Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom: Activism as Community-Building in Action

Abstract

This essay reflects on the first three years of Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom's work. While we initially perceived our project and corresponding website as a space to develop and circulate pedagogical materials, it has become clear that what we have accomplished since our launch goes far beyond mere content creation. In fact, the community-building portion of our project has become the driving force of our mission. For us, community-buildling is activism in action, as it allows us to change the conditions of academia in real time, by making intentional choices that foster more equitable interactions with one another and with our collaborators. Although the content we publish is, of course, important for ensuring Victorian studies centers questions of race, we view this content as the organic outgrowth of the careful and caring relationships we have been cultivating since our inception, commencing with the four of us and expanding outward to our contributors. Indeed, centering race in scholarship and teaching means little when students and teacher-scholars of color remain cast aside by academic norms, structures, and forms of relation that have been shaped by the increasingly commercialized neoliberal university.

We founded Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (UVC), a peer-reviewed digital humanities project that reimagines how to teach Victorian studies through a positive, race-conscious lens, in a catalyzing moment of activism in 2020.¹ As righteous and rightful outrage surged in response to the murder of George Floyd, the first stages of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and a spike in anti-Asian violence, we came together as four scholars teaching at very different institutions across the United States in a shared desire to take concrete action in the spheres where we felt we had some influence. Confident that our strongest impact would be best effected within the context of our teaching, we began constructing a pedagogy-centered website (undiscipliningvc.org), taking critical inspiration from Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong's “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (2020), which itself built upon Christina Sharpe's call for scholars to “undiscipline” in order to dismantle the inherited racist epistemologies that undergird so many academic structures and fields.²

This essay reflects on the first three years of our project's work. While we initially perceived UVC as a space to develop and circulate pedagogical materials, it has become clear that what we have accomplished since our launch goes far beyond mere content creation. In fact, the community-building portion of our project has become the driving force of our mission. For us, community-building is activism in action, as it allows us to change the conditions of academia in real time, by making intentional choices that foster more equitable interactions with one another and with our collaborators. Although the content we publish is, of course, important for ensuring Victorian studies centers questions of race, we view this content as the organic outgrowth of the careful and caring relationships we have been cultivating since UVC's inception, commencing with the four of us and expanding outward to our contributors.

As we see it, centering race in scholarship and teaching means little when students and teacher-scholars of color remain cast aside by academic norms, structures, and forms of relation that have been shaped by the increasingly commercialized neoliberal university. The following essay thus discusses the theories and frameworks drawn from abolitionist and disability-justice organizing that have informed the strategies and structures we use to support various forms of community-building. Recent conversations in the digital humanities (DH) around race, structural intervention, and access have been foundational for us too. From these sources, we have endeavored to establish practices of radical care, particularly in the way we center vulnerable voices, move toward more reciprocal and compassionate labor conditions, and create an accessible platform for all our users.

Crucially, we do not offer our examples as a definitive program or endpoint but rather as documentation of our own learning and a statement of rededication to the work of transforming how we relate to one another and produce knowledge. By expounding on our methods, we hope to inspire our colleagues, in Victorian studies and beyond, to think critically about their scholarly practices and to consider how we might all break from the typical modes of academic engagement (e.g., journal articles, book publishing, conferences, blind peer review, etc.) and exploitative models of conducting academic business as usual. Moreover, in laying out our political and ethical commitments, we invite our site-users and contributors both to hold us accountable to our stated values and to “freedom dream” with us, to borrow from Robin D. G. Kelley, so we might, together, create the academic community our most vulnerable members so want and need.³

UVC builds from the premise that scholars, individually and collectively, can usher in real change in the academy, starting from the ground up. As the theorists and activists cited in this article continually express, long-standing transformation only becomes possible when we all enter into the mutual work of listening, learning, and experimenting. By honoring and caring for every member in our communities and by engaging in rigorous processes of reflection, scholars can begin constructing a different and more just world where academic work is not draining and destructive but life-sustaining and meaningful. This alternative future depends on collaborative action to vivify what we have only dared to dream and to envision a world that we have yet to realize can be ours.

