[Podcast Introduction]
Victoria Robinson:
Welcome to the Pedagogy Podcast. A discussion of equity, inclusion and Justice in the classroom at UC Berkeley, hosted by me, Victoria Robinson, Director of the American Cultures Center.
Marisella Rodriguez:
And me, Marisella Rodriguez, senior consultant at the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Victoria Robinson:
This collaboration is spotlighting the American Cultures’ Excellence in Teaching Awardees in 2021, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the American Cultures Center. The AC center supports faculty members from over 50 departments across campus teaching courses developed to meet the AC requirement, which is the only campus wide requirement for all students. Addressing issues central to understanding race and culture and inviting UC Berkeley as a community of staff and students and faculty into analyses critical to our complex, diverse worlds.
Marisella Rodriguez:
The Center for Teaching and Learning partners with campus educators to inspire, enrich, and innovate Berkeley's collective teaching and learning community. Our work on campus is informed by the idea that effective teaching is learned and improved over time. Each of our guests have demonstrated this same commitment to progressive refinement, especially as it relates to equity, inclusion, and justice oriented teaching strategies.
Victoria Robinson:
In this episode, we're excited to be joined by Jake Kosek, associate professor in geography. Welcome, Jake.
[Interview Begins]
Marisella Rodriguez:
Welcome.
Victoria Robinson:
It's great to see you, Jake. And we're here having a conversation together because you were nominated and were selected for 2021 Innovation and Teaching Award for American Cultures. And it's actually hard to encapsulate everything that students said in their nominations, But we'll probably come back to some of the the big points in a second.
Victoria Robinson:
But could you just introduce yourself to to everybody listening today?
Jake Kosek:
Yeah, My name is Jake Kosek, and I'm a professor in the Department of Geography here at UC Berkeley. And I teach on questions of kind of intersections, of questions of empire, questions of nature and questions of difference. And that intersection through a geographic lens.
Victoria Robinson:
That's wonderful. And the big class that you're being recognized for is Geography 10AC which is now in some ways a core staple of the geography department undergraduate curriculum. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of the class? What were the big questions that that you were drawn to for which you developed the course?
Jake Kosek:
Oh, gosh, It's a funny way to think back to the very beginning, I’ve been teaching it for eight years, nine years now. But I took the course kind of reluctantly, to be honest with you. It's a course introduction, geography course, and the course was titled World Region States and Peoples. And I'm like, okay. I was like, the problem with that for me and how I think about geography is it turns geography into finding what exists and where it belongs, what it is, rather than how it is.
Jake Kosek:
And so we quickly changed it just to get something else on the books, changed it to Worldings. So it's really more about the creation of those conditions, creations of the world, creations of the spaces that we occupy from classrooms to cities to nation states, asking questions about the politics of conditions under which we live, thinking critically about those not as givens and trying to create something and really create different possibilities, different worlds, different spaces, different conditions under which we might live differently.
Jake Kosek:
So the geography class actually was just an introductory class that I said, okay, if this is geography, it has to be something very different. One more thing I'll say about that is that I've always had this deep love of geography and also a discomfort with its history. Geography is the handmaiden of empire. That's what geography did. Geography was invented for for colonialism was invented as a means to expand empire, to create a singular world out of many worlds.
Jake Kosek:
And that history is precisely what I write, think, and teach against. So with that, starting taking the introductory geography courses that had been taught, I was like, This is not what I want to do. And first I kind of resisted it, and then I realized, okay, if I'm going to teach this class, I want to remake this. This class has to be something entirely different.
Jake Kosek:
And so what does an introductory course look like that is actually fundamentally critiquing the object of the course as most people know it, what geography is and so Geography 10 became a class about Worldings. And I tried to remake geography in this different image with some of the basic tenets of what geography is about, trying to both point out and remake what geography could be.
Victoria Robinson:
That's wonderful. Funny you say that geography is a handmaiden of empire. Growing up in England, it was English, math and geography.
Jake Kosek:
Exactly.
