00:00:03A.B.: I'll start with introductions. My name is Amy Brainer. I'm associate professor of Women's and Gender Studies and director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
00:00:14R.L.: I am Rashmi Luthra. I was director of Women's Studies from 2002 to 2004. [See the index for annual reviews and a certificate lunch program from those years.] At the time, it was actually called Women's Studies, then later Women's and Gender Studies. Also, I have basically taught at University of Michigan-Dearborn for over 32 years and retired about two years ago. I'm now professor emerita of UM-D and taught in Communication and Women's and Gender Studies.
00:00:59A.B.: You were involved in Women's Studies and later Women's and Gender Studies pretty much the whole time, right?
00:01:07R.L.: That is quite true. The directorship does not represent my involvement. I was involved throughout. It was really one of my important institutional homes at the university.
00:01:27A.B.: I'll ask some questions that are related to being director, but some of the questions will really relate to just your experience in the program generally. Feel free to talk about other years as well. Don't feel confined to the directorship.
00:01:41R.L.: Okay.
00:01:43A.B.: Tell me what you remember about how you became the director of the program. For example, was this a position you volunteered for or were asked to do?
00:01:56R.L.: I was, actually, asked to do it by both Suzanne [Bergeron] and Lora [Lempert]. Do you want me to - when I take any names, should I elaborate?
00:02:16A.B.: You don't need to. We can always add - we're gonna add a little context around the interviews, so we can always do that. This is going into an archive that will include their interviews as well, so we can even link to them.
00:02:34R.L.: Okay, great. I was asked to do it by Lora and Suzanne, and I had the support of many faculty in this. I just felt like it was, sort of, my turn to step up and do it because I had been involved for a long time. It didn't take a lot of convincing, even though - I think I've explained to you that I've sort of had the balancing life for many years. It was first raising the kids, and then afterwards taking care of my parents, so it's been many, many years of caregiving. So whenever I was - and that is why I generally was asked to do things rather than jump up and say that I wanted to do them, because there was always this feeling of like, "Can I balance everything?" I want to make sure I give it my all. If I take something up, I want to take it seriously. It was often in response. In this case, it was also that I was asked. I also felt that it was the right thing to do and also my duty to step up.
00:04:03A.B.: You're not the first person to say something like that about it being your turn or your duty. Could you tell me what you mean by that?
00:04:19R.L.: I think we're small enough at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, that we realize that there's a small pool of people who actually are equipped and the right people for certain positions at certain times. There has been this sense, at least in the past, that if someone were to take up, let's say, the position of directorship of the program, people wanted to make sure that it's taken forward. There's proper stewardship. It's not dropped. Something terrible doesn't happen, or it doesn't fall into the wrong hands where the care isn't taken to keep certain aspects that are the core of it, and also grow other aspects that we had wanted to grow. There was a sense that you were taking something that people cared about. That there weren't enough people to go around to do this, especially with WGST.
00:05:44R.L.: The situation had been that there was nobody who was actually - before Suzanne, there was nobody who had an appointment even part-time. Even a joint appointment in the program. What that meant was that anyone who even taught classes in the program, you had to sort of get the permission of people in your own discipline. It was hard to do. That was a struggle. Then what more if you were going to take an administrative position [in WGST]. You'd have to take time away and effort away from your core discipline. There was often hesitation and sometimes resistance to that at various levels. I think one had to be very clear this really mattered. Again, because of that context, there weren't too many people in the position to be able to do it. Also, the person had to have the heart for it. If that makes sense.
00:06:59A.B.: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it does.
00:07:01R.L.: And so when I was approached, there was this kind of mutual sense that a couple of other people had done the job, but we are looking around. Suzanne needed still the time to come up for tenure. It would be better, a person would be in a stronger position, if they already had tenure and had it for some time. I happened to be in that position. I had a very strong affinity. I had worked with the program in many different ways. It just seemed to be, I think, just a good fit at that time, and I think that's why I was approached.
00:07:59A.B.: You said that it would be a person who had a heart for the program. I'm going to ask you a few questions about your heart for the program. Just starting with, tell me about yourself at that time. What did you specifically bring to the role of director? It could be your academic background, your personal context, or something else.
00:08:30R.L.: I had taught Women - these names of the courses now seem very outdated, but - Women in Cross-Cultural Perspective at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an adjunct for a couple of years, while a grad student, and then after I finished the PhD as an adjunct. I had been pulled in this direction, even if my degree was in communication, for a number of reasons. Because the scholarship I was doing in communication, some of it exposed me to questions of gender, took feminist approaches. It's called feminist scholarship of communication. It just pulled at me in terms of the personal aspect.
00:09:28R.L.: There could be many guesses as to what sort of really attracted me in that direction, but I have to say that there's always something in our personal lives that - I had a sister that I lost when I was quite young, to suicide. That was I think - there were several aspects to that situation that I felt had to do with structure. The possibilities or lack of possibilities for a teenage girl at that particular time in India and so on. That could have been - again, it's kind of hard to put together that biography in particular ways, but that could very well have been an instigating factor. And then reflecting on my life.
00:10:40R.L.: So let me tell you another key moment. In 1983 - this does seem like ancient history, I'm sure, to you. In 1983, when I was still fairly early in my graduate program at UW-Madison, I saw an ad for a project assistantship for a summer institute in Women in Development. It sounded very attractive to me. I decided to work with a professor from - a Brazilian feminist. She had come from Brazil to run the summer institute. I just loved that experience. Not only that, but it opened my eyes to a lot of the possibilities because it brought together my interest in questions of nation with questions of gender and questions of development and so on. It gave me the sense that there are ways that this could be brought together, all of these interests.
00:11:58R.L.: Also, in that institute, I met third world women who were at various academic institutions in the US. We all came together in this institute. I became a member of - actually, I helped to organize it, but I also applied for the institute itself, so it was this double role. I was blown away by the perspectives and the strength and the personalities of the women that I met through the institute. Some of whom have become - at least a couple of them are lifelong friends.
00:12:49R.L.: That then led to something else, which is one of - by the way, and this is just a funny little aside that I want to tell you. Just as I was starting to talk to you, as the time for our Zoom call was nearing, I got a call from precisely one of those people. Who's my lifelong friend from that particular summer institute. There's something going on here, because she just called me. In fact, I had to ignore her call. I will call her right after this. The ties just were very strong.
00:13:28R.L.: Then, it so happened that one of the - in fact, the person who just called me, a really, really amazing feminist in her own right, South Asian feminist, told me about another South Asian feminist who was still a grad student in psychology, so completely different discipline. That she had started this effort, and this newsletter around the effort, called Committee on South Asian Women. It so happened that they needed a place to stay. They were going to come for a conference to Madison. Basically, we just all piled into my little apartment, and had just the most wonderful time together. And I decided that I wanted to be part of that effort. I became then really, really, very involved in the Committee on South Asian Women that had just been formed. Formed a chapter in Madison, contributed to every issue, and so on.
00:14:42R.L.: That was one of a kind, because it was an effort to do networking between South Asian feminists, not only academics at different universities in the US, but also to connect with women activists and movements in South Asia. The thing that was very unique about it was that it was not based just on India, it was very explicitly South Asia focused. It was very important as part of the effort to connect with activists and academics who were from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and so on. Then also very important to connect with academics and activists in not just the US, but also in Canada as well and beyond. We were trying as much as possible. That was a pretty unique and important experience. I did that for many, many years.
