Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good
The United States begins its summer season a little ahead of the solstice with Memorial Day weekend.
The end of May also brings my year-long writing experiment to a close.
Thank you so much for reading and learning with me since last May. I’ll be writing again in a few weeks.
Subscribers will hear first what’s next for me. If you know someone who’d enjoy reading, please invite them to sign up too.
See you soon!
The story of the Dakota Access Pipeline continues:
The pipeline is planned from Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois, where it would tie in with an existing pipeline to refineries in the Midwest and on the Gulf coast.
The project was never examined under an environmental impact review but instead was approved under a fast-track process that three federal agencies have stated was not adequate.” —Lynda V. Mapes, November 25, 2016
A neighboring town, Bismarck, ND, also rejected the Dakota Access Pipeline over pollution risks before the company approached the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Tribe rejected it too.
This weekend, the Army Corps of Engineers informed the Standing Rock Sioux that it planned to close public access to the Oceti Sakowin camp, a site where thousands of Native and non-Native water protectors have gathered over the last several months. Tribal chairman David Archambault, Jr. published a response this morning on the Standing Rock Sioux website:
Our Tribe is deeply disappointed in this decision by the United States, but our resolve to protect our water is stronger than ever. We ask that all everyone who can appeal to President Obama and the Army Corps of Engineers to consider the future of our people and rescind all permits and deny the easement to cross the Missouri River just north of our Reservation and straight through our treaty lands. When Dakota Access Pipeline chose this route, they did not consider our strong opposition. Our concerns were clearly articulated directly to them in a meeting on Sept. 30, 2014. We have released that audio recording from our council meeting where DAPL and the ND Public Service Commission came to us with this route…
We ask that the United States stop the pipeline and move it outside our treaty lands.” —David Archambault, Jr., November 26, 2016
Three people in my network have joined camps at the Standing Rock Reservation, and several more in my extended network are reading for winter there. Excessive local police force has been all over the headlines, and rightly so. But state violence is the easiest story to tell because, as Archambault writes, it’s so common, so continuous with the history of the US and its dealings with Native peoples.
EarthJustice’s legislative counsel Raul Garcia tells a simpler, less sexy story of Native and non-Native people gathering at Standing Rock out of shared spiritual conviction, not just common political belief.
Even when we were talking about politics, the sacredness of it all was what tribe members conveyed as important. The respect of the people overcame any thought of animosity, and the solemnity of the place and the need to protect nature inspired peaceful unity. This indigenous vision of sacred air, sacred water and sacred land was striking to me. I live in Washington, D.C., where polarized rhetoric dominates the landscape, and where, since the presidential election season, distasteful attacks are rampant. Visiting the camps and understanding the spirituality driving this struggle against corporate profit was an eye-opening and humbling experience.” —Raul Garcia
All of the camps and the medical council still need material support, and as Dr. Adrienne Keene has said, “money might be best.” Please give what you can.
Monday’s work on The Game That Shall Not Be Named, colonialism, augmented reality tech, and lineages of state violence went further afield than I expected.
As sites like the Holocaust Museum and Arlington National Cemetery begin to push back against the game’s boundaries, there are plenty of thoughtful, worth-reading articles about the broader connections and the moment that we’re in.
This moment holds the potential for deeper and more substantial awareness of all that’s shaped us and all we’ve yet to do than we’ve ever had.
It’s also clear to me that this awareness will not be televised, produced or commercially broadcast because it isn’t the kind of awareness that comforts. It’s an awareness that undermines neutrality claims, nostalgic appeals, supposedly amoral innovation, and all violent supremacies.
Read up:
The justifications, the technologies, the casualties. What distinguishes them at home and abroad? What separates the cultures of imperialism and militarism from domestic policing?
“Nothing. That is the answer that more and more scholars and activists are bringing to light. It is the answer that black intellectuals including Langston Hughes articulated decades ago.” —Brandon Byrd, July 14, 2016
Things are bad, but I would posit that they have been this way for as far back into American history as you want to go. What has changed is the amount of information available to the average citizen. Thanks to cellphones and people employing social networking to spread news quickly, what goes on minute to minute has crossed the line into overload… There are at least two different Americas. They have existed in an environment of almost unbroken mutual exclusivity. That’s over now.” —Henry Rollins, July 14, 2016
Understanding and drawing from the fact the whole world—not simply one state or country—is full of oppressed and disillusioned people might be key to advancing our struggles. I believe, as Malcolm X once said, that freedom will come when we start identifying ourselves with oppressed people around the world, building with them, and forming effective movements against imperialism.” —William C. Anderson, July 13, 2016
According to SimilarWeb, 5.9% of all Android users opened the app on Monday.
