Barbecues and Positive Development

Hey everyone. I hope you all are doing well.

It's just past midnight, and I'm sitting here still stuffed from a terrific dinner of pork chops with sliced peaches, plums, and chilies, black beans and rice, corn tortillas, and fresh greens. (Thanks, Dev!) I have to repay the favor sometime with soul food. No worries.

Anyhow, the second week of classes start up tomorrow. The first went by rather smoothly. I definitely enjoy the Social Policy class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For our first week, we read and discussed Jill Quadagno's One Nation, Uninsured in which she details the history of health care reform in this past century. I have been fervently recommending it to my colleagues and friends on Twitter.

She makes a highly convincing argument that health care reform is largely shaped by the configuration of competing interests. The persons most successful at offering and advancing health care reform are highly mobilized and on-call to write letters and contact representatives and officials, present a unified message of resistance (or support), and offer significant amounts of lobbying capital (e.g. money). And if you're not on the FreedomWorks payroll, by all means, stand tall and gang up with your fellow co-workers, union members, or school and community organizations. Although she is rather honest about the power that lobbying firms command compared to "we the people," reform happens when sympathetic groups stop vying so hard for their individual self-interests and start negotiating common desires.

In between book chapters, I visited a couple of meetings of local university clubs. For crying out loud, I need to get out of the department every once in a while, and I just happened to brush across some passionate, fun, and lively students trying to make a small difference. I met with the university's Social Justice League and rubbed shoulders and shared picnic food with the Black Graduate Student Association at a welcome back event. A few days earlier, I attended an open house at the Martin Luther King Cultural Center hosted by the African American Student Association.

Commiserating over the questionable presence of diversity on the campus or pitching ideas about how to reach more students interested in volunteerism and social justice, I felt obliged to introduce myself. Name, school, what I do, the hopes for accomplishment. I'm trying to work on the 30-second meet-and-greet. "Hi, my name is Dee. I am a Ph.D. student in sociology, and I am studying the impact of multicultural organization membership with regard to resilience." Something like that. I kept shaking hands, smiling, and practicing.

It was so rewarding to see a beam of smile in response. Heads would nod; some would press me a bit further. A few would ask questions or dig for a hypothesis. I met one really nice lady named Nura at the AASA. She works for the McNair Scholars program, and she says that she too is interested in understanding how minority students from typically disadvantaged backgrounds muster the courage and diligence to balance home, school, perhaps a job to help with family finances and more while still maintaining solid grades.

You know, it wasn't too long ago that I felt rather frustrated with my department because I found so few opportunities, and even fewer sympathetic or interested ears regarding my substantive interests. While acknowledging that I can still benefit greatly from the methods training I receive here, I also understand that, here, "race" means "Hispanic" and "community" gets as much respect as "culture" does if it's only used to talk about all those bothersome residual sums of squares. Chips over half-moons, indeed.

These good blessings came to me this week and taught me that, yes, there are people out there who care about this project. I have to venture away from the department. I have to go find them, meet them, greet them. It's my job to get out there and shake hands, meet over a cup of coffee, and discuss how our academic worlds come together.

In the name of a former advisor and good friend in career development, "Network or not work."

So far it's working.