Twilight, my feline son, has this cardboard scratcher lounger he absolutely loves. Occasionally, he does this silly goofy thing where he’ll just roll over, tumbling off the damn thing. I’m not sure whether this is as intended or by accident, but either way — the world ain’t so bad when you’re sprawled across a fluffy rug.
A lightning round of life updates: I’m 28 now. I have consumed something like 2.95 of my 3.00 years of PhD candidature, though of course, it will just take one administrative form to secure another six months. I haven’t been to a gym since August-ish last year. I have been working full-time hours whilst receiving a past-time stipend since August-ish last year, too. Most of my travels over the past few years have required early mornings and late night bouts of writing, in order to accommodate others’ leisure plans during the day. And whilst they, as regular folks with regular office jobs, are working, it is getting more difficult for me to sit at a desk without my innards seizing up — hence why it is my coffee table and the floor, beside my cat, that has been my workplace
Everybody and their mama wants to know what I’ve found, in my research. In this section, I will explain why this has been driving me loopy.
Firstly, my the research does not aim to find, but to generate knowledge. Any insights are the result of interpretation, sense-making processes. I am crafting meaning, not simply excavating facts as though they have always existed; fuck ontological realism and your positivist impulses.
Secondly, you ask because you are expecting answers, yet all I have developed is further questions. You’d like me to set out a few strategies that might help policymakers operationalise and/or institutionalise the nebulous concepts of 'intersectionality and practices of “intersectional policymaking” more effectively. What I have been attempting to understand, though, is how you have sought to bring it to life, and why,
why it’s so fucking important that you drop this word into your strategic plans, and run workshops, and treat Kimberlé Crenshaw like a deity, even though:
a) you have suggested that other concepts that you already know and are familiar with (or at least, already have some kind of foothold in policymaking spheres) might suffice (“co-design” perhaps, or “lived experience leadship”), and
b) there are many barriers to “intersectional policymaking” that you simply do not expect or hope or desire to change (the siloisation of the organisational structures that you rely upon, or the conditions of austerity that leave us all under-resourced and cannibalisng each other for scarce funding).
The public sector has been hollowed of any capacity for prefigurative forms of politics, for imagination or ambition, for transformation. What I have found argue is that, despite these strictures, we have looked to institutionalising a very capacious formulation of “intersectionality” as an attempt to position ourselves as imaginative, ambitious, transformative, anyway.
At least, that is what I think I will argue, noting that, thirdly — I am not sure what I have found generated yet. I have not yet had the opportunity to write the significant, theory-inflected, conceptually innovative parts of my thesis yet, because I have folks breathing down my neck and insisting that I fix my too-long sentences and too-long paragraphs first.
Hilarious, isn’t it? Stressing about a thesis submission deadline whilst genocides continue, international rule of law has once again been pilloried, and we’re on the brink of a World War that will be driven by AI-driven military capabilities that have probably been in developed for years, already.
I write my stupid emails and my stupid chapter drafts on this stupid laptop, which rumbles and whirrs as I sweat. Even if peace can be restored, we have been at war with the planet for decades now. We’ve had a muggy summer, bushfires and floods, and I am wondering if there is any pathway towards ecological repair.