From Diverse Content to Radical Care

In the early days of establishing UVC, we did not conceive of our project as activism since we were not organizing public demonstrations or providing direct services to vulnerable communities. Certainly, we felt grounded in our conviction that teaching—because of its secondary and implicitly derided place in the academy—must be taken seriously as a critical practice and as an important site for antiracist and anticolonial intervention. At the same time, we were always acutely aware that the scope of our project was limited, aimed at changing how a relatively small group of teacher-scholars selected and engaged with nineteenth-century texts in their classrooms and with their students. What quickly emerged, however, was a clear sense that our aims were not simply about changing what was taught in the Victorian studies classroom around race but also how those in our field relate to one another in undertaking this antiracist and anticolonial work. So, while we saw our project as having an impact on how Victorianists construct curricula and teach students, we likewise came to understand how essential it was to build a community of collaborators that embodied these principles in tackling the shared labor of reimagining our field.

To guide us in these efforts, we recognized the need to frame our project within an ethic and practice of radical care, one that would encompass every element of our work—from publications and public interactions, to how we communicated with contributors via email, to how we designed and developed our site code. We hence drew on the scholarship of Victorianist colleagues such as Talia Schaffer and Travis Chi Wing Lau, who have elegantly and incisively written about the need for structures of care in academia from the perspective of disability studies, alongside its intersections with feminist, queer, and critical race studies. We were also inspired by digital humanists like Kim Gallon, Roopika Risam, Catherine D'Ignazio, and Lauren F. Klein, who have advocated for racial and social justice in DH praxis.⁴ Through these scholars’ insights, we came to see how our models of change and intervention had to focus on meeting the needs of the most vulnerable people in our academic community and audience. This included scholars of color as well as graduate students, contingent faculty, and scholars who are marginalized because of their sexuality, gender identities and expressions, religion, citizenship status, and/or the construction of their bodyminds as outside the norm. It likewise included instructors and faculty teaching outside of research institutions in high schools, community colleges, and regional teaching-oriented universities. Furthermore, it encompassed academics and students in the Global South, who work under material and technological conditions that are quite different from those found in the Global North. Because academia is organized along rigid structural and hemispheric hierarchies that reinforce elitist systems of privilege, race, and power, we knew we had to create spaces where we honored and nurtured one another as whole beings and where we could engage with people who lived and studied outside the Anglo-European framework and networks of circulation. This awareness of just how wide and diverse our circles have been and should be compelled us to make radical care the foundation for all our intellectual efforts.

As we have slowly built and expanded UVC over the last three years, we have become increasingly invested in using abolitionist frameworks—especially in their intersections with racial, social, and disability justice, and with feminist, queer, and trans liberation movements—to guide these practices of radical care. While abolitionist organizing is best known for its specific efforts to dismantle the prison-industrial complex, systems of policing, and the underlying structures of racial capitalism, activists and thinkers at the heart of the movement have long understood these aims to be part of a much larger worldmaking project. As abolitionist geographer and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has stated, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions.”⁵ And though this work requires the large-scale dismantling of violent systems and structures like prisons and policing at a global level, the work simultaneously understands that these visions can only concretely take shape when executed locally and through transformations in our more everyday modes of sharing space with one another. Thus, by focusing on implementing such transformations, every academic can make a difference, as Erin Rose Glass has argued specifically in the context of DH praxis, in the communities where they have influence and impact.⁶ In other words, to exist in communities that have the capacity to eliminate and truly redress harm, which is central to all struggles for liberation and freedom, we must begin building them together, each of us, right now and right where we are.