Victoria Robinson:
So just to stick with the class for one moment, because in the nomination letters, your students talk about your incredible enthusiasm for what you teach. And that that enthusiasm then spills over even to the most kind of ardently hmm student in the room whose have to take this class. It's either an entry to the major or it's for the American Cultures requirement.
Victoria Robinson:
Can you speak for a minute about what is the thing that excites you most that you teach? It could be, you know, is it a particular subject like what gets you kind of ready to get up in the morning and go, Oh, I'm going to take that on today?
Jake Kosek:
I think part of it is just everybody thinks they know what geography is. You, first day class people are like, well, you know what geography is? Yeah, like, you know, states, capitals and rivers. And you're like, okay, let's start there. And then pick what they think they know and destabilize it. Learn to critique it a little bit and realize that there are totally other ways of thinking this.
Jake Kosek:
And that to me is to go into a class or we're going to talk about something that everybody thinks they know. Expose in a sense, what are the foundations of it, the things that are naturalized in it, and then help in that critique, plant the seeds or help collectively come up with seeds of different possible directions, different possible futures.
Jake Kosek:
So that's always in the most general sense of it is, but most of the time it's it's a fun there's always, well, this and honestly, between you and me and this podcast, you know, I get up but every time I go to teach. I'm terrified. Like I can't I when I'm walking to class, I have butterflies in my stomach.
Jake Kosek:
I'm like, Oh my gosh, oh my God, everything's going to go off the wire. But I do know, having done it enough now that it will be fine and it tends to go great. So it's this kind of overcoming that, coming in with a certain enthusiasm, asking the questions that will surprise and entice people to come and think with me about these things differently.
Jake Kosek:
But the energy is it comes from that I think.
Victoria Robinson:
You mentioned that to deconstruct, to modify, to challenge the kind of presumptions and assumptions that people bring into a room. And actually people talked about the humbling experience of unpacking something that they felt very familiar with. And I'm actually wondering, you know, if we focus where we are right now in this type of teaching curriculum at UC Berkeley, the American Cultures curriculum holding a certain kind of ambition and expectation of taking on some of the most difficult issues, some really daunting questions and challenges of our lives.
Victoria Robinson:
How do you get students into that moment where they are listening and they are unpacking and they are questioning their own position in an idea, especially as it is structured around questions of racial justice, questions of social justice? And I ask this because also your class is of 300 students, you have students in a geography class coming from public health and sociology and engineering and in some ways, maybe the most diverse undergraduate student experience in terms of backgrounds that we'll ever find at Berkeley and especially and now then centered on a curriculum that is supposed to be challenging and thinking through notions of race and ethnicity and culture.
Jake Kosek:
Yeah, you don't have a lot of help right now in the world because I think people are like, This world isn't working. It's not the push from where we are. There's something different or that this there's something wrong or that there's a critique possible. People know it. People know it in their bones. They are. It is a terrifying moment.
Jake Kosek:
It is hard to imagine an alternative future as one you would be excited to reside in at this moment. There are so many things and you know, we say this in any generation, in some sense, I'm like, okay, well, there's nuclear threats and all kinds of stuff going on. The histories of the civil rights movements or the movements of anti-apartheid, all kinds of things that were always big issues that were central to the discipline, central to teaching.
Jake Kosek:
I really do think this moment is different. There is things that are breaking. It is so obviously that we're off the rails and that the question is when you can go into a class and say, listen, there is another. They feel relieved. They're relieved by the critique. At first, and then they're terrified by the critique. And then the possibility is like helping say like, listen, the solutions are already here.
Jake Kosek:
There are people, communities have been imagining other solutions for a long time. And this is one of things I love about AC is that it's trying to bring that into the curriculum. This is not a great book saying I don't teach in the history of geography or geography as you know it. There are other worlds, there are other ways of occupying space, there are other ways of relating to the material world, the ways of understanding notions of nature.
