Too often we felt isolated in academia. We felt disconnected, tokenized, unheard; our full humanity misunderstood. We needed radical community within the institution to hold us—community that committed to doing academia differently. Community that understood, agreed, “just got it,” supported each other, and made space for all our struggles. We needed each other. We needed to come together to disrupt academic expectations of individualism, competition, and “professionalism.” We needed space to deliberately engage anti-gentrification, Indigenous liberations and climate stewardships, Black radicalisms, feminist abolitions, emergent strategies (Brown, 2017), anti-capitalisms, and queer orientations for utopian futurities. We needed to question what has been and reimagine what might become of the university.
Could we find joy within this institution that itself was not built for us? Could we do academia differently to create beautiful spaces of flourishing, love, relationality, and community? Could we form something otherwise among these colonial ruins that instead nourished, supported, valued, and uplifted us all? Could we reverse the extractive forces of the colonialist institution—reject research that takes from local communities to benefit the academy; refuse research that simply gives back to local community that which is most easily offered yet often excess? Could we leave behind the need to be “dominant, primary, and expert” to instead become supportive, coalitional, and useful labour in solidarity with on-going struggles already begun within our communities? Could we redirect our academic lives towards offering ourselves, our skills, and our academic learnings to those communities already doing liberatory work? Could we enter in the middle of on-going stories rather than trying to re-write them from the start? Might we, in fact, become justice as embodied knowledge mobilisations put-to-use?
We decided, yes. Yes, we could, and yes we can become of more use to each other and our communities. Therefore, in response to our desires to do academia differently, we formed Becoming Coalition (BC), a growing community of 10+ racialized and/or queer scholars (undergraduate, graduate, faculty) grounded, not in identity, but in shared politic, love, well-being, relationality, slowness, deep practice, and intellectual curiosities committed to supporting each other and being of use to liberatory change in our communities. While being in, but not of the institution, Becoming Coalition commits to continued systemic disruption, group care, and liberatory change through four objectives:1.) Reorganized Relations that flatten hierarchies and privilege deep connections, 2.) (R)evolutionary Collaborations that challenge individualism and competition through coalitional publishing, team course design/offerings, and group mentorship, 3.) Radical Theorypractices (Berbary, 2020) that turn student research away from extractive, liberal qualitative research initiatives towards liberatory, relational, post-inquiry possibilities, and 4.) Reversed Research that prioritizes building relations with on-going, community-led organizing, activism, and movement through offering our skills, knowledges, and labour where and when we can be of use—reversing research directionality; redefining research as practice, practice as research; reinvigorating embodied praxis; igniting engaged theorypracticing. Together, these four objectives offer a growing number of our students radically different, and more deeply supported opportunities to flourish within the institution as a united community. Together we redefine colonialist notions of research, excellence, relationality, and worth within the academy, while also committing to redirect university resources towards community-led liberation, disrupting status quo and reorganizing us sustainably towards better futurities.
Over the past two years, BC has already successfully supported objectives 1.) Reorganized Relations, 2.) Revolutionary Collaboration, and 3.) Radical Theorypractices through our own organizing of time, resources, knowledge, and connection. Yet, to promote, connect around, support, and follow through on objective 4, Reversed Research, we require external funding (wages for student labour, website development, advertising/promotion within communities, workshop development, needed materials, space requirements, etc.), which can be difficult to obtain through traditional grants due to the emergent, unpredictable, shifting, and anti-linear landscapes of such work. The longevity of such work depends on funding that grants us the freedom to invest in long-term relations with community members. To continue to realize our 3 objectives and work towards the fourth, we are seeking funds to support four initiatives: I) workshops on coalitional writing for justice-research, II) the development of a skill share series where co-activators share relational strategies for consciousness raising, organizing, and action, III) a barrier-breaking event for community organizations to discuss and receive financial and in-kind supports from BC, and IV) the inaugural BC Zine a digital product reflecting the heart work of the collective. Fulfilling this 4th objective would not only be game changing in the ways research has traditionally been done, but would also be game changing for our coalition, future students, and the futures of our communities.
Recognizing that our commitments, academic education, and lived experiences have deeply prepared our coalition to do such justice work within the academy and within our communities, and that funding is our only stumbling block, we are hope-full for the funding attached to the game-changing Robbins-Ollivier Award. Such work would provide a working scaffolding as template for others to create similar spaces across the university that become havens for subversive scholars who want to “do academia” in ways that uplift loving relations, create communities for those of us made unsafe by status quo, offer alternative possibilities of what counts as scholarship, mentorship, and community, and redefine, through anti-colonialist frames, what should also count as research for liberatory community transformation.