00:16:03R.L.: And just recently in fact, speaking about retrospectives, because I think at this point in my life, the cohort, the women that have been sort of doing these important projects over the years, we are all at a stage where now it's about sort of gathering those histories. What's so interesting is that we're doing this, and just a few months ago, I was trying to work with, not the person who just called me, but this other amazing South Asian feminist. We were trying to sort of gather things, and she was going to be giving a talk on the history of that effort. I went back and I did an analysis of all the newsletters to see how - To me it's like there is this confluence, because [you and I] are talking, and [the person who called and I] are gathering this whole retrospective on the Committee on South Asian Women. To come back to your point, and I'm being very long-winded, but it's just to say that my heart had been in this for a very, very long time.
00:17:20R.L.: So I had done that, I had taught the classes at Wisconsin, I had - what am I leaving out? Oh, and then I had done another pretty significant effort that also showed my heart for these questions in this area. That was that I had served - I'm trying to look at my notes to see exactly which year that it was. I had served as the vice chair and then chair of the feminist scholarship division at the International Communication Association. Now, the ICA is one of the flagship organizations in the field of communication. I had been part of the effort to, basically, take what had been an interest group to divisional status. To kind of give it more importance in the organization and to do more programming to make sure we had more panels, and that it was legitimized and so on. I'd been part of that effort.
00:18:34R.L.: Then of course, because I had been part of that effort, and again, interestingly, because of all the other commitments, including family commitments, balancing, there too what happened was a couple of people became vice chair and chair. Then they approached me and said, "Hey." Because it's a similar thing. You've done something important. You initiated this thing you care about. Then people want to make sure that it is carried gently and carried with care. So that it keeps on growing and it keeps its spirit, it keeps its central sort of - the core of it. Because I had been part of that transition, then after a couple of people did it, then of course, they asked me if I would do it. It didn't take much, again because I did have a love for it. So I had already done that. I had done that in the - I'm trying to look at my - I have notes here as to when I did that. I have to look at my CV here again, but it was a few years before that point [becoming director]. It was in the 1990s.
00:20:01A.B.: I'm interested, these values that formed and these communities that you formed and commitments outside University of Michigan-Dearborn, do you feel like you were able to bring some of those values to the University of Michigan-Dearborn Women's Studies program? Were there challenges in doing that? Was there support for that?
00:20:26R.L.: I felt that I could bring a part of myself and part of what I had been doing into the program and into the role. Because there was no other way. It was never going to be, for me, a situation of - it's like Women's and Gender Studies is here, and feminist activism is here, and anti-colonial and anti-imperialism struggle is here in this other team. It just wouldn't happen for me because - and by the way, even before I had done the summer institute, I had been involved in Wisconsin in third world movements. In an academic context, but I had been involved in that as well. You see how there's this trajectory where everything is sort of sitting together. It was just part of who I was. It was part of growing up in different places. It was part of understanding and seeing what imperialism does in different locations, because I had also lived in the Philippines, I had lived in India. But it's not just a question of living in different places, it's a question of becoming very interested in certain questions about those power relationships. From a time that I was fairly - I would say from the time that I started college, really. College also was in different places. It was in India, it was in the Philippines, it was here.
00:22:19R.L.: How much of it could I bring in? I could bring in - I think I could bring in the feminist part of it. But not as much the global and the anti-imperial as I would have liked. But then you have to work with -you have to give care to, and you have to respect the context itself. Because you can't just come in and say, "This is who I've been, this is going to now echo me, or it's going to be in my sort of image." That's just not the way it works, and that's just not who I am also. Because now I'm in a context where there are people before me that care about what's going on here. I'm trying to make certain things, facilitate certain things, but I'm working with people who have their own projects, their own trajectories, their own understandings.
00:23:32R.L.: In that way, Suzanne [Bergeron] and I became so very close because we both understood that intersectionality. Then we tried in our own way to make it a living part of the program by having courses, and especially Suzanne developed a whole lot of courses that centered the global. I brought that in centrally to my teaching of media, Gender and Media Studies. It was central to my teaching of that class. I couldn't really teach too many. I taught Intro to - at that time, I think it was still called Intro to Women's Studies - twice. Once with Katie Anderson-Levitt and once with Suzanne. I loved the experience of team teaching that class. But then, you know, I had to do leadership in my own program and then in the department as well.
00:24:44R.L.: Again, we're small enough that there are so many requirements for your time and your leadership that it's just like, there's not enough of us to go around. That was the limitation. Even, for someone who really loved to teach in this area, it was just the one class that I taught on a regular basis, Gender and Media Studies, that I had developed. Then Intro to Women's Studies twice, not as much as I would have wanted. Because again, the requirements of the core disciplines, the requirements of the department, and so on. I hope that answers how much of what I was concerned about and really cared about - I could bring in a portion of it. Bringing the rest of it was a bit of a struggle. The way I saw it was, you work with what you have. You try to bring out the best of what exists there. You nurture that. You don't come and impose yourself and your vision wholesale from above because that never works anyway. That's just how I proceeded. I tried to find whichever openings there were.
00:26:21A.B.: What about with the students? Tell me a little bit about what the students were like that you worked with, whether it was as director or just in your experience teaching Women's Studies.
00:26:37R.L.: I found the students to be very - I found the struggle with the students to be very authentic and their struggles to be very authentic here at University of Michigan-Dearborn. By that I mean that, I remember coming from teaching at University of Wisconsin-Madison, I think I had certain expectations and ideas, which didn't really fit the situation. I quickly had to learn that - there's so much here, but you have to work with the students. You have to understand, sort of, where they are. Theory speak is not going to work, unless you can bridge, unless you can start with experience, unless you can - in fact, that change that I had to make was actually a very - it made me a better teacher. It made me a better teacher, because I always had to start from the ground up. I always had to think about bridges, like where do you bridge? Where people are, where their experience is with what you're trying to do.
00:27:54R.L.: With the Women's and Gender Studies classes, like with Gender and Media Studies, there were real moments of conflict. They sort of made the classroom come alive. They were hard. I don't want to pretend that it was easy. But I felt like, this is the reason we teach. Because, yeah, there is conflict, but that's because people come from so many different perspectives. They have so many different trajectories and so many different life experiences. They're at different paces and different vantage points and perspectives relative to all the questions that we take up. There are bound to be these moments of confrontation. How you deal with them, it's like you grow, they grow, everybody grows. It's not easy because it does work through your body, through your mind. You have to work through it. You need reserves. You need resources to deal with those things. It does act upon us, our body and our mind too. It makes us grow, but it means you have to put out a lot. It was wonderful. We had those moments.
00:29:16R.L.: And then some of the best moments - and now I'm not talking about conflict, but I'm talking about some of the most rewarding moments, where you felt like there was a community that had been made within a semester - happened also in some of those classes in Gender and Media studies. I, in fact, will never forget this one semester where what I had done in that class was that I had the students do a project at the end of the semester where they could use any modality, any form, to express what essentially- how they would put into action, how they would - well, basically to fill a gap in pop culture or media that they saw. A real gap in terms of the understandings they had gained from the class, and what gap they would personally like to fill. They could team up with others to do this. Then try to enact that in some kind of prototype and present it to the class.