Jake Kosek:
There are different ways of being in relationship with each other. All those things are geography. And so people are really animated about trying to find those things. So it's just allowing people creating a space where it can be that I must say, the hardest thing in doing that is letting go of what we think the academy is about and what teaching is about.
Jake Kosek:
We think we should teach. We need to teach you what I learned as a geographer, frankly. Bullshit. No, we don't. You know, there's this is a different world. And you want to know that there's a history to a discipline, that there's something. But you don't have to accept that you can teach against it and recreate it. And that's what the possibilities here.
Jake Kosek:
And we forget that so much in the academy and so much in our teaching. What is it that we're here for? What other things can we learn? How might we create other relations and futures, other worlds? That's really what we should be teaching. And it's not about the institution, it's not about the professionalism, because that's what's been told to us so much.
Jake Kosek:
Now, how are we going to make future entrepreneurs and professionals? You know, that element of it. Sure, pieces of that are important. But really what's important particularly is that people feel the wheels are coming off the bus. How can we really get in and imagine something differently? So the course, rather than structures on the history of the geography or minutiae about this reader or this author, this or it's really a conceptual course and for an introductory course that's rare and I'm like, Put down your pencils.
Jake Kosek:
I don't want anybody to bring computers to class. We're going to take home messages. I'll give you my take home points. But like this, let's have a conversation about that. Stay with me. And I do things that are, you know, a little bit less conventional. I try to make it very low stakes, but I may call on people.
Jake Kosek:
I say, listen, you can always have a free pass. There's nothing wrong with not knowing the answer. I can barely remember my daughter's name when I'm trying to introduce her to someone walking down the street because I'm terrified like, Oh my God, I can't remember this person's name. That feeling of like, it's like, this is try this. And if you don't want to do it, say pass.
Jake Kosek:
And so we just try to get more people involved in the conversation. So it's not just me telling them something. It's us trying to like, react to and become in relations. And that's part of what is so hard about the last year. And on Zoom, which is a business software program, it's actually part of the problem now. I chose to be back in the classroom because I had to get off Zoom, but even with a mask, you realize this whole thing has taught me that teaching is so much about relations.
Jake Kosek:
It isn't about this or learning these steps or what you should do, or here's what geography is, but it's like, Come with me into this. Like, let's be in this together. What is it that we can imagine this being? And the best moments are when I'm surprised when we really don't know the answer. And I think that's probably what I want to teach most, is that education is about being open to being moved by things that you had no idea you could be moved by and that you had no idea where they are before.
Jake Kosek:
And so to try whatever way to do that, whether that's by hook or by trick or by whatever I can and teaching, that's part of what I, what I try to do.
Victoria Robinson:
Wow. You turned very quickly a corner from it’s terrifying and it's daunting and I have a lot of help in the world because the world has got the wheels coming off it. And yet the commitment you seem to have pedagogically is actually one of inquiry and joy and opportunity and as you said, relationship building and engagement. And you're famous for not only having awe inspiring material and asking questions that maybe haven't been in the room before, but of really allowing students to feel incorporated.
Victoria Robinson:
Now, you've just shared that one of those tools is put your pens away, no laptops. Let's just listen and think together. But what are other ways that you really incorporate students to participate in the class? And I'm thinking particularly about the fact that often students from various differentiated and often minoritized backgrounds sit in a classroom wondering about when their voices might be called on, and also maybe terrified about some of the subjects that feel very close to them in the classroom.
Jake Kosek:
Yeah, that is a line that is so hard right now. And I think it's really important. I mean, I guess the first thing I'd say is that do not teach the history discipline, because the history of the discipline has been written by and for certain people. And so all the material, everything you say, if what you read, who's on the syllabus to how you read it, to what examples you give has to be so different to make other people feel.
Jake Kosek:
And it actually not just to make other people feel included, but in a sense for everybody to let go. Because this world in the way that it has been constructed is killing all of us. You know, that's kind of famous Baldwin line. You know, it's like this not just killing is not just this is not just killing me, he said as a Black man, queer Black man, but it's killing you, too.
