University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses 2018 I Look to the Ground Beneath My Feet: An Insurgent Performance (Auto)ethnography Timothy M. L. Sutton University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons Recommended Citation Sutton, Timothy M. L., "I Look to the Ground Beneath My Feet: An Insurgent Performance (Auto)ethnography" (2018). Doctoral Dissertations. 1184. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1184 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. I LOOK TO THE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET: AN INSURGENT PERFORMANCE (AUTO)ETHNOGRAPHY A Dissertation Presented by TIMOTHY MATTHEW LEE SUTTON Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2018 Department of Communication © Copyright by Timothy M. L. Sutton 2018 All Rights Reserved I LOOK TO THE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET: AN INSURGENT PERFORMANCE (AUTO)ETHNOGRAPHY A Dissertation Presented by TIMOTHY MATTHEW LEE SUTTON Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________ Claudio Moreira, Chair ________________________________ Kimberlee Pérez, Member ________________________________ Kysa Nygreen, Member _________________________________ Mari Castañeda, Department Head Department of Communication Caught in my struggle for higher achievement And my search for love That don’t seem to cease “The Same Situation” by Joni Mitchell (1974) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My dissertation project began with an epistemological crisis. In 2011, the state of Arizona passed a law which effectively outlawed the teaching of Mexican American Studies in public K-12 schools. As a result, the wildly successful MAS program in Tucson was shut down. School administrators entered classrooms that were in session in order to box up books (including Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed). I was preparing to work on my prospectus at the time, and began to wonder how I was supposed to ethically engage in a project of knowledge creation when specific knowledge was being denied to specific students in specific places. Roberto (Dr. Cintli) Rodriguez’s blog posts for Truthout.org helped to put what was happening in Arizona into perspective. At the time, he wrote, “If people want to see what erasure or a disappeared curriculum looks like, they can look not to Tucson, but to every K-12 curriculum in the nation. This is not hyperbole” (2012, n.p.). It is the curriculum and pedagogy of Tucson’s Raza Studies program that taught me to begin by looking to the ground beneath my feet. Rodriguez continues: Among those who look on in horror at what is happening in Arizona, many are blinded to the fact that this has already occurred in every state of the union. Arizona was the last holdout. … This alludes to the teaching of the so-called master narrative of history, traditionally taught in US schools as the story of this nation and continent, beginning with the pilgrims or with v Christopher Columbus, an event that set in motion the ideas of providence and manifest destiny - the belief that God had bestowed upon Europeans/ European Americans the right to conquer all of the Americas. … Asking what is at stake in Arizona is not only asking the wrong question, but it is asking it a few centuries too late. (2012, n.p.) Rodriguez’ words continued to percolate as I attended the ninth Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2013. I eagerly anticipated attending a panel organized by Bryant Keith Alexander titled, “The Iconography of the West: Auto/Ethnographic Representations of the West(erns),” but more for the participants than the topic. As I found my seat, I noticed a flyer had been placed on every chair. It was a call to respond to the panelists’ presentations to be published together as a special issue of a journal. Sitting down while reading the call, a light went on. Rodriguez’ blog posts, Bryant’s invitations to critically examine the Western genre, Norman Denzin’s book Searching for Yellowstone, and a brief autoethnographic essay written for Claudio’s seminar where I began by asking, “Why don’t I speak Spanish?” all fell into place, like pieces in a game of Tetris. (Of course nothing is ever so neat, but it seems like that in retrospect.) This was the inspiration for writing “John Wayne in the Irvine Ranch Farmers’ Market.” I submitted the first, rambling version as my prospectus. That was pared down into a conference performance for QI 2014, and once again expanded into my response for Bryant’s third panel of autoethnographic encounters with the West(ern), “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” These essays vi were published in a special issue of the International Review of Qualitative Research (Fall 2015, Vol. 8, No. 3). Chapter 3 of this dissertation is, I think, the final, most complete version of this essay. I gathered much of the information about outlawing the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, Arizona by reporting for a podcast and community radio program called Education Radio.1 We devoted two hour-long programs to the issue which aired on WXOJ in the Northampton, MA area the week of July 1 (part 1) and July 7 (part 2), 2012, six months after the department was dismantled. The podcast has been available online ever since. For this two-part episode titled “Arizona Goddam! The Fight for Raza Studies in Tucson,” We interviewed MAS student activists, as well as Jose Gonzales, who taught American government and history classes from a MAS perspective and Roberto (Dr. Cintli) Rodriguez from the Chicana/o Studies dept. at the University of Arizona. In addition to maestros Gonzales and Rodriguez, I’d like to thank the Education Radio Collective including Barbara Madeloni, Tim Scott, Deborah Keisch, Dani O’Brien, Kate Way, Hannah Mills, and Chris Herland. * * * The International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry deserves to be mentioned as the incubator for quite nearly every word written here. Held annually at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2005, I was 1 Available here: http://education-radio.blogspot.com/2012/07/arizona-goddam- fight-for-raza-studies.html vii uncertain whether to attend in 2015. Resulting from the controversy over UI-UC firing Steven Salaita, some academics responded by boycotting the University. I did ultimately go, but wrote my performance to specifically address the situation. Chapter 4 of this dissertation is a polished version of what I presented at QI 2015 at the University of Illinois, under the title, “What am I doing here? Isn’t there a boycott going on? Or, reflections on academic freedom and decolonizing knowledge production.” Earlier, I performed a trial run at SUNY Albany for their Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies graduate conference, “Decolonization in the 21st Century: Revolutionary perspectives from Latin America and beyond.” * * * Chapter 5, “Heart Murmur” appears in the journal Qualitative Inquiry (2017, Vol. 23, No. 6). I presented a previous version at UMass Amherst on April 2, 2016, under the title, “Between the World and (My)Self: Affecting Performance” as part of Forms of Feeling: Navigating the Affective Turn, the eighth annual interdisciplinary graduate conference sponsored by the UMass Amherst English Graduate Student Organization. I’d like to thank Kimberlee Pérez not only for her thoughtful comments, but also for being one of the few in attendance at that panel. * * * A condensed version of chapter 6, “Avatar, Tar Sands and Dad” was first performed at the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry at the viii University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with the generous assistance of Claudio Moreira, Ayshia Stephenson and Carmen Hernandez-Ojeda. A revised version, closer to this version here, was performed for a graduate seminar on qualitative inquiry taught by Kate Way in the Leadership and Policy Program at UMass Dartmouth’s School of Education. It has also been performed for an undergraduate class titled, “Monsters, Tales and Going to the Dark Side” taught by Robin McLean for the English Department at Clark College in Worchester, MA. My thanks to Kate Way, Robin McLean and the many students who volunteered to read and asked such brilliant questions, and to the anonymous reviewers for their close reading and careful comments which helped to improve this text. I’d like to thank Karen Werner for leading me to the documentary Tipping Point, and for inviting Clayton Thomas-Müller to speak at Goddard College. It was there, while having lunch with the two of you that one of the crucial pieces for “Avatar, Tar Sands and Dad” clicked into place. * * * I want to acknowledge the members of two activist collectives I was a part of before and during this project, Education Radio and Can’t Be Neutral. So much activist work never makes it into dissertation form, but the Education Radio collective was central to my understanding of the politics of neoliberal education reform—and its broader impact on society—far more than any class I took. More importantly, Can’t Be Neutral took that knowledge and put it into action. The work we did building connections across race and class, though not always ix successful, is an example of spiritual activism at its heart. In a world that privileges liberal individualism, building community is a radical act of love. Love, human connection and solidarity are the best antidotes we have to fear, uncertainty and precarity.