00:30:50R.L.: There's this one semester where it's like we left that semester, those presentations, literally crying because we were all so touched by them. It happened in other semesters too, but that one semester there was something. I don't know what it was. It was a confluence of the people who were there and what they were going through in their own lives, and how they needed to express it and needed to have that camaraderie and have each other sort of say, "Hey, we are here. We want you to take that next step." All of that came together. Literally, every time for every presentation, we would just come away from each session crying. It was one of those things I would just hold it really dear. They would do things like - I remember in that there was - they would do skits. They would do comedy routines. They would do events in class, like a reverse gender reveal party, I remember once. They would just do these really amazing projects. I don't know if I've - again, because I'm just letting this flow, I'm not even going with my notes. I hope -
00:32:30A.B.: No, the flow is what we want. This is great. Can you think of some things that were going on, maybe socially or culturally or politically - it could be during your directorship, but it doesn't have to just be those two years, when you were involved with Women's Studies - that you saw the program respond to, or grow and change in response to?
00:33:07R.L.: Well, I think one of the things that was going on - by the way, Amy, can I come back to the question of some things in the directorship that I also hold dear?
00:33:18A.B.: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
00:33:21R.L.: Because I realize you've gone to a later question, but if you want, I can come back to that, now or later, whenever you want.
00:33:29A.B.: If you're thinking of it now, we can do it now.
00:33:31R.L.: You don't mind?
00:33:32A.B.: No, not at all.
00:33:33R.L.: Okay. I'll make sure to come back to the question you've asked. You had said, were there things expected, unexpected? Were there things where my time aligned with the effort? The things I wanted to do, things I didn't. Let me just start with - let me just say that there were a couple of things that I did, because you asked the question of certain things that you remember that you kind of connected with and you still consider important. I think you might've heard this, that I had to resurrect the advisory board when I became - I had to recreate, I should say, an advisory board when I became director. That advisory board was very - they became very invested in the programming of WILL [Women in Learning and Leadership] because it was just taking off. There was so much excitement in those meetings that they basically all decided that we have to do a women's leadership conference. It then sort of became my job to make it happen.
00:34:53R.L.: Well, it turned out to be, I thought, a pretty powerful event. Now, we did get some critiques that we could have had faculty be more involved, because I think the advisory board sort of took center stage. They kind of put themselves in the front with that one. But in terms of the students and their participation in it, and having something like that on our campus, I thought that it was very unique, because we had kicked off that conference with a Palestinian feminist activist doing an absolutely stunning performance. [Later correction: Laila Farah is a Lebanese activist incorporating Palestinian and Lebanese voices in the performance.] Then we were able to get Grace Lee Boggs, get her to do a keynote. It was one of those moments that we had her on our campus. Then we had these women activists, community leaders, come and do breakout sessions. I felt like we put, I put in a lot of effort. But it felt like we'd done something of note. [See the index for a draft flyer and a final program for this conference.]
00:36:11R.L.: Then the more enduring types of things were creating the structure and the process for Suzanne [Bergeron]'s appointment [in Women's Studies and Social Sciences]. Because there hadn't been a joint appointment. That was a very - I would say, the stakes were high. I remember that getting the - having the understanding of the dean at the time, Katie Anderson-Levitt, was very helpful. We all worked together in creating the structure. Lora Lempert was very much a part of that. Maureen [Linker] also very much. We tried to figure out what to do really so that the WST voice would be not drowned out by Social Sciences. That there was enough power in that situation. And the majority vote on the [promotion and tenure] committee. Because we knew that the value of the research and teaching and so on was not - that it wasn't valued as much as we thought that it should be. It was a high-risk situation in that sense.
00:37:32R.L.: The structure became very important, and we worked carefully to put that together. [See the index for the joint appointment promotion and tenure document that Rashmi and others worked on at this time.] That was also like the first time that that had happened for a joint appointment. A lot of work. I could have done without some of the static involved with those kinds of things, I have to say. I learned about myself that I do not have a confrontational posture. I don't actually. But on the other hand, I am very tenacious. Like if I think something is right, I'm gonna keep at it. But I'll try to find a way to do it without having outright conflict. If it happens, then sure, I'm not gonna let go. You asked, "What did you learn about yourself?" Now I digress. You sound like you want me to come back, so I will.
00:38:28A.B.: Oh, no. [Laughter] I'm sorry if I sound that way. Just for people listening, we don't have our cameras on to keep our sound, so maybe that's creating that feeling. But I was very absorbed in what you were saying, and I was not wishing that you would stop at all. I know you're looking at the questions, and you've realized I'm jumping around and not asking them in order because I'm trying to follow you and make them natural and not cut off your narrative. But I will make sure that we touch on everything you want to say from the questions. If there's something I don't ask you, we can absolutely come back to it. That's why the order is changing, because I'm trying to listen and then base my next question on what you're kind of focused on at the moment. I do a very semi-structured or unstructured interview because everybody's story is going to flow in a different way. I don't want to constantly pull you back to center myself and my questions. [Note from Amy: I shared the interview questions, but prior to Rashmi, no one had looked at them beforehand; reflecting on this interview, I realized that I needed to be aware of people who did and go in order of their notes. Thank you Rashmi for bearing with me through this learning curve!]
00:39:36R.L.: I love it. That's the beauty of your - I can just see you having brought that to all the interviews you've done in your work. I honestly can Amy, I really can see it.
00:39:47A.B.: It's maybe the ethnography style, different from the more formal interview style. But yes, if there are questions that are important to you, I do want to make sure we get to them. You did start talking about things you had learned about yourself. Is that something you would like to keep exploring now, or do you want to wait on that until later?
00:40:10R.L.: What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to talk about one other thing that happened as director. Here, I'm trying to answer the question of, what did you do that you're kind of proud of, that's been sort of enduring? I did talk about two aspects. The [women's leadership] conference, but even more so creating that structure [for joint appointments] for the first time, so that we could [use it for] future appointments. Because we were looking forward at that point. We really were hopeful that we would be able to, and luckily we did, get people like yourself, like Lisa [Martin], coming in, because that was our great hope that we would. That we were creating the joint appointment, the structure, not just for now, but we were trying to do it so that it would work for others that we would hire. Truly it was a difficult process the first time. It was like - [crosstalk] What's that?
00:41:12A.B.: I said I believe that it was difficult.
00:41:16R.L.: It was difficult because there was just a certain amount of resistance. There was just this lack of understanding of the joint appointment and what it meant, and Social Sciences. There were lots of questions along the way about the committee structure because there was vigilance on the Social Sciences side to make sure that they, somehow, did not give up any of their say or their influence or their power. For that reason, it was difficult. It was fraught. But we realized how important it was to try to get it right, because this was going to matter for other appointments. Of course, it was going to matter for Suzanne [Bergeron]. It was so important for us, for posterity but for now also, to do this right. I think that we did manage to make sure that the committee structure was such that there would be a way to really value the work in the three different categories [research, teaching, and service]. That still wouldn't be -
00:42:34A.B.: That's very unique about Women’s and Gender Studies, I'll say, as someone who has experienced it from the side of going through with a Women’s and Gender Studies appointment. Now mentoring someone who doesn't have a Women’s and Gender Studies appointment or joint appointment, and realizing how different the valuing of certain kinds of labor is. I recognize that stemming from the work you all did to set this up.
00:43:03R.L.: Yeah, we did. We just were trying to look forward. I'm glad that you see it this way, because, again, that was our hope. I know a lot of things have changed. I know that the context is now very different. We'll come to that a little later. But that was our hope, that we would keep growing and that we would have appointments that were at least joint in Women's and Gender Studies. That it was important to have a structure where the work could be valued. Thank you for that affirmation, Amy.