Additionally, as Qui Alexander asserts, committing to this work means engaging in ongoing processes of rigorous reflection and revision: “Abolitionist praxis is not limited to a one-time event; it is something that is embodied in the everydayness of life; enacted through our relationships to self and others.”⁷ It is about asking and trying to answer difficult questions, even if no specific initiative can successfully answer every question or solve every problem. In this way, UVC is dedicated to continually interrogating and evaluating how our work—namely, our scholarly content, modes of interaction, and digital practices—contributes to the effort to “dismantle systems of oppression, to change cultural practices/logics that perpetuate those systems, and to build the resources and alternative structures to support the type of world in which we want to live.”⁸ As Alexander notes, sustaining a dedication to these processes is challenging within the conservative and disciplining structures of formal education at all levels, but particularly within the neoliberal university whose values are increasingly commercial and money-driven.⁹ Nevertheless, building relationships and solidarities where we can collectively resist these forces is essential if we are to address the root causes of racism, colonial violence, and white supremacy that create so much harm and oppression.

Centering Vulnerable Voices and Needs

To actualize our commitments to radical care and to antiracist and anticolonial praxis, we understood that we had to center the voices of Black, Indigenous, and other teacher-scholars of color. At every stage of our site's development, we have reaffirmed our commitment to building an antiracist and anticolonial community by intentionally elevating the expertise and perspectives of BIPOC scholars—especially those who are contingently employed and vulnerably positioned within the academy and who are rendered even more precarious by inequalities around ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and citizenship status. We strive to enact these principles when creating all the materials we post on our site, both in terms of the contributors we engage and our citational practices. Though we know we still have significant room for improvement, specifically in involving more Black and Indigenous scholars, we believe that our most concrete success in realizing these values took place in the special forum, “Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom: Study, Struggle, and the Critical Work of Teaching,” that was published in the August 2022 issue of Victorian Studies.¹⁰

In recruiting contributors to this forum and leading them through the writing process, UVC was steadfast in its dedication to spotlighting the insights of scholars who often get short shrift in mainstream Victorian studies and the academy more generally. We made an important decision in this regard when we first received the invitation to edit the issue. Instead of centering our own, more structurally- and otherwise-privileged voices, we chose to use the forum as an opportunity to showcase the critical perspectives of teacher-scholars of color who are graduate students, contingent faculty members, professors, and/or other educators employed outside the four-year university system and whose very positionalities have necessitated the reimagining of teaching, mentoring, grading, and/or advising practices. The forum became a platform to distinguish and amplify the voices of our colleagues who have thrived as teacher-scholars despite the challenging and often unacceptable working conditions in which they teach and research. We were grateful to see how the journal, in turn, used the occasion of our forum to affirm its own commitment, on the issue's lead page, to “reckoning with the past practices of our field, which has been dominated, historically, by white scholars.”¹¹

Giving these contributors a platform in one of the flagship journals of our field was a significant moment in its own right because it put them in a position to lead and shape discussions around “undisciplining” our classrooms and building antiracist teaching environments. At the same time, the process of creating the issue and supporting our contributors in their writing and revision was just as—and perhaps even more—important to achieving our goals. By facilitating a workshop and affinity space where these teacher-scholars could convene as Victorianists of color and uphold one another as intellectuals and peers, we created a community where writing peer-reviewed publications was the vehicle for a much broader and transformative encounter. In this space, our authors shared in their experiences of navigating some of the most difficult conditions within higher education. They also started conceiving what a new Victorian studies might look like, one that recognized and took care of its most vulnerable members.