Soon enough, marketers will be able to target those people through sponsored locations within the wildly popular mobile game. Niantic, the game’s developer and a spin off of Google, said earlier in the week that it would offer advertisers sponsored locations down the road, a move that will especially appeal to retailers, but few details were given.
On Wednesday, Niantic CEO John Hanke told the Financial Times that sponsored locations may come sooner [rather] than later.” —Maureen Morrison, July 14, 2016
The handwringing that has always followed Pokémon’s popularity to claim it is essentially cutesy cockfighting has always missed the point that it was never really about fighting at all; that was nothing but a pretence for collecting, exploring, and discovering a grand, old, pre-urbanised world that a young kid could adventure through all by themselves…
“Pokémon Go isn’t really doing much new. It takes well-established technologies and modes of play from AR, the existing data from Ingress, and incorporates them with the well-established brand that is Pokémon—a brand already built around the idea of exploring public spaces. It then circumvents the need for players to own unique hardware to play the game, instead being free-to-play on the mobile device already owned by both those kids discovering it for the first time and those adults who remember it with a fond nostalgia.” —Brendan Keogh, July 14, 2016 (emphasis added)
Who does own the virtual space around you? I can’t put a billboard on your house without asking you; but is it so obvious that I should be allowed to put a virtual billboard “on” your house without giving you any say in the matter?
… Perhaps the best thing to do is to look backwards, not forward, for solutions. In the early days of the 20th century, another technological revolution raised questions of control, trespass and oversight: the aeroplane.” —Alex Hern, July 13, 2016
Aishwarya Subramanian, a doctoral student who studies fantasy, colonialism, and place, has written on the game for an Indian online paper. Her piece draws from my article.
![What I've learned... and what's next. [Image: a candle in the dark. Photo credit: Jared Wright.]](http://mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Learning_KM.jpg)
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See you in 2016!
I’m back from the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication convention, a 5-day trip with the academic community I was last immersed in in 2012.
I caught up with colleagues I’d left behind, and reconnected with others who were years ahead of me and now teach as tenured faculty members at universities across the South and Midwest. I also surprised my dissertation chair and watched him at an early morning research panel. He still writes and presents exceptionally careful, thoughtful case studies of inhumane organizational rhetoric.
Between Thursday and Friday I also had several conversations with professors, staff members, and nervous about-to-be-graduates about alternative academic life: their worries, their frustrations, and their options. (I’ll share video of my dialogue with Paula Chambers when I have it.)
I pushed through a day or so of imposter syndrome—the nasty nag of whether I belong and what I have to show for three years in the wild—and as I pushed through that din, I regained a sense of my common bond with those writers, scholars, researchers, activists, dreamers, and teachers who promote freedom through the practical disciplines of composition and communication.
Dr. Adam J. Banks, a writing, rhetoric, and digial media professor at the University of Kentucky, pointed the convention outward and upward on Thursday morning. “Ain’t No Walls Behind the Sky: Funk, Flight, and Freedom” combined music, film, pop culture, and politics, and it confronted ways that composition scholarship turn students into clean, conventionally respectable disciplinarians. Banks spoke as a digital griot
If you weren’t present during this address, no post hoc description will be adequate. But the [as yet un-captioned] video offers a glimpse. Watch it if you can. (39 minutes)
“It’s time for us to travel… We need to build deep and long-term intellectual relationships with university libraries and high schools that go beyond the first year comp trip to the library to learn about source use. And we need to keep working hard on that fourth “C” in our title [Communication]. We have to do long-term work to build more on our relationships with communication programs, schools, and departments. Many of our members attend RSA [Rhetorical Society of America] and ACA [American Communication Association], but how can we take those individual relationships that exist and use them to deepen our programmatic relationships?
“What can we do throughout 4Cs and our home departments and programs to build long-term with Hispanic-serving institutions and tribal colleges and HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities]? We need greater connection and collaboration across programs and organizations, because even the most brilliant faculty, even the largest writing and rhetoric programs, even a badass organization like 4Cs cannot do this futuristic work alone…
“To evoke flight, even imagined flight, at a time like this might seem fraudulent given that none of us on the ground is free… I’m asking us to think about freedom in this un-free world because the only freedom we will see, the only freedom we will get, is the freedom we take. And the only way we get free is to get off campus, and walk with and learn from those who are out here working in freedom struggle right now…
“One thing this means in our work is we have to focus less on the rhetorical exemplars, focus less on the ‘successful’ movements. Freedom work is funky rather than refined. It is becoming rather than overcome. It is in process rather than proclaimed.” —Adam Banks [27:22-31:14]
I spoke to Adam a few hours after his speech in a room without stage lighting, with no transparent podium and no cued soundtrack.