00:43:35R.L.: I wanted, also, to say that the third aspect, which sometimes doesn't get, I think, associated with my tenure as director, is that we started on instituting the Women's and Gender Studies major. We very much had started that process. We came up with three different options as proposals. Three different curricular options as part of our proposal, so that we could offer options to the faculty. We had many, many meetings where we represented these proposals to the WS faculty. We had reached the point where the faculty had approved a proposal for the major. Then Maureen [Linker] became director and then took it forward through all the other levels, and then it became a major. That's, I think, somewhat little known. That was also something that we had put a lot of work into.
00:44:40R.L.: Also, seeing WILL doing what it did, and seeing WILL grow was a great joy for me in those years. I was not the driving force at all. Suzanne [Bergeron] was the heart and soul behind that, but wherever I could, I tried to support that, like through the advisory board and in small ways that were needed, like showing up for the students in the lounge when they wanted to meet certain people, or to support their efforts. Really, I was not at all central to that effort, that is Suzanne.
00:45:22R.L.: I have to say, and I know this is going to happen, come somewhere, but one of the greatest joys I had in those years when I was directing, and before and after as well, was the collaboration with Suzanne. I had to say that because it was just such an important part of getting things done, but it was also such a friendship. I feel like that also will endure, because there is - it's just like we almost finished each other's sentences. We used to laugh about that because it was uncanny how our perspectives aligned. In fact, we had to kind of work to differentiate because we were like, we wanted to be sounding boards for each other. We were, I think, good sounding boards for each other too. There was such an affinity for each other's perspectives that we found ourselves thinking each other's thoughts almost. It was almost to a point that was uncanny. If you talk to her about it, she has -
00:46:39A.B.: Oh, I know. I'm expecting that from her too. [Laughter]
00:46:45R.L.: That was one of the great joys that I had, personally, in working on this. I think that was one of the reasons that we were able to put in a whole bunch of initiatives and keep moving forward. Do some very interesting programming, but also start some key initiatives, was because of really aligning and working well together.
00:47:16A.B.: That seems so important to me, friendship. Not just an institutional relationship, but a real friendship, I think, makes a huge difference.
00:47:32R.L.: Yeah. It was a good thing and I really value it. Even looking back, I value it so much. I wanted to make sure to say that. Now, if you would like, Amy, you can take me in whatever direction. [Laughter]
00:47:57A.B.: I had one follow-up question from something you said, which is about laying that precious groundwork for the major. I wonder if you could tell me why it was important to you to have a major? And I will give you this context, that the major feels precarious right now. There are a lot of forces, external and internal to the college, that are sort of challenging the value of our major. And so I feel like it's important to hear from the people who created the major, why that matters?
00:48:43R.L.: Okay. We thought that the major was very important to put in, because, frankly, that's the coin in which this institution speaks. [See the index for the Women's and Gender Studies major proposal.] It was so clear, because that is the coin. If you're going to be asking for [faculty] lines, if you're going to be asking for resources of any kind, you are greatly disadvantaged if you do not have a major. From that practical perspective - if the institution was very open to all different kinds of configurations of programs and centers, that would be one thing. But we had seen that [a major] is the coin, those are the magnets, that's what gathers resources.
00:49:57R.L.: That is sort of the lever of legitimacy. That is the ground in which you attain legitimacy. Then that brings the ability to ask for resources and all kinds of things. It was very clear that that was an important thing to do. It's just knowing the institution and knowing what you have to do. It was for purposes of legitimacy and purposes of garnering the resources that we felt like we deserved because we knew the value of it. We knew how important it was for our students. We knew how important it was just as a point of - well, first of all, because of the world. WGST brings the world into the institution. Brings together community activism, all the questions that are so important to our world, into the institution, bridges those different aspects. We knew all along the value of, of course, that, but it's a question of keeping on persuading everybody else of the value of that.
00:51:34R.L.: It could also be a place, we realized, of interdisciplinarity, which I don't think has ever been fully realized. It's always offered that promise of a place where you could bring together skills and background and interests from different disciplines, and methodologies and philosophies and theoretical groundings. All kinds of things could come together here. And they have up to a point, but we rely on institutional structures to be able to go beyond that point. I don't think that we ever realized that fully. Now, we seem to - even the things that we worked so hard to create seem to be under great threat. That is very troubling. Because it is important at this juncture for you to - I hope I said something that would actually help.
00:52:52A.B.: I think it's helpful, also just encouraging, to talk about your values and the worth of your program when that's maybe not recognized by others, by their metrics.
00:53:06R.L.: I think it is important to talk about the value. But the way in which I stated the value, whether other audiences will latch onto that or not - because that becomes the interesting thing, is that the language we have to use for certain audiences is very specific. We know that how community and activism and research, the academic aspect, how this can be a really generative meeting point between these. That's why it's so important for the institution. But will the audiences that we're speaking to understand that?
00:53:46A.B.: [Laughter] Right. Do you feel like you were successful in making people understand that?
00:53:53R.L.: I think in moments when there's more money, it's more flush, people were more open-minded and willing to listen. I think that we are in this whole austerity logic that is now very much in place. I think people are - I can see people really competing for resources and being much more mean-minded and narrow in their orientations because of that. I think it does depend on that context. I think there's just so much more fighting for crumbs in an austerity context. So I think we were able to do some convincing. We were able to have some kind of hearing because it wasn't as competitive at the time.
00:55:00A.B.: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That makes sense.
00:55:05R.L.: But again, there were limits to how much we were heard. Let me not - We were fighting. There was conflict. All little and big resources. Suzanne [Bergeron] had to fight for having an office. She couldn't have it with faculty in Social Sciences, and she had to be pushed into a different hallway. There were lots of different - and then the lounge and finally getting it. Then other people parking themselves and not leaving the lounge. Then trying to convince them that in fact it belongs to these programs including Women's and Gender Studies. That we can't just reserve it for other programs without permission. Then the fight for the major. Every step for everything, of course, the case had to be made, and it wasn't easy. But I feel like at least because the resources were a little more - it wasn't the austerity logic at that time, so it was a little easier to get a hearing.
00:56:15A.B.: How were you supported as director, and by whom? This could be both practical support and emotional support. You're talking about money, that's absolutely part of this, compensation. You also mentioned friendship. Could be mentoring. Any of those things that supported you as a director.
00:56:49R.L.: Suzanne and I worked to get more resources for the administrative aspect for the directorship and for the WILL directorship than we had before. Compared to what's going on now, it was actually a pretty good situation. We were able to get one - please check this with Suzanne, because I might not be remembering this correctly. In my memory, what I remember is that I had - we would get one release time per semester for the Women's and Gender Studies directorship. And either one per year or one per semester also for the WILL directorship. Please check that with Suzanne. Looking back, it seemed like we were able to do pretty well. Then we had a shared office with AAAS [African and African American Studies].
00:58:07A.B.: That's so nice. I would love for us to have [a shared office with AAAS]. Were you [crosstalk] - oh, go ahead.
00:58:16R.L.: Sorry, students also. I think we had two students shared between them [WGST and AAAS]. Right?
00:58:21A.B.: That's right. When I came in [2014], there were work study students.
00:58:27A.B.: You mentioned this, I think, but just to check, were your home discipline and department supportive of you taking on the role of director of Women’s and Gender Studies?
00:58:45R.L.: I think by that time I had been around long enough and had achieved a certain degree of - let's just say that I had really done a lot of work for Communication. Also, I had really done a lot of service at the department level, college level, and lots of different levels. I think people had seen that I had sort of - I wasn't shirking anything. I had put in a lot of work, and I had just been wherever I needed to be and given a lot of myself. I think because of that there was not - I think that you do garner a certain amount of respect after a number of years. Then you can sort of come to the table and say, "Look, this is for a short term period." Then you also try to make sure that - you have to do the work of making sure that everybody's going to be okay. Again, because we're a small enough place that - because I did care about my Communication colleagues as well. I had to talk to them to make sure that we knew what was going to happen to my classes. How that was going to be taken care of.