What prevented this experience from being one of tokenizing and temporary inclusion was our understanding, following the work of The Care Collective, that “creating ‘caring communities’ does not mean . . . using people's spare time to plug the caring gaps left wide open by neoliberalism.”¹² Rather, we saw our workshop as offering a moment of reprieve from the typical neoliberal order that governs higher education.¹³ In our time together, “corporate control over increasingly atomized, impoverished, endangered and divided communities” was suspended, however briefly, and we were able to catch a small glimpse of what it meant to operate within “co-operative communities” that are “co-produced” and “that enable us to connect, to deliberate and to debate, to find joy and to flourish, and to support each other's needs amidst the complexities of our mutual dependencies.”¹⁴

Furthermore, it became clear, as we were conceptualizing and organizing the workshop, that we were replicating and formalizing the various kinds of mentorship and support that scholars of color who work in predominantly white fields have frequently built and maintained outside of official channels for their own coping and survival. As activist Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has said of the disability justice movement, “None of [our organizing accomplishments] happened because able-bodied people decided to be nicer to cripples. It happened because disabled queer and trans people of color started organizing, often with femme disabled Black and brown queer people in the lead.”¹⁵ The clarity of these insights allowed us to see that we could not simply wait for others to create and codify these kinds of nurturing and collaborative affinity spaces. We needed to do it, and, more crucially, we had the experiential knowledge within our team to do so.¹⁶ In this respect, the workshop taught us many lessons about what is possible and why it is imperative for us to perpetually ask ourselves whether the most vulnerable people in our community are being centered in our work and whether we are creating spaces where we all feel supported and can thrive.

Antiracist and Anticolonial Collaboration

From the outset, our project has been a collaborative effort, starting with the four of us and growing to include increasing numbers of contributors and, most recently, assistant and associate editors. As a form of knowledge-building that seeks to destabilize central authority, collaboration has been our best approach for envisioning antiracist, anticolonial, and antiableist possibilities for our field. This is particularly true at a time when universities run on the labor of undervalued scholars and contingent faculty who are rendered disposable and when the commercial publishers, on which so much of academic research relies, focus their energies on providing resources to institutions in the Global North and create structural barriers for those in the Global South.

To bridge and disrupt these inequities and erasures, we have been actively seeking to involve more scholars from the Global South in our scholarship, expanding on the ways we have prioritized sustainability, access, and universal design in our website to help ensure that our materials are not only globally oriented but also globally available in, for instance, low-bandwidth or pay-as-you-go digital environments. In doing so, we have worked against the typical image of the individual white Anglo-European scholar surrounded by well-stocked library shelves. Instead, we have found that foregrounding dialogue and coalition-building across cultural and national contexts, especially with scholars in vulnerable positions and/or working in contexts outside the US and UK, is much more conducive to advancing knowledge and imagining new avenues for our field.

This inclusive approach infuses our work down to its most fundamental components. Our content deliberately centers on pedagogy not only because our initial idea was to create such a resource but also because teaching is something all academics do, regardless of their geographic location and whether they work at well-funded R1s or community colleges and regional universities affected by austerity cuts. In our view, those employed at the latter have more to add to conversations about how our field should be engaging students given their heavier teaching loads and experiences with a larger and more diverse student body. Yet these are also the reasons, among many others that often align with existing racial divisions, for why such teacher-scholars are marginalized in Victorian studies.

UVC's focus on pedagogy, therefore, enables us to turn the tables and change what counts as—and, more importantly, is respected as—“rigorous” scholarship in our field. By publishing genres that do not usually get recognized in the academy—such as lesson plans, syllabi, Zoomcasts,¹⁷ and assessments—and by arranging for their peer review, we bring the same kind of intellectual seriousness applied by established academic journals while simultaneously recognizing and celebrating the many places where knowledge is produced and the various forms through which it can be expressed. These new genres of publication provide structurally vulnerable scholars the space and opportunity to release their work in a refereed format that affirms their intellectual standing, framing their contributions as on par with scholars who have the privileges, time, networks, and institutional resources to publish traditional articles and books with mainstream academic journals and presses. Moreover, the genres showcase how the work of our authors within the classroom—perhaps the most foundational and central space of academia—offers some of the most innovative and interdisciplinary insights about how Victorian studies can approach its cultural objects with an increased awareness of and as a critical reflection on race and racism.¹⁸

