Grad Life Update

Hey, everyone! I hope things have been well with you. I have been caught up reading and writing, and I realized I hadn’t posted here in almost a month, so here is a life update post, which will hopefully be at least mildly interesting to y’all.

As I have sort of half-mentioned previously, I am currently in Illinois, getting an early start on my PhD work. My topic is still pretty broad, and refining it is the focus of some of my summer work here. I am interested in race, class, and gender in labor history, with a specific focus on Black working class women. I have begun an annotated bibliography of books related to my topic, and will be reading 8 books on the subject to write a literature review before the end of summer. Here’s my booklist:

• Gray, LaGuana. We Just Keep Running the Line: Black Southern Women and the Poultry Processing Industry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014.
• Haley, Sarah. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
• Harris, LaShawn. Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
• Hunter, Tera W. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 2009. 2nd Ed.
• LeFlouria, Talitha. Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
• McDuffie, Erik. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
• Nadasen, Premilla. Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women who Built a Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 2015.

Pretty cool, huh? Well, I think so, anyway. I’ve read 4 of them so far (Hunter, Jones, Haley, and LeFlouria), and I’m quite excited to get into Harris and Gray this week.

my face when I got access to research databases again

To aid me in note-taking and summarizing each book for annotation, I created a four-page book summary worksheet with the most important info to record about each book. (The worksheet is downloadable here, if you’re interested.) These notes and annotations will come in handy in a couple of years when I take my preliminary examinations and craft my dissertation proposal, as long as I keep with my system.

My advisor is super attentive, which is cool, and not the case for everyone in my cohort, so I’m digging that. Been meeting every week to discuss the books read and how they could relate to my future research. Some of the doctoral candidates in my program have also been giving me loads of advice and answering all my questions, which has been amazing. I’m grateful that folks have been so welcoming thus far.

Can I just say: it’s kind of weird and awesome that I can now officially call myself a grad student! It’s early days still, but I’m already so excited and ready to go. Feeling blessed.

In my free time, I’ve been following the World Cup (go Nigeria!), and rooting for all the former colonies, basically. It’s been lots of fun to watch with others and chat with my cohort about the games. While I don’t normally get into sports much—I was always the book nerd, non-sports type that jocks picked on in school—I love the World Cup, and know enough to have a conversation about it. It’s like nerd camouflage…

watching a game in the student union with another member of my cohort

My latest music obsession is Joe Buchanan, a Jewish country music singer. I am Jewish, and I love country music, and I was ridiculously excited to find out about him. His first album is beautiful and amazing, and I’m way into it, and he’s working on a second album now, for which I am suuuuuuper excited.

I have also been listening to Unorthodox, a podcast from Tablet Magazine. It’s really funny, and I’ve really enjoyed that. Also listening to Daf Yomi for Women, as I read through the Talmud, and Your Torah. Basically, hanging about in my room and being super Jew-y in my spare time.

Tomorrow, however, I’ll be venturing out to a protest. Apparently, there’s a particular hotel that ICE agents like to stay in when they come into town here, and we’re going to be protesting outside of it tomorrow morning. I’m no longer in Portland, where folks shut down an ICE office, Occupy-style, so I’m excited to plug in here in my new community.

Not much else to say, for now. Things are going well, even if a bit busy. Hopefully, I can finish up a couple of other drafts I’ve been working on, and post more in the next couple of weeks. I didn’t plan to totally abandon Steemit, I’ve just been hard at work!

Until my next post, take care!

Pictures by me unless otherwise noted. Divider created by javehimself, and used with gratitude.

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