01:00:18R.L.: Then at the department level, I had to talk to the chair, explain why this was important and why it was needed also by the program. With all of that in place and talking to everybody involved, I think because it was a short term, not like a forever commitment, it was two years. I made it very clear that it was going to be limited to that. That I was not going to be going beyond that because again - Oh, by the way, you had asked me what I had brought to the position. At UM-D itself, I had put in another major, the Communication major. So I had that institutional knowledge that I brought to the role as well. Because [the length of the commitment] was limited, because I had been around, because I had done a ton of service, I think it was like, okay. Two years was, "Okay, she can do this as long as she comes back to the other stuff."
01:01:23A.B.: Now I want to ask you, because I hear you describing how much you did. You're describing it through this ethic of care that I really resonate with, making sure everyone is okay. But also, it's a lot of labor that you did for Communication and then for Women’s and Gender Studies, and I know that at the same time you had your family responsibilities. What was that balancing like for you? How did you find that balance? Were there ever times that you felt depleted? How did you handle them? How did you protect that time for your family that you needed as well?
01:02:13R.L.: That part was the toughest. That balancing was really hard because I didn't want to shirk any duties. I wanted to give myself where it was needed and where I felt like it could make a difference. At the same time it was very, very clear that relationships - You know that I'm there for you. That kind of thing. I'm here, number one, I'm going to drop things for you, that sense. I wanted [my kids] to know I'm their person, right? Because having seen how it could look when things did not look good, I was also very conscious of that. There was this kind of thing.
01:03:13R.L.: A lot of me was being sort of - I had to show up in a lot of places as fully as I could. As authentically and as fully as I possibly could. It meant that I - there were some health issues because of all that I had to do. I took care of them through, I maintained everything. I tried to make sure that it didn't become - you know, that I was okay. But there were - my stomach has always been, and it takes all the stress. I had a lot of issues with that, where I lost a lot of weight. Things happened along the way. I would try to find the reserves. I think that what I tried to do was almost like to use whatever joy I could eek from one to sustain me in the other, if that makes any sense.
01:04:38A.B.: Mm-hmm, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
01:04:41R.L.: The joy from my kids, to see them develop and to see that they were secure and they felt very loved. To see that. I think I try to extract from that, the joy from the everyday situation there, to take me through any difficulties in the other sphere. Also, the joy of camaraderie and whatever I could extract from that, and the meaningfulness of it - because I knew what I was doing was meaningful, I felt it was meaningful - to sustain me in the daily rigors of bringing up kids. I think that's what I tried to do. I can't say that I was - sometimes there was depletion, physical, sometimes mental, just the strain of it. Feeling like, can I do this? Can I hold it? There are moments where you feel like, oh, is this possible? [Laughter] Is this going to happen or is something going to drop? Like how long can I - ?
01:06:02R.L.: I think part of it, actually Amy, when I did decide that I will just retire a couple of years ago. I have to tell you that sometimes you just keep going, and then you realize afterwards that, "Okay. I need to heal from all this." There was a lot like, maybe I can now allow myself to not be so much and do so much. I want to put the human aspect out there because it's not like I did it all, I did this and everything was fine, always.
01:06:53A.B.: I think it's really valuable to be willing to share that part. Because younger generation leaders are going to be trying to understand how their foremothers accomplished so much. And I think talking about the sacrifice that was part of that is important. Not making it seem like it was just seamless, effortless. It was real effort and sacrifice.
01:07:29R.L.: Yeah, definitely. I think the other way that I did it - actually, Suzanne knows this about me, I also kept my - I think you resonate with this. I also kept my sort of institutional life quite separate from my private life because I just felt like I could give - the space was needed because I was giving so much to each sphere, and I didn't need those to crisscross and create issues.
01:08:02A.B.: Yes. I completely agree. [Laughter]
01:08:05R.L.: That I felt like would be a whole other layer of things. I did not have the wherewithal or the energy to deal with any of that. It was like, "Okay, this is enough. I'm going to try to give myself as much as lovingly as I can here and here." I need to not have what might come of inter-layering these things. I kept these spheres pretty private and separate.
01:08:40A.B.: That's helpful to know.
01:08:42R.L.: These are coping mechanisms. These are things which you do to - if you are going to give yourself so much, then you have to find ways to go through it, literally to go through those journeys.
01:08:58A.B.: Kind of in the same bucket of talking about balance, when you were directing the program or in any type of administrative role, did the amount of time you spent on other things at work change, like on research and writing?
01:09:18R.L.: Yes, for sure, because of a lot of - I did take up a lot of administrative roles, and each time they did affect the research. Specifically with the directorship, the thing was this, that I was about at the time that I wanted to come up for - I knew that during that time, toward the end of it, I would want to come up for a full professorship. But I also knew that [during] those two years, I might not be able to publish as much as I wanted. Going up to that making a bid for full prof, that might be interrupted. That was hard. I thought, "Well, I don't know. I might have to postpone it. I don't know what's going to happen." Then as luck would have it, what happened was, because I had been active in my profession and in ICA, the International Communication Association, which was also labor, right? Because I'd been active there -
01:10:17A.B.: Absolutely. Yeah.
01:10:18R.L.: That was a lot of labor too. I had been active there, so some of the colleagues that had gotten to know my work, they approached, one of them sent my way, this big effort. UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization] was putting together an encyclopedia, and they needed this one theme in the encyclopedia to be on journalism and mass communication. That was equivalent to about two edited collections. When this came my way, I agreed to do the editorship. I'll tell you why. Because I knew that it would be a lot of work directing the program and doing this, but I did not have to create my own new initiative. Because there had been a little lag, and I wanted to get a new project going, but I knew with the directorship, there's no way I could have initiated a new project. Then this fell in my lap. When it came my way, I knew it would be a lot of work, but I'm like, "I'm taking it." [Laughter]
01:11:34A.B.: The timing was right for you.
01:11:36R.L.: That's how that problem got solved. Again, it's like I'm doing this, but I'm editing all these articles, and I'm writing the anchor for the sections, and I'm like okay. But you know you just - We've all done it. But we also have to admit, yes, we've carried a lot. I'm only now realizing. Like learning how to breathe fully again. Literally learning how to breathe fully. I have an incentive spirometer on top of this desk. [Laughter]
01:12:22A.B.: Wow. You're like, "This is not a metaphor."
01:12:28R.L.: [Laughter] No, it's not.
01:12:37A.B.: You had shared a little bit about where some of your support came from as director. Was there support you felt like you needed but didn't get?
01:12:50R.L.: By the way, I did not talk about the emotional support. Really, I come back to, the camaraderie with Suzanne was really important. Really important. Because there was no formal mentoring. None. Everything that we did for the program was seen as plus, plus. It's your problem because you're really in the discipline. You don't expect to get any extra mentorship or anything like that on that side. Like, "Okay, now you deal with it. You decided to do this? It's yours." That's kind of how it was seen. There weren't those kinds of - there was no sense of any formal mentorship. But there was informally, and key to this was working together with Suzanne [Bergeron]. Both of us having these initiatives, working on this, that, and the other, everything together.