Likewise, the digital approach of our website reflects these values of equitable inclusion. We work to our means, in the spirit of minimal computing.¹⁹ We run a site that seeks to be sustainable, environmentally friendly, and mindful of what scholars like Cédric Leterme write regarding the “exploitation, domination, and dependence” on which Western digitization practices rely.²⁰ We practice independence and self-empowerment as part of disentangling our work from the racist, colonial, and neoliberal university as much as possible. We have built our site ourselves using the most basic of coding languages, and all our code is documented and citationally referenced, as a way to provide responsible attribution and to promote long-term, collaborative maintenance. We also have designed the site so that it highlights content over form but so that form, too, carries meaning. Our images, for example, display the work of a global array of creators in reflection of our mission, while our theme colors derive from that work, as a way of honoring those creators, of traversing the digital-material divide, and of ensuring that form harmonizes with and reinforces the message of our content. Finally, the site prioritizes “a reduction in energy consumed, storage, and labor,” as Roopika Risam and Alex Gil put it, thanks to its streamlined design and reduced digital footprint. This element additionally makes the site fast to use in low-bandwidth environments, which are usually found outside the West and/or in low-income areas where marginalized students and scholars often live.²¹

Commitment to Transformational Growth and Accountability

Within abolitionist organizing and theorizing, the values of growth, sustainability, and collective learning are central, notably in developing practices around transformational justice. As Mariame Kaba argues, “Transformative justice takes as a starting point the idea that what happens in our interpersonal relationships is mirrored and reinforced by the larger systems.” We take Kaba's assertion to heart and, like her, push our contributors to “think all the time about the interplay between those spheres,” as they create their materials for our website.²² The authors of our syllabi, lesson plans, and assessments, as well as our Zoomcast guests, can all attest to our investment in taking location and positionality seriously as critical points of analysis for developing responsive and responsible pedagogy.

In our minds, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to antiracist and anticolonial pedagogy given the “multiplicity of needs, conflicts, and harms that exist in our individual communities.”²³ This is why we ask our collaborators to ground their materials in the specificities of their teaching contexts to provide various models of transformative pedagogy. Such grounding, we believe, helps the users of our site to adapt these materials to their own contexts by showing how a particular course (e.g., the ubiquitous Victorian or British literature survey) changes when it is taught in different parts of the globe, at different institutions, for different students, by different instructors, and by using different, noncanonical texts. It also contributes to the type of transformative worldmaking that Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl describe, “such as the creation of new, non-Euro-centric geographies and the tentative entanglement of heterogeneous places into networks of reciprocal exchange.”²⁴ The critical reflection that this attention to context requires, moreover, helps our contributors to grow in their own teaching but in ways that are fully supported via a collaborative and communal creation process focused on restoring and inspiring the contributors amidst academia's unrelenting demands. As one of our authors recently told us, “the UVC process took a good idea . . . and helped transform it into something more thoughtful and deliberate.”²⁵ Another shared that working with UVC has been “rewarding and healing,” with our responsive, humane deadlines being called out as particularly noteworthy.²⁶ These comments are encouraging, as they capture our best aspirations for our project while reminding us of what we should be seeking to achieve with all of our collaborators.

A safe and caring academic community “is—and likely will always be—a work in progress,” to quote Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, which means that our goal is less about striving for a fixed and idealized utopia and more about an ongoing commitment to “experimentation and practice.”²⁷ We emphasize experimentation in our support systems because we understand that submitting work is a vulnerable act, particularly when the prospective contributor is a “junior, contingent, early career scholar, or emerging writer,” as Lau acknowledges in his own reflections on editorial care.²⁸ Given that these are the very scholars we aim to cultivate, we, like Lau, have sought from the start of our project to “honor[] the vulnerability of that act of submission” by putting in place a peer-review process that is open and caring by design. In this, we have taken a cue from DH initiatives whose peer-review tenets resonate with our own, including the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, Review in Digital Humanities, and One More Voice.²⁹