Jake Kosek:
And he was talking to whites in particular, like, listen, this is killing you. This is not good for anybody. And that element of like, this has to be different as a starting point, as a critically important. And then how you teach it. So I did this funny thing in the beginning of classes that, you know, I've always kind of do as a side thing, and I just got my midterm evaluations back for this very course.
Jake Kosek:
And I must say it's a little disheartened because one of the things people said they loved the most is this thing I do called the Apple Quiz. So I'm a farmer, I grow apples and I and other things and but I bring apples. And it was a way to kind of start out to get my nervousness down personally and also to kind of bring everybody kind of into the room.
Jake Kosek:
I said, okay, so we'll have some questions, random questions about kind of traditional geography, like where's Mongolia or something about that was in the reading or something about the number of extreme weather events in the last year versus the last 200 years or something about climate change or something that's kind of related to what we're talking about at the certain moment.
Jake Kosek:
And then if they could answer the quiz, I have to throw the apple to them and I'm on the stage is a 400 person room. This is a big room.
Victoria Robinson:
Are you a good throw?
Jake Kosek:
Well, that's it. Sometimes I am and sometimes I'm not. So everybody's there looking and like, waiting, like what's going to happen? Invariably, the person has the right answer. It's going to be someone in the back. I think they're sitting in the back because they want to. Then people raise their hands the back of the classroom, the only time ever.
Jake Kosek:
And so you're like, Oh, everybody’s like laughing when it’s someone at the back. I'm like, okay, am I going to do it? And people start ducking like they're whatever, and I just throw the apple in. I'm pretty good seven out of ten times. But the three times that it goes off, it goes can go wildly off. And the point of bringing this up was one of the things they said they loved the most about the course, which was disheartening, was the Apple Quiz.
Jake Kosek:
And I'm like, ouch, it's, you know, all this time I'm thinking about all these examples. And so first I was like, disheartened about it, but I was thinking about it this weekend. I realized a part of what they're doing is it's one of the few moments where unscripted, like we're actually personally living, we're actually there. And it made me realize for somes, the geographer who thinks about how a space is produced and what are the rules that govern that space of what you can and cannot do.
Jake Kosek:
You walk into a china shop or you walk into a gated community or you walk into whatever a library. You have a set of rules that come with it. And the classroom, of course, is just fraught with these. Right. And so in some ways, the Apple Quiz is a breaking with that. And I took it as this kind of offhand thing, but I realized, no, what this is, is a breaking of the social rules of the classroom and letting it know that we can break those rules and that that creates an opening, that then people are kind of just in a different space to start the thing.
Jake Kosek:
And so in some ways, this thing that started as this kind of joke to get us all the attention to get me less nervous has become something they love. And I'm thinking about it that way. I can really understand. I think that's what they feeling with it. And what it does is also pushes me to think about more ways to do that, more things like that.
Jake Kosek:
It's just different that way, you know, you can do it differently. So in some sense that's a kind of a long answer to. The other thing I'd say is just one more thing. You asked about pieces that I find to get better at the one is really knowing students now, this is really hard in a big class because I don't interact with them.
Jake Kosek:
Some come to office hours, which I love, but it's rare for most of them to come and they're intimidated and it's hard for this within the small peer office hours to break that up. But the element I'd like to incorporate most, and this is what this year has taught me, is how to actually be attentive to the worlds that people live in.
Jake Kosek:
That isn’t the classroom. We expect you to check that at the door, be professional, walk into this professional space. There's some advantages to doing that, but there's real losses and it's really hard as a teacher if you don't know some of those things. So trying to find ways to invite that in a way that's confidential and also a way that actually helps my GSIs.
Jake Kosek:
So I've had my GSIs, people who work with me have some type of anonymous questionnaires like tell me the things that are hard in your life right now. Tell me what you're actually struggling with outside the class. What matters to you most? Right now? It has nothing to do with academia, and for them it's been and for me it has been so eye opening.