01:13:48R.L.: Then some faculty who really felt like they - Lora [Lempert] was pretty instrumental because she had done the directing. I was not right after her, but then I think second after her. She had really done certain things to make it much more visible and put in a lot of initiative. I was kind of looking at her as, I want to make sure that we take it forward from that strength. That was important. She was very much in there making sure - like when we were putting together the tenure structure and all that, she was very much a part of that. Katie [Anderson-Levitt], by chance, because she was dean. I know there's certain areas in which she maybe could have done more. You can talk to Suzanne about this, but when it came to office space and stuff, it didn't turn out to be ideal for Suzanne herself. But as far as resources for the program, I think her being dean was also very helpful. That's how I see it. Then Maureen [Linker] being on the committee when Suzanne was going through the tenure process and understanding everything that was required, understanding everything that it meant, all of those things were very - I felt supported in those ways.
01:15:27R.L.: Let's see, where I didn't - I think it's that kind of - [Pause] Hmm. I think lack of support was more so just like, the institutional structures just weren't there. You had to create everything. That effort that it took, and everything seemed to be an uphill battle, because none of those structures existed. The institution itself was not hospitable, and therefore all of that work had to be done, if that makes sense, in terms of lack of support.
01:16:19A.B.: Yes. We weren't trained in graduate school to create institutional structures at universities, necessarily. [Laughter] I wasn't, anyway.
01:16:29R.L.: Exactly. To do those things from the ground up, there wasn't that expectation. By the way, the Communication major, that's a whole other story. That had been very conflictual, and that was -
01:16:43A.B.: Mmm, yeah, I didn't realize you had created that major as well.
01:16:47R.L.: That was before tenure, so quite interesting. [Laughter]
01:16:53A.B.: Someone needs to interview you all about that. Do you want to say anything about that here, about doing that before tenure and what that meant?
01:17:04R.L.: Talking about feeling personally precarious and not feeling like anyone really had your back. That was another situation altogether. I can't even think how I did it in those years, because it was tough at every level, emotionally, physically. That was the kind of situation where if you did not have tenacity, there is no way. Fighting everybody all at once, internally, externally. But the chair at the time - so there was - I had some support, but it was like a blessing to go ahead and at least try to attempt this. But there were so many obstacles along way. At the college level, other disciplines, my own discipline because mostly they were lecturers, and there was such a resistance to any kind of change. Yes, how do I break this down for you? It was probably one of the most difficult things that I have done, is to have to fight all those fights when you felt like you might not have your job anymore. Yeah, I think I'm gonna leave it at that. [Laughter] That would be a book.
01:19:05A.B.: Yeah, it sounds like a book. [Laughter] It sounds like a book, and maybe one day it will be. [Laughter] You know, this is part of the Inclusive History Project, and the mandate of that - I won't speak for the whole program, but as I understood it, or why I decided to do this project as part of that larger project, is that it was a critical look back at the university's history to see who was and wasn't included in different periods. But then also how people created the inclusion when it didn't exist. Thinking about, like you said, the inhospitality of the university, and the obstacles, and you said resistance to change was one obstacle.
01:20:08R.L.: Huge resistance to change. I found that both times [with the Communication major and WGST major]. Both times actually.
01:20:16A.B.: Again, recognizing it as a book and not one interview, I won't ask you to say too much, but - what is your sense of where some of those obstacles might have come from? What was it that the university was resistant to? Change is one. What else?
01:20:46R.L.: Change is definitely one. I do think that the university, when it was first put into place was - again, I don't know the entire history, but my sense is it was a smaller cohort of faculty that had been able to craft what they wanted. At the time it was very - I think probably mostly White men at the time, at the beginning. I think there was a real sense of ownership of everything that they had done. Because they had a lot of leeway to shape it as they wished in the beginning. I think that once having shaped it like that, there was a reluctance to admit different areas, even ways of being, ways of thinking. I don't have any proof to say that it was like - Okay, but I have to say that I felt this sense from the time that I came here, that somehow the place had to be kind of like - not only was it resistant to change, but we had to work to not only take it into the future, but bring it into the present.
01:22:31A.B.: Yes. [Laughter]
01:22:34R.L.: That was always very daunting because coming from UW Madison [to] here, I just felt like, wait a minute. There seemed to be a little bit of a time warp. It was like this little bit of a time warp situation. Although of course, there were some very, very interesting and productive things about being in this location, which I have learned so much from. But that is because of the students and because of our communities and all of that, the communities that we have.
01:23:15R.L.: But as far as the institution, it's like somehow there always had to be this work not only to take it to the future, but really bring it to the present. Like, where are we? Why are we still doing things in a certain way? Why haven't we recognized that Communication is a legitimate discipline? That was my first battle, right? That it actually exists as a bona fide legitimate academic area. I feel like every single time there has had to be this effort to say, you know this exists. This is not an outlier. This is actually already recognized legitimately nationally and internationally. Why is it that even this degree of persuasion has to be done to communicate that this thing is a bona fide thing, that it is legitimate? Seemed like an outsized amount of effort had to be put into something that - where you should have been met halfway, because if you could only see the rest of the world, then you could see the national academic picture. Then you would realize that, look, we're lagging behind. Why does there have to be so much effort just to bring us to the present? I don't know. I don't know if any of this resonates.
01:24:45A.B.: It all does. So I am going to jump to this question, and I will go back because there are important questions before it, but it feels fitting here. What are some things you learned about the college or university as a result of this work?
01:25:05R.L.: Well, we have been talking about how - the resistance to change we just talked about, right? I did learn that there is a lot of this resistance. What else I learned was that we have a rather unusual categorization and grouping of things. Some of this seemed a little bit somewhat arbitrary. Over time as I was working on all of these things, it's like, why is it that certain disciplines belong with other disciplines in what is called this department? Some disciplines sort of being jammed together. They don't necessarily belong together in departments at other institutions, many other institutions. What that does, I had to keep learning. Like, how do you work with that? What does it mean? How did we arrive at this structure?
01:26:31R.L.: Because what happens in that kind of situation, is it always seemed to me that whenever we did anything, there was a little bit something like, we kept on having to reinvent the wheel from the ground up. Because are we going to - Now the creation of this College Wide [Programs] space. And then that becomes threatened. It's continually threatened. Then are we going to put something in that basket, or are we going to put it in this basket in terms of here, in this department? What really is the - I was never really convinced as to how did we arrive at this and what was really the rationale [laughter] of some of these things.
01:27:13A.B.: That's a good question.
01:27:16R.L.: Because it was so unusual. What kind of ripple effects has that had, including the ripple effects on all of us? Is that partly also what we've had to struggle with? Maybe it does create openings because it's so unusual. There might have been good things about it, but also there might have been difficulties presented with that because there are different salary structures in different departments, and different - And so how does something - On some campuses, Communication is in Social Sciences. Over here, it was in Humanities, just to give you an example. WGST, it's like, where did it actually belong? You have this thing called College Wide Programs. Never very well defined, and never very well protected. That created a lot of its own difficulties. I learned over time that what seemed like arbitrariness perhaps created certain openings, but I think it created lots of problems as well.
01:28:38R.L.: What else did I learn about the institution? I learned that we weren’t - [Pause] We have tried for a long time. I learned that there was sort of this identity crisis. Like, who are we really? There was this attempt to recreate ourselves as a metropolitan university. That was also a very checkered effort. It took hold in certain ways and did not in other ways. This kind of constant struggle of, we're part of University of Michigan, but we are a thing unto ourselves. But what really are we? Is something that I kept seeing over the years, over and over again. I think those kinds of things, of course, are bound to have ripple effects on things you do with programs and administration and everything. It's another thing that I learned.