While we still value and rely on various forms of academic expertise, our process expressly seeks to break the problematic mold of blind peer review, which, despite its seemingly neutral nature, often perpetuates structures of academic elitism. In our review process, we name everyone involved to give them credit for their labor and to offer them appropriate recognition. Often, we choose reviewers whose research lies outside of Victorian studies given the limited scope of our field. Periodically, we have consulted with our authors to determine who would best be positioned to read their writing. We also invite authors already published on our site to peer-review submissions. Most importantly, everybody understands that the review process is part of a collective endeavor to improve and strengthen our commitments to antiracism and anticolonialism for the radical transformation of our field while recognizing and seeking to ameliorate the structural injustices that same field has created.

In the foregoing ways, our peer-review process becomes a form of scholarly mutual aid, where we can, as Piepzna-Samarasinha states, “dream [of] ways to access care deeply, in a way where we are in control, joyful, building community, loved, giving, and receiving, that doesn't burn anyone out or abuse or underpay anyone in the process.”³⁰ This framework of mutual aid allows us to emphasize collective efforts over individual achievements, deficiencies, or choices. Furthermore, it challenges us to “change material conditions rather than just winning empty declarations of equality,” in scholar-activist Dean Spade's words, where we make strides to “dismantle existing harmful systems,” to “directly provide for people targeted by such systems and institutions,” and to “build an alternative infrastructure through which people can get their needs met.”³¹

In this context, then, when we hold ourselves to high standards,³² it is not about tearing down scholars or preemptively rejecting material that is still tentative and emergent; it is about addressing and redressing harm, equipped with the understanding that the community can only rise when everyone is working together. At the same time, as Kaba reminds us, “Abolition is not about your feelings. It is not about emotional satisfaction. It's about transforming the conditions in which we live, work, and play such that harm . . . cannot develop and cannot be sustained.”³³ Given the challenging nature of all antiracist and anticolonial undertakings, we realize that discomfort and conflict are inevitable. In these moments of tension and even breakdown, it is important for all of us, and especially those with more privilege and power, to commit to being accountable for their actions and for their growth—recognizing here, to again follow Kaba, that no one is “able to actually force anybody into taking accountability” and that “it has to be a voluntary process.”³⁴ In these ways, UVC invests in growth by inviting people into our circle of mutual learners and committing to our own further learning—maintaining a resolute focus on enhancing and deepening critical relationships and of supporting and building solidarity. In this process, we are also mindful of the vital importance of holding firm boundaries and staying true to our guiding values, ethical principles, and vision.

Conclusion

To work in education at all levels at this moment in the twenty-first century means that every educator is inundated with talk of strategic plans—five- and sometimes ten-year projects that outline goals, outcomes, and metrics for success. As should be clear from the ideas and descriptions expressed above, we are resistant to thinking in these corporatized terms, working instead to develop different standards and models for understanding and celebrating our impacts while challenging ourselves to do more. For this reason, we return to Kelley's evocative term “freedom dreams” to gesture to a horizon of justice that we can envision but not exactly map out.³⁵

We know we have come incredibly far in the first three years of our project, with much of the thanks owed to our generous and brilliant contributors. Accordingly, we refuse to limit our imaginations about what is possible for the years ahead. To be sure, we have specific plans and projects in the works: new syllabus clusters, Zoomcast interviews, lesson plans, and assessments. Yet much of what our project will do will emerge in the organic process of collaboration, of moving through challenges with courage and generosity, and of holding ourselves accountable to the highest possible standards. We sense this will not be driven by the four of us but by a much larger collective with whom and from whom we will have the privilege to work and learn. This is far from a passive process of washing our hands and waiting for community to happen. “Hope,” as Kaba reminds us, “is a discipline.”³⁶ Thus, we will continue manifesting our hopes and freedom dreams in all our ways of being, thinking, and creating together. And as you read this, we hope that you feel called to join this communal endeavor to create not only a new Victorian studies but also a more just world, one full of new ways of living and thriving.