Jake Kosek:
I have a bunch of students who are living in vans, you know, like, Oh, right. You know, people are living in single households with, you know, five people in a single room, you know, things that I kind of know in an abstract. But when you actually see it and you know, those people are teaching, it's changed how my GSIs have taught.
Jake Kosek:
And I think there's some way of doing this where I can keep a bar. You want people to be able to strive for something they don't know they can do, but not make it so that, you know, you you realize everybody's starting in the same place. You're not denying them the possibility of achieving something. So you assume less and still have expectations of what possible for them and for the class. How to do that? I'm not sure.
Jake Kosek:
But that's in a sense become especially true this last year and a half. I had a really hard year myself. It's made me really rethink teaching, even on the class, even on this scale.
Victoria Robinson:
I feel like I, I just learned myself how to be a better teacher. And actually that was going to be one of the questions, which is what advice would you give to other faculty thinking about? You know, I instinctively know that equity minded teaching needs to be central to how we construct the classroom, but they may struggle with thinking about what are those interventions, what are those opportunities?
Victoria Robinson:
And you already named a few. So low stakes testing, making sure that we all know that when we're teaching and learning, loving and living in high stakes environments where it's stress and anxious that everything that we think about ourselves shows up in probably the worst ways. Right? But then you also talked about these broader communication strategies that just allowing people to have their own voices about who they are, what they're struggling with, what their opportunities are, what they're hoping to achieve.
Victoria Robinson:
That almost sets a different relationship for the class because you want to know them more than just being the learner in the room. And then I actually think you somehow put aside the idea that, well, it is also about these themes, but then we're asking questions of climate change and the Nigerian delta, of the number of formerly incarcerated people and the effects.
Victoria Robinson:
It seems as if you're also motivating students with these very important, exogenous factors in life that also many will care very deeply about having a relationship with. So as you said, if the wheels are falling off the bus of life, actually students feel very empowered by thinking that there are answers out there, there are approaches. And we’re in a genealogy, we're in a lineage and we are in some ways sitting on the shoulders of giants.
Victoria Robinson:
So that's what I'm hearing. And I just wanted to throw back at you. I think that you've already started to name what equity minding practices look like, but you also said you had a you have a bag of tricks. So any other tricks that you would like to share?
Jake Kosek:
Yeah, I guess others I don't you know, it's hard to come off the top of my head, but the first thing that comes to mind is this connection. And we’re just talking about this. And you I'm like, okay, I gotta take notes. Victoria, you're doing that. That's a great idea. You know, one of the things I do is the first, you know, the first day of classes, I just look around the room, I say, Tell me about yourself.
Jake Kosek:
And most time when you get someone asks you about yourself, they'll say this, And my name is X or Joe or Sam or Annie or whatever it is, and they'll and you'll say, I'll say their name, and then they'll say something else. They’ll say, And I'm from Kenya, or I'm from Cape Cod or I'm from Albuquerque. And and any time you do it, you're so in the class.
Jake Kosek:
Everybody's kind of doing this. I do this maybe like invariably everybody will say their name and who they're from. And I ask, Why? Why are you telling me this? Of all the things you can tell me about how tall you are, how many siblings you have, or how much you people you love in your life, and who are they matter to you.
Jake Kosek:
You choose to introduce yourself at these moments by saying, I'm from this place. And so I start with something that's so, you know, like, Oh, I don't know why I did, that's just the convention. It's because places are so deeply part of who we are. And so with the AC curriculum, it's great because it's like, okay, so what is Crawford, Texas, mean to you versus, you know, inner city L.A. or what is, you know, like Albuquerque versus Long Island or what?
Jake Kosek:
Already we are so infused with these things that we already know them. They teach us who we are and they teach us who other people are. And so that connection between who we are and the little things about like what we carry with every day, politics isn't out here. It's what it’s. Like think about, gosh think about, you know, a binary bathroom set up like, you know, this is something that that forces you to make a choice, a binary choice from the very that's a geography question.