01:30:06R.L.: I also learned that we keep saying that we are responsive to communities, that we are part of our communities, that we don't have this kind of wall, and that we want to be part of the metropolitan. It's an aspiration and that's fine enough, but I also saw lots of disconnects in those areas. I continued to see that there were disconnects in terms of our student populations, in terms of our real immersion with the communities, with our responsiveness to things that were going on. The amount of effort that I had to make as chair of Language, Culture, and Communication to retain and facilitate tenure for faculty members who are teaching Arabic, and have an Arabic Studies minor, and so on. And then CAAS [the Center for Arab American Studies] has answered some of that call. But it's just been again, it's like, there's this promise that we would do this, but there's always this - I just feel like there's a disconnect. There's always been somewhat of a disconnect too. That is another whole other story. Again, I don't know how much of this rings true for you. I think it's a good aspiration, but I'm not sure that we [laughter] - it keeps sort of falling short.
01:32:04A.B.: This is very related to what you've been discussing. What are some things you learned about Women's Studies or later Women's and Gender Studies as a result of this work? That could be the program here at UM-Dearborn, or it could be the field of women's and gender studies.
01:32:27R.L.: What did I learn about women's and gender studies? Okay. [Pause] Well, I learned that by default, it tends to be very US focused. That if you don't keep working at it, that really is the default position. [Pause] As a whole, I learned that it is potentially a very dynamic field, and that it's willing to attend to its internal contradictions, and that that is where the greatest hope lies. That it continue to be dynamic and attend to its own internal contradictions, especially in the question of intersectionality. For example, I think that what's happening right now with the whole question of Palestinian rights is very relevant in holding up a mirror to ourselves. When we look back, I think we can look at that trajectory where we can get caught up in questions of the domestic, and when I say domestic, I mean US, which are very important struggles. I'm not saying that they're not. They're very important struggles. But I think that what we are learning more and more today - again, this opportunity is presenting itself - is that if we do not see the linkages between these different struggles, we're going to be blinkered.
01:34:37R.L.: The women's and gender studies programs will only have relevance, continue to have relevance, if these kinds of struggles are interlinked. I think we're seeing that opportunity again, and we're seeing that this is a juncture where things could go in one direction or the other in terms of what we mean, what we mean to do, what we want our programs to represent. I just hearken to that. In the past that was felt too, because when I did make certain efforts in that direction on campus with Palestinian rights, it's like, I didn't really expect to garner the support of the program because again, the situation is always so precarious that you don't want to put people in a difficult position. You take these kinds of positions individually, but you don't want to strain others because they might feel that they're at risk. I don't know. I'm ending at a very open-ended note. If you want to bring it to something a little more specific - and Amy, I tend to be somewhat abstract. [Laughter] So if you're getting frustrated with that, please pull me to the specific, because I tend to do that.
01:36:30A.B.: I will. No, I'm not frustrated, but thank you for knowing that, and letting me know. This feels like a good place to ask how you've seen the program grow and change, if at all. Maybe to be specific, we could talk about in response to Palestinian freedom. Have you seen the program grow and change in that regard?
01:36:58R.L.: Well now I have not been there in the recent few years, and it would be very interesting to see what actually is happening. In the times that I was there, it felt a bit lonely. I didn't really see the openings to make those linkages or to have any academically based activism in that direction, because whenever any attempt was made, even in small groups of people or individually, there was just so much pushback. There was so much threat, actually. It's not just pushback. In this area, there's actual threat.
01:37:42A.B.: Yes. Yeah. Where were the threats coming from? Were they coming from your colleagues within Women's and Gender Studies and/or outside Women's and Gender Studies?
01:37:54R.L.: Not within Women's and Gender Studies. At that point, I wasn't directing. This was much later, and it was more so from the dean's office up. And on up, up all the way to the regents. When you realize that, you're like, why are you going to get other people into that soup? You have to be responsible. You've cared for people, then you're not going to pull them or ask of them something that could threaten themselves and their careers, right? Because see, that then becomes a sacrifice for you to make. You're not entitled to have other people make that sacrifice. It's just one of those things. It's an ethical struggle. It's a struggle about ethics, what is right to do, what is not right to do.
01:39:18A.B.: What are some things you learned about yourself as a result of this work?
01:39:29R.L.: I think I was hinting at that before. I learned that I really enjoy it - my best moments are when I can facilitate the coming together of people to create these moments of joyous spirit. Where we feel like we are doing something that matters together, and creating something that matters together that is much larger than ourselves. That is the thing that gives me the greatest satisfaction, if I can facilitate that. Also, I learned that I just love to see other people succeed. Those are my most precious moments. If I could mentor people to see their aspirations come true, to facilitate their pathways, then that gave me a lot of satisfaction. So that I did learn. [See the index for one example of how Rashmi celebrated others - the Composing a Life series that she launched to honor retiring faculty. The series continued for many years.]
01:40:45R.L.: I also learned that I am conflict avoidant. I kind of shy away from that, so I do not have - and sometimes being in these positions does take confrontation, but I would always try to find a different way because that's just not who I am. It kind of gets me right in the gut. It just doesn't feel right. It just tears through me emotionally and physically. So I tried - but as I said, it's this combination, though, if I feel something is the right thing to do, I also discovered that I have a lot of tenacity. Like, I won't let go. If I think that something's truly important, if I'm convinced of it, I will work with others to make it happen. I'll find a way.
01:41:45R.L.: Again, please don't take this in the sense of - I don't want any kind of self-glorification here because that's not what I'm trying to do. I honestly am not because that to me is antithetical to who I am. All I'm trying to say is, what did I discover? I discovered that I don't like conflict. I try to find a different way. But then how do I get things done? How did I put in these programs? How did I do these things? Because if I feel like something is worth doing, then I try to come at it from many different directions until I can make it happen. I don't let it go.
01:42:28A.B.: You're starting to answer it, but I was wondering - because how you described how you feel about conflict, I think I feel that way too. [Laughter] What alternative ways did you find? Because I think for those of us who feel that way, we would like to find alternative ways as well.
01:42:54R.L.: Okay. I think one of the ways is that if you can find even one or two good allies in a situation, then what you can do is you can work with them to try to figure out your way through this without - Okay, I'm trying to think really, how did I - ? So understanding who I could count upon was an important part of it. And using that as openings to maybe help convince others.
01:43:35R.L.: But also, I think that it was one of those things where, showing up at every opportunity to make the case, and to present whatever material you could. I think people just get to learn when you keep showing up and making the case. Even without hitting anybody over the head, or without just ramming things through that this person doesn't [laughter] - that they really mean it, that this is really important and for these reasons. I think part of it - it's the doing of it that just creates those openings. They see the sincerity. People see the importance and the sincerity if you yourself see it, and you keep showing up at every opportunity in every way, and in different venues and veins. Meaning you use different modalities, you talk to people in different kinds of fora, some private, some public.
01:45:08R.L.: Well, okay, let me just give you a very concrete example. This goes back to - I'm going to talk about the Communication program for a second, just to give you an example of how I learned this about myself and the ways that I found. There was so much resistance to the program that finally what happened was that the provost at the time said that, "Yeah, okay, we can make this happen, but we're going to have to do it in alliance with, or we're going to have to make an articulation agreement with Henry Ford." And it was a community college at that time. It wasn't a college. That presented an opening. It was like a wedge. It was like a possibility. That was a lot of work doing an articulation agreement. [Laughter] It was a lot of work, Amy. But that was the opening I saw.
