickly anthropologists seem to forget that Axel Wenner-Gren was an arms dealing industrialist who was a "self promoting [Nazi sympathizing] nuisance," or how quickly we brush aside our critiques of government when we're accepting their fellowship money. Means to an end, right?

The persistence of these funding regimes and the subsequent demand for ethnographic fieldwork reflects anthropology's lazy refusal to grapple with potentially revolutionary methodological shifts spurred by the digital age. Sometimes we need to spend a year in whatever village talking to locals and figuring out the answers to really tough questions. But sometimes we only need a month or two, and a month of Skype interviews, some week-long site visits, and some archival work that could be easily integrated in vacation time (of which those of us in unstructured PhD programs have plenty). 

Anthropologists need to take a moment to look at themselves and ask why they're applying for funding, whether or not their projects need all the millions of dollars being spent on them, and what kind of methodological developments could make the field more accessible, practical, and meaningful while ensuring its continued theoretical resilience. Maybe we shouldn't blindly cling to disciplinary norms, and maybe we should think more about the role of anthropology in the "modern" world. As David Graeber has recently pointed out, this professional-managerial model of anthropology that's developing within Western universities runs contrary to everything we're trying to do. The way out of this, he says, is by trying to have fun with anthropology. Play and playfulness as an antidote to the well-known horrors of neoliberal capital is a compelling thesis; kowtowing to neoliberal funding regimes, however, probably isn't the best way to achieve it.

After completing his service as a medical officer in WWI, André Breton - the founder of surrealism - began frequenting a bookstore in Paris with other leftwing intellectuals. The owner (I don't remember her name), commented that, despite her own revolutionary tendencies, speaking with Breton and listening to his ideas made her feel like a bourgeois reactionary.

What's the difference? A revolutionary thinks past the immediate, imagining a future that doesn't necessarily depend 1-to-1 on the past or present, respond directly to it. A reactionary, on the other hand, responds to the challenges they see or experience. Surrealism was revolutionary in that it allowed thinkers to break away from 'reality' through various methods (automatic writing, for instance) that, at least in theory, let them imagine the real as completely different. Surrealism responded to contemporary challenges, but their thought, ideally, wasn't limited by such basic questions like "What should we do?" 

For questions of ecology, this means thinking less about how to respond to challenges like getting businesses on board with mitigation and adaptation initiatives and instead thinking about how to change the system completely, making those issues irrelevant.

Environmentalism and sustainability are reactionary. Ecology, on the other hand, can be revolutionary, but to be ecological, we have to look past contested notions of nature and the environment and re-evaluate the way we treat broader issues of labor, markets, consumption and the commodity form. Workers, for example, should have more vacation, more protection, and higher wages. Sure, this correlates to higher prices of goods and services, but it makes sense that the more leisure time people have, the less stuff they'd need to consume, focusing instead on their time spent with family and friends. It would also force us to reconsider what can and can't be commoditized, questioning the economic rationality of markets that demands the commodification of non-commodities (like environmental quality) whose marketization only serves to dispossess the public of their physical and emotional benefits. 

Hi, and welcome to my blog, where I'll post updates on my research, occasionally interspersed with random thoughts and opinions on pop culture and news. My research is on the anthropology of supply chain management (SCM), and for my dissertation, I'm looking at sustainability on the cocoa supply chain and how that affects/is affected by the different forms of labor involved in the production and trade of cocoa and chocolate.

Here's an overview of what I'm doing: 

Traditionally, supply chain managers and SCM scholars define supply chains as a set of three or more "nodes" that facilitates the flow of goods, information, and services between producers and consumers. SCM is different from logistics management because, whereas logistics deals more or less with a company's internal movement of stuff ("intrafirm flows"), SCM deals with external movement of stuff between and among firms ("interfirm flows"). Those the basic definitions. From there, practitioners focus on very specific aspects of the supply chain (e.g. procurement, marketing, warehousing, wages, etc.), and very few people make decisions for an entire "supply chain," especially in complex examples like cocoa. Similarly, researchers usually use abstract mathematical models to understand relationships between different elements of SCM (again, e.g., procurement, marketing, warehousing, wages, etc.). These models can either be simple descriptions of the entire supply chain, which yield very broad, theoretical results, or they can be extremely complicated models of particular relationships, which can then be tested using various data. 

Now, I have a hunch - and this is the main theoretical part of my dissertation - that this way of thinking about supply chains and supply chain management is going to result in a lot of unsolvable problems, the same kinds of inconsistencies and contradictions that have defined the history of capitalist development and caused a bunch of serious crises along the way. The difference, of course, is that while capitalism generally thrives on these crises (crises reveal capital's flaws and lets it self-correct), a crisis in SCM will be devastating because of the particular moment of capitalist development we're currently in, what Anna Tsing calls supply chain capitalism, and because of the inherently connective nature of supply chains that makes a domino effect likely. That's a shame, because unlike finance capitalism or industrial capitalism, supply chains and supply chain capitalism more broadly integrate different kinds of workers in relational systems that are smaller, more visible, and easier to meaningfully engage with. The encounters between different workers represents encounters between different forms of labor, encounters that have historically been violent or revolutionary but that now (in supply chain capitalism) form the system's backbone.

My theory, then, is that SCM should be recast in terms of the various labor formations that constitute the supply chain. I haven't exactly figured out how I'm going to support this theoretically, but I suspect it will be something like this: 

Marx argues that labor is the source of value via the abstract concept of socially necessary labor that is embodied in the commodity. Value for the capitalist comes from exploiting the worker's labor - by paying her for less work than she provides. From there, I move on Walter Benjamin and some French literary and aesthetic theorists, who I think do a really good job of explaining why people are willing to exploit themselves, arguments that are as compelling today as they were in the early and mid-twentieth century. To show what it means for a worker to exploit herself (and, just as important, what it means for one person to exploit another), I mostly skip over the classical phenomenologists, jumping straight to contemporary affect theorists and the new materialists, who do an amazing job describing and understanding experience, emotion, and feeling. They pay close attention to how different ways of knowing (epistemology) and different ways of being (ontology) interact (onto-epistemology) and are politicized (ethico-onto-epistemology) to define and redefine experience. There's a lot of political potential in this that I'm excited to explore. 

So, is my research not just going to make it easier for rich, Western supply chain managers to exploit workers who are affected by their decisions? That's why I'm ultimately focusing on sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), which has emerged in recent years as the foremost model of complex supply chain management. Thanks to the voluminous literature on sustainability and sustainable development, I'll be able to critically examine SSCM's research and practice. I suspect that will push me beyond "sustainable" SCM, which, as the name suggests, simply sustains existing power dynamics between different forms of labor. Instead, I'll propose an ecological supply chain management, which is a bit corny but nevertheless does a better job at integrating human and non-human work and experience.

Stay tuned for updates!