Jake Kosek:
That's a question of the separation of space into a binary that has a long history, colonial history, I would argue an imperial history of that kind of nature, culture, separation, these two binary things come into being and we are forced to make and live that all the time. And so when you teach people that you can break that, that you can critique that and think other possible, they get it.
Jake Kosek:
Again, this is a sense of students who are growing up in this world. This is it is coming apart. But but also feel so confined and limited because in some sense it's being asserted louder and more forcefully than it has been in a while, because I think it's failing so badly at the moment where it's falling apart. The most ugly things are coming up.
Jake Kosek:
And so students are feeling the the the anxiety, the violence, the oppression of all that. And so the tricks then become to link it back. Like, what does it mean when you walk into an organization of space? What does it mean when you walk into what are the codes of relations that are that are set there? So part of it as a geographer, as you know, is to teach and teach the different spaces and how those codes, But those codes are to recognize them because space and places and spaces, whether they be towns, cities, nation states, etc., have these rules that we think are just given.
Jake Kosek:
This is just a stage on which the social relations happen and politics happens. But actually geographers are about teaching conditions and what are the structures that actually not just in what people say, what people intend, but actually in the ways you live your life, the ways your body is comported? What is the ways it policed through everyday interactions in space. And geography is this great discipline. I love it because it's asking those questions. It's not just about race and racism. It's race and racism that are policed not just through racists. There are plenty of them, not just through institutional racism, which is in institutions built into laws and structures, but built into the very material table. The structures of the building, the organizing, the architecture that what's planted in gardens to, you know, the or the nation state is a structure with boundaries and borders and fences.
Jake Kosek:
All of that is actually part of what they're living. And so if you can do that as a long way of saying maybe it's a long way of saying, but it's that element where people start to realize when they feel bad about themselves, when they feel like they can't do something, when they're told they can't do something, that this is built into the things that are around them, the very infrastructure around them.
Jake Kosek:
So to really change this, you actually have to change much more than your attitude, which is what people have or people doing or your intentions. You have to change your relation, not just the relations around it, but it's deeper. But when you and that's scary at one level, but it's also freeing and you realize, wait a second, I've been this is this is rigged.
Jake Kosek:
This whole thing is this classroom is rigged. There's one person down here at a podium and there's a whole bunch of people up here. The thing in the hierarchy is built into the structure of this classroom. Wow. What has. So I start a classroom by sitting in the classroom, one of my first classes. So some people aren’t even used to who I am.
Jake Kosek:
So I go into the second class and I sit in the seats and I start lecturing the seats and people are trying to turn around and they're trying to lay awkwardly there and they're like, What are you doing here like this? And they're actually sometimes get upset, flustered because you've changed the rules again in a different way than the Apple Quiz, in a way that's structured in the space.
Jake Kosek:
And so the elements of that are doing the things that would point that out. And then and this is where it becomes collective doing the things that allow us to imagine other ones like I don't know the answer to the magic futures, actually the best I can do is try to crack them. I get. But it's not about the critique.
Jake Kosek:
We often spent so much time with a critique but the critique enables something. So what is it that you can create? You are imagining and you will imagine things, I cannot imagine. The most I can hope for is actually to create something that I will never see, like to undo, to create possibilities so that there's a world that I can't imagine that will come into being because of the things that I hope you undo.
Jake Kosek:
And of course, I'm trying to create new things to new relations and whatever. But at this point in my life, I will not see what needs to happen for a viable future, let alone a healthy future. When I want full of relationships really that really that really are enriching, I won't see that. I don't think and it may be multiple generations.
Jake Kosek:
But that's also been as AC teaches a part of many tasks and people trying to end slavery knew within their lives that they would never see that. But they died in the dark in some sense, but carrying a candle. And there is good company in that dark and good company with that candle going forward, you may not be able to actually see it, see it achieved, but that's those are, those are and I try to teach them that these are the people.
