Elliott
I completed my Ph.D. in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University with an emphasis in Political Theory. During this time, I also attended the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis as a student of their two-year Psychoanalytic Studies Program. For my dissertation, I integrated psychoanalytic approaches towards human-environment interaction, and especially the decolonial approach of Frantz Fanon, with debates surrounding the nature and ethics of private property. I am also the co-editor (with Sanaullah Khan) of a volume entitled Globalization, Displacement, and Psychiatry: Global Histories of Trauma, published by Routledge, which explores the production and psychiatric management of traumas from critical, global perspectives.For this volume, I contribute a chapter along with sex and gender theorist Alyson K. Spurgas in which we discuss the iatrogenic production of feminized traumas within psychiatric and sexual therapy settings. With this text, Alyson and I expose how psychological assumptions and therapeutic practices can be complicit with structural patterns of gender-based violence and sexual control. In addition, we discuss the challenges of interdisciplinary psychosocial research and the complexities of psychoanalytic approaches toward human behavior and gender identity, and we speculate about the shape of more liberatory and healing futures.
I have also collaborated extensively with Benjamin Tellie, art educator and curriculum theorist, to bring informed, caring and responsible explorations of racial oppression to classroom pedagogy at both secondary and higher educational levels. My approach towards lectures and discussion is heavily influenced by Fanon's psychotherapeutic ethics, which aims to "consciousnessize" the operations of racism by taking personal feelings, traumas and defenses seriously and responding to them safely.
I have future research projects outlined in the areas of property law, critical legal theory, and TribalCrit. Because my research thus far, as it pertains to colonial patterns of oppression, has centered primarily upon racial dynamics, I hope to continue learning about how coloniality operates uniquely to disprivilege Native communities through erasure and theft and to explore the relations between racism and broader features of settler colonial and anti-Indigenous violence: including as they may overlap or intersect, or as anti-Native racism may take on particular patterns and forms.I am also working on a few smaller studies in psychoanalytic and political theory, as well as a project that applies Fanonian metapsychology to debates within environmental philosophy and speculative realism. In addition, I am currently reading disability studies scholarship to fill a significant gap in my knowledge. I have recently found David Gissen's The Architecture of Disability to be particularly meaningful for developing my understanding in this regard, as it helps me reframe my approach toward the relationship of human bodies to the built environment more generally.
My personal heroes and inspirations include, most prominently, Frantz Fanon (of course), bell hooks, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Ricardo Flores Magón, Ashanti Omowali Alston, Abdullah Öcalan, Subcomandante Marcos, and Eqbal Ahmad.
Elliott
When I had dreams of becoming a musician and composer, back in my undergraduate days, I made music for friends who had dreams of becoming video game designers. The following track is a theme I made for a friend who wanted a song that sounded like a "gnome in the forest." The game was never finalized or released, but from what I remember, it was supposed to be a retro-style game about a jolly gnome mining for ore (or something like that). This was my first attempt at digital music creation, so there are problems with the audio mixing and it is clunky in other ways. But I enjoyed making the music and learning about the process.
The following are songs I made for a video game about zombies. It was supposed to be a plants-vs-zombies-style mobile game, set in motion by a friend of the family, but this one never fully came to life, either. The first track was for the main menu and the second for level one (note the death knell toward the end for players to hurry up...!)
I've had dreams of becoming a performer, as well, first as a jazz saxophonist and then later as a songwriter. While I am now a much better jazz fan than I am a saxophonist, some old clips remain:
My outlet as a musician these days is mostly songwriting with a piano or guitar. Eventually I will record a couple things and post them here.
Elliott
"Always academic, curriculum is also subjective and social. As a verb – currere – curriculum becomes a complicated, e.g. multiply referenced, conversation in which interlocutors are speaking not only among themselves but to those not present, not only to historical figures and unnamed peoples and places they may be studying, but to politicians and parents alive and dead, not to mention to the selves they have been, are in the process of becoming and someday may become. Education requires subjectivity in order for it to speak, for it to become concrete, to become actual. Without the agency of subjectivity education evaporates, replaced by the conformity compelled by scripted curricula and standardized tests." -William Pinar
"Why Currere? For one, we teach our students from pre-K to PhD that the primary purpose of education is not free intellectual pursuit, spiritual growth, or even critical consciousness. We teach them instead that the primary purpose of education is to get a job. If we are not saying it straight out, we are certainly implying it in almost every facet of the way we do school—standardization of knowledge, deintellectualization of teaching and learning, and the normalization of students. In this way, education gets reduced to schooling, and schooling gets reduced to best practices designed to control what and how we know. And without intervention in this process, we can easily become divorced, uninterested, mechanical, or alienated. Currere is an attempt to reclaim education as a journey toward self-understanding or an understanding of self as it is always in relation to other selves and always positioned in the world at a particular historical moment. On this journey, then, we learn not only about ourselves as situated knowers, but also about others and the world around us.Second, even more powerful than the discrete “education” we receive in schools is the curricula hidden and reinforced through other social and cultural institutions and practices that support pedagogies of empire—neoliberalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on. These pedagogies teach us how to be raced and gendered consumers in ways that reinforce their disciplinary powers. Even more worrisome is that this learning is largely subconscious. About 95% of our brain capacity functions at the subconscious level, we are actively receiving and processing thoughts, which ultimately direct most of our actions. The question, then, is how we might become more aware of the dirge of thoughts flowing through our brains and directing our actions. ...Third, there is a powerful assumption that the way to do social justice work is to direct our efforts at or on behalf of the less fortunate, to be the voice of the voiceless, to be advocates for the poor or otherwise disenfranchised, to do for them what we assume they cannot do for themselves. Underlying this assumption is the idea that we should be selfless in our social justice endeavors. This is at best disingenuous and at worst dangerous. The only access we have to advocating with/for others is through the self. And an unexamined self is a dangerous self, because it does harm with no realization of that fact. Currere, I would argue, positions the self to examine the self. Some might consider this problematic, contending that the self cannot be objective about the self. While I would agree, I would also suggest that the point of such examination is not to render objective knowledge; it is to delve into the contours of the subjective in a way that is not possible for the objective researcher to do; to render knowledge and insights inaccessible to the objective researcher, who will undoubtedly offer—not an impartial or more truthful perspective, but simply—another partial perspective. And in fact, it is the dialectical tension between the two perspectives that brings about the troubling questions, which should be the impetus for critical self-examination. At any rate, currere—as a form of critical self-examination—affords us the kind of deep understanding that allows and encourages the self to transcend itself and to connect in more authentic ways with others. So instead of speaking for the voiceless, I work to open pathways such that the voiceless might speak for themselves." -Denise Taliaferro Baszile