He’s 100% real. I sensed no disjunction between what he said in his address and the spirit he carries into his teaching, scholarship, and work in the wider world.
And I find that inspiring. It’s what I’ve wanted for myself for years.
Since my early 20s, I’ve sought a fully-embodied experience of wholeness. I’ve sought it in religion, in scholarship, in relationship, in activism; everywhere I am, it’s the same core mission:
Name: Keisha E. McKenzie
Keyword: integrity
Developmental Stage: intermediate
I entered the technical communication and rhetoric program at Texas Tech in part to understand integrity more: what does it mean to live as a whole person and participate in a complex society when you have little more than the coding languages of words, rules, roles, and norms? What does it mean to use these tools to make sense of the community’s rules or live sensibly in relation to them? How does wholeness work in practice, in the government office, in the provost’s office, and at my desk?
I graduated from my program determined to apply what I’d discovered to the world outside the academy. And I’ve been applying as best as I can as a new micro-business owner, communication services provider and consultant, as a new immigrant building a home in a nation still deeply ambivalent about my kind.
And I’m fueled to move forward now. I’m often affirmed by the exhortations of Toni Morrison. As I read about one of my New York siblings forced into psychiatric treatment by psychiatrists colluding with the NYPD, I also read a brief column from Morrison about the liberating powers of art, writing, and creation.
Creation is a testament to freedom. Appealing to the boundlessness “behind the sky” is reaching toward a world that doesn’t demand an escape hatch or a parachute. Yet here, in this moment, Morrison says, is the artist and the writer, rebelliously undermining the ideas and ideologies that, full-grown, nurture tyrannies of body and mind.
“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” —Toni Morrison, The Nation (March 23, 2015)
Because we live in this world and not in another preferred reality; because we join our ancestors in adopting the stories and rites of freedom even when constrained; because there’s nobody as “badass” as Toni Morrison and she is 84 years old—if we’re gonna go down at all, we’re gonna go down making art and writing books… and the status quo will have to deal.
I’m spending this March bouncing between the two coasts of the US for three projects including a film event, national communication conference, and a non-profit board meeting at the end of the month. This means I’ll be away from home for my birthday, but I’ll also be in the thick of more than 3,100 highly engaged writing, communication, and rhetoric professionals at the 2015 Conference of College Composition and Communication (CCCC) convention in Tampa, FL.
This coming Friday afternoon, Versatile PhD‘s Dr. Paula Chambers and I will talk about the risks and rewards of the alternative academic professional journey and life beyond the traditional tenure track. We’ve been asked to share our respective experiences and dig into the deeper issues of working outside the academy. We’ll also talk with smaller groups of attendees through the day on Thursday and Friday.
Our dialog: Find us in the Tampa Convention Center Ballroom A from 2 p.m.-3:15 p.m. this Friday afternoon.
Our mentoring conversations: On Thursday, find us in the Action Hub, Tampa Convention Center Ballroom B from 10:15 a.m.-1:15 p.m. and 2:30-5:30 p.m. On Friday, find us back in Ballroom B from 10:15 a.m.-1 and 3:30-5 p.m.
Follow along via the conference Twitter hashtag, #4c15, and watch for any scheduling or availability changes with our session’s tag, #altac.
In about four months, I’ll be able to share the details of my Napa trip and the project that I worked on there. I enjoyed a few intense days with several people inclined to the art of open-hearted conversation. It was the applied version of an approach I’ve been encouraging informally and through my writing for a number of years and I can hardly wait to say more.
For now, though, I’m inspired to head back to that area for less work and more rest: it was a welcome reprieve from the Eastern seaboard’s extended winter, and it was beautiful.
Up next: Check in again in about 2 weeks for an abridged version of my presentation at Creating Change in February (with audio if I can wrestle Audacity into submission), and an article on working across faith and secular lines for the common, public good.
![What I've learned... and what's next. [Image: a candle in the dark. Photo credit: Jared Wright.]](https://mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Learning_KM.jpg)