Jake Kosek:
This is a worthwhile thing. And you may never see that light. It's not about this. It's about creating. It's about finding good company, good relations. And that will be the struggle and hopefully you will be able to achieve in your worlds something else. But it's it's a long term game, just like the end of slavery or, you know, any time when there's emancipation.
Jake Kosek:
Those were people fought and died without knowing that they would never do that. That's what the struggle really continues. It's not because my students come back dejected out on the streets and like, wow, why didn't this work? Well, I was like, you know, it's like it doesn't always work that way. It probably won't work there most of the time.
Jake Kosek:
But there's you've created a space, you've created a different way of imagining space. You you allowed people to realize that there are other people out there. You're not alone of tons of things that are achieved in those moments that in a sense become part of I'm part of it. So so trying to do some of that that work that that, you know, we will fail.
Jake Kosek:
But the failure is actually the very conditions of possibility for something else. That's what has to happen.
Victoria Robinson:
Wow. As somebody who studies prison abolition, I'm like, yeah.
Jake Kosek:
You're learning this is why.
Victoria Robinson:
Dismantle, change and build. And it seems like we're kind of wrapping up time together. But what you've also put your fingers on is experimentation and improvization that it seems that you allow your students to really have those, you know, what, if or how would or could it be possible and slowing the work down enough so students can be in self-reflection which you've already kind of named and held on to some of the the ways that actually you're in opposition or against the grain for what we think the university can be a site of.
Victoria Robinson:
Right. So you talk about professionalization and accreditation and just getting things done to move on and you kind of set the terms for the class in a very different way than that, is that you're asking students to just be in that moment and think outside of the conditions that they think that they're in. And so as advice to faculty moving forward, I think that those are great pieces of advice about how to establish and in some ways also be forgiving of oneself as well as everything else around you.
Victoria Robinson:
I mean, it feels as if you're often you're often asking yourself for forgiveness to be in the space. So I think that's an incredibly rich and very generous way to set up a real learning environment.
Jake Kosek:
I struggle with how to forgive yourself for what is not, are the conditions you're in that are making this so brutal. And I watch this with junior faculty, certainly with the growing ranks of lectureship and the transformation, the privatization of the university and the kind of that whole element, I watched teaching become more of a struggle because the conditions are harder and harder.
Jake Kosek:
But I have different pieces of that and not so much for the lecturers or the GSIs or the junior faculty, but for senior faculties. And I think about this all the time. If you have tenure and you're not using it, that is an abomination. And I love this about AC it’s always pushing. It's like you've got to talk about the hard things and you got to realize that it will cost.
Jake Kosek:
And if you aren't doing that, you're not pushing it, then then why do we have tenure? I believe deeply in tenure. I think it's so important, but it is so rarely used. So, yes, forgiving, forgive for ourselves, for the sense of conditions, the things that we have to struggle through. And sometimes we have to like bar the door and protect ourselves and our communities in ways that you cannot take on.
Jake Kosek:
But I think for a lot of senior faculty, I think about this all the time. We've got to take, especially at this moment, be willing to take risks. And by the time people get tenure, they're so used. We are so used to being an and a part of the institution. We are so professionalized that we think the university is about the institution and maintaining the institution or writing the memos, being a good member of that kind of institutional community of the university.
Jake Kosek:
And we're missing what the university is about. The university is about something so different. It is about these other possibilities and moments of crazy danger that if we can't do that, when we have tenure of anybody who can do it, which is we have this incredible possibility, then I think we're also missing something. So the forgiveness is also and I feel like them both are forgiveness of conditions of the people have to struggle with, but also the sense of like at moments knowing when and this is one of them where we really need to step up and take on issues we are afraid to talk about.
Victoria Robinson:
Thank you. I really am grateful for you bringing us to that point of the now of what are the pressures and opportunities of a certain way of thinking and being which is centered in a long history, a decolonial history. AC started out at the ports of Oakland and San Francisco, with students being taught by longshore workers how to refuse South African goods being brought off the ships.
Victoria Robinson:
And they started to think about boycott, divestment, sanctions that came back to the university. And that was the the external pressure of the political education on on the shifting and the need to shift the university. But right now, I think the AC is the miner’s canary of the university, because whatever's going to show up in general will actually show up in particular very quickly in AC.
Victoria Robinson:
So you name the kind of adjunctification, precarity, but also the kind of the moment and opportunity we have of this very important time where we're talking about anti-racism, we're talking about racial justice. And actually, as much as we'd like to think that those conditions have always been that they haven't and they have to be fought for again and again.
Victoria Robinson:
So I'm not sure if you have anything to say on that final note.
Jake Kosek:
It's always too soon to go home. It is, struggle is never over because you can you know, that element of it is I think there's so many of my mentors who were came of age in in struggles in the sixties and seventies kind of felt like, okay, we achieved something and what it was. But, you know, I see you talking to someone who's kind of went was a teacher, was a professor and eventually dropped out and moved to a rural area.
Jake Kosek:
And they felt like they were kind of it when they were a professor and they were doing all these alternative things. They were leading the charge with the bunch, with the community, with the students. They had the students and faculty. They had done this, all this creative stuff. And then they turn around and they realize how few people are behind them, which maybe people are going a different direction.
Jake Kosek:
But it's also just how, in a sense, the possibilities aren't just creating them and this is maybe the limits of critique. It's not just creating them, it's actually fostering in relations, which are long term ongoing, of which we have to continue to struggle. It's always too soon to go home.
Victoria Robinson:
Thank you. I love that phrase too soon to go home. Is there anything else we haven't asked that you would like to share?
Jake Kosek:
I guess Is this the elements of just a pitch for geography? I love how much I love I love geography so much. And I think that the elements of really trying to in these moments where we're struggling over racism, we're struggling over sexual binaries that are embedded within in so deeply in the world around us where we're trying to deal with.
Jake Kosek:
Yeah, the really the end of the world in a real direct way. Right. And it’s already sort of out of our hands. It's not just getting people to the to the to the end nuclear weapons. It's like it's already launched. So how do we the question for me here is, is is less just about how do we stop things, but how do we live in the aftermath?
Jake Kosek:
We are already there. This is this moment. And I think geography has a lot to do there. There's a there's a way of rethinking again, in the notions of identity and relationship to context and conditions which offer a much more structural I mean, structural, both institutional but structural also in material conditions, right. As we try to deal with climate change, it's so easy to go back to geoengineering or to a centered, state centered solution where actually questions of justice and equity get sidelined.
Jake Kosek:
It's amazing. This is the history of a binary that's become the environmental movement versus the social justice movement, but really the ways in which at a moment of crisis, you see the worst returns to this, this kind of thing where like you have Halliburton, Bechtel, and US military in your kind of justifications for empire, you know, climate change being a justification for empire and all this this element of this.
Jake Kosek:
So I love that geography is like has that part has always had some critiques of that of these notions of environment. But now it seems more important than ever. So I'm I love teaching geography. And if you haven't taken a geography course and you listen to this, take a geography course, there's some really great ones around.
Victoria Robinson:
Well, I can't thank you enough. I mean, I think you've taken us into tools and tricks and inspiration and ideas, and as a pitch for geography, that toolkit is big. And I think we've just scratched the surface. So I also didn't say I'm Victoria Robinson, director of the American Cultures Center, in conversation with Professor Jake Kosek from Geography.
Victoria Robinson:
And I'm from England. I was going to say aloud, so thank you so much, Jake. That was an absolute pleasure.
Jake Kosek:
Yes. Thank you.
Marisella Rodriguez:
Thank you. Well, thank you for being in conversation with us. We'd also like to thank the Ethnic Studies Changemaker team, which includes Pablo Gonzalez, Rania Salem, Angel Garcia Ballesteros, the American Cultures Center and the Center for Teaching and Learning. You can find all of our episodes on the AC and CTL websites, and Spotify.