01:46:17R.L.: You see what I'm saying is, because as a junior faculty member without tenure, how was I going to get people to do this thing? How was this going to happen? How many allies did I have at that point? When that opening presented itself, I'm like, "You know what? Maybe not now, but later there can be a major. Right now, there's going to be an articulation agreement." It was just coming at it from any direction that you could, honestly. It was using any opening that you had, basically. That was one example.
01:46:56R.L.: Then with Women's and Gender Studies, it was a little different because I had, you know - for certain things, there was backing from the affiliate faculty. Of course, Suzanne was there. As I said, the dean was very sympathetic. Lora was there, Maureen was there. There were people that I could count on to make the case and so on, but it was also - like, for example, with the major. We went with one version, we got critiques, we went back with another version. This is just with the WST faculty. Then we came back with lots of critiques, and we went back with another version. It's just keeping at it until you come to the level where people - you're bringing them along. If you bring them along enough then there's not going to be that much resistance. That's one way, but all of it is just work, work, work. I don't know if I've said any kind of magic wand, like how do you get around it? How do you -
01:48:01A.B.: If there was a magic wand, someone would've already capitalized [on] it and sold it to us.
01:48:07R.L.: That's exactly - there just isn't.
01:48:09A.B.: But this is helpful. It is helpful to think about strategy and taking small steps in the direction you want to go as a meaningful act.
01:48:25R.L.: Knowing that you're not where you want to be.
01:48:27A.B.: Right, yeah.
01:48:32R.L.: I know I'm doing a lot of sighing, because as I'm thinking back on this, I'm like, I'm getting tired just thinking about it. [Laughter]
01:48:44A.B.: Well, let me give you a question that will bring you some joy.
01:48:50R.L.: Oh, you're fine to ask me anything. [Laughter]
01:48:55A.B.: Let me give you this question though. What memories of Women's and Gender Studies do you cherish?
01:49:05R.L.: Oh, I think I'm repeating myself here. Some of the moments in the class. That was so lovely, where we cried, where we laughed together, where it made a difference to us. Where we were not even different. We were all doing it, the students and teacher. It didn't matter who was a student, who was a teacher, because we were all so touched. Those moments are just so precious.
01:49:31R.L.: And then there are moments where - like in the conference, for example, when Laila Farah did her thing. Moments like that, where it's such a breath of fresh air. Nobody had done that on this campus. That goes back to conviction that I had way back when, that these rights are tied to each other, and to bring a Palestinian [allied] feminist activist, knowing that this campus is not always hospitable. Doing that and then getting complaints. Afterwards some students going to the chancellor saying, "How come there was a Palestinian [allied] feminist activist doing this thing on our campus?" Well, but it was a highlight in my mind because I had the courage. I had the courage to do something that I knew might not sit well at all. But the students were just mesmerized. They went up and they talked to her, and they said, "Nobody gets us. You get us," especially the Lebanese students. It was such a moment of light and joy because she just made everything come alive with the performance.
01:50:53R.L.: Moments like that, moments when we - moments of working with Suzanne, honestly. We'd just have to sit with each other, and we'd hold our heads in our hands, and we would cry, we would laugh, we would just be ready to give it up, you know? But then we'd have to come back with more reserves, and we'd have to make strategy. Those moments of strategy would make us laugh, because we'd know what we were up against. We'd know the people that we were working with, and we'd know what we were dealing with, but we would always be like - come at it a different way. Come at it another way. Figure it out. It would bring up so much humor. I'm sure you've had these hallway conversations with her where it can get pretty funny. It can get pretty intense, but it can get pretty funny.
01:51:41A.B.: Yeah, the humor is essential.
01:51:44R.L.: It was essential. Those moments of strategizing and how funny they got sometimes because we knew the field. Meaning the field ahead of us. By field here, I mean the ground that we were working with, the space. We knew it, we knew some of the chess pieces. As we would try to work with it, as we would try to move them around, it was sometimes really funny. [Laughter] Those moments are just moments that I would always cherish. Then the mentoring, and then you coming in, Amy. That was a big - it was really a high moment. It was an amazing moment in my trajectory here too. The search committee, your being one of the candidates, and I was really quite sure. Then your accepting, your coming here, and my having the opportunity to have a small part in that, your life here.
01:52:59A.B.: Absolutely. Not a small part. An important part, for me.
01:53:07R.L.: Then of course, I always knew that you also had Suzanne. That made a big difference to me. I knew it also when I was leaving, and that made a very big difference to me. The thing is that that was also a real highlight because I knew what you were bringing to the campus. Those kinds of moments, the mentoring moments, the moments of being able to bring people in that could go beyond what we had done to bring new vision, to bring that dynamism of the field to us here, to keep it dynamic. Because we had gotten our degrees way back when, we were trying to keep up with everything, but there's nothing like someone immersed in graduate programs and bringing in that dynamism, right? Those are real highlights. I am trying to think. Every time someone got tenure that I cared about, those were huge moments. It's like, wow. Like, I get to have them here. Those were very, very high points. What else do I - there is a lot to cherish, too.
01:54:41R.L.: I think the feeling of struggle, the feeling of working at the margins. There is a joy in that. It's very hard. It seems like a bit of a paradox because you know, it's very difficult, it makes it very tough. There are very difficult moments. But there's some kind of joy in that because we're in it together. And we know - there's a feeling of kind of - and I hate to use army metaphors, militaristic metaphors, but I'm about to use one. There's this feeling of being in the trenches. Give me another one, Amy. I don't wanna have to -
01:55:21A.B.: [Laughter] Okay, let me think on that. Yeah, yeah. I hear what you're saying. What advice would you give to a director of Women's and Gender Studies today?
01:55:40R.L.: This part I actually had to write down because I was like, [laughter] oh my gosh. This one, I wrote this morning because I wasn't able to come up with it the other day. I said, I'm going to come back to this question. The honest answer is, it's hard to give real advice because things have changed so much. Because it's a different context. I really thought about the austerity logic and how much it's affected things. This is what I wrote. I said, "The austerity logic has become central, and I'm not sure I can advise chairs well on how exactly to push back on that. We've always had to keep making the case for WGST, but I think both the internal and external context have changed enough that any advice would not be responsive to the actual situation." Because you know what's happening nationally right now. And you know what's happening with this austerity logic in the college much better than I do. For me to pretend that I know this terrain now, it would just be disingenuous. It just wouldn't be right. All I could do is go back to those lessons of, if you find something is really important to think that that institution building is actually gonna make a big difference - well, building is a big word in these days when they're cutting everything. I don't even know if you talk of building anymore, or you just talk of not cutting.
01:57:27A.B.: Of surviving, yeah.
01:57:29R.L.: Of surviving, right? This is what I mean, because I am not in that struggle right now. It would be pretentious to say, "Hey, this is what you can do." I really don't know. All I know is that having people you can trust, at least one or two, that you can trust through anything and everything, a friendship, an alliance. That there's no substitute for that. That at any time in the past or now, that will be key. I would say coming at things from different directions, if you think that that particular thing is important enough to save - I'm not gonna say build, I'm gonna say save - then you just hold on. You try one thing, you try another thing. You come at it from one direction. You come at it from as many directions as you need to, and you take small steps, you're not there yet, you make do with compromises, but you keep at it until you are able to save the thing you want to save. Maybe while you save, you can also do some surreptitious building.
01:59:01A.B.: [Laughter] I like it.
01:59:03R.L.: Right? Guerrilla work. Especially in times of austerity, really, guerrilla work is probably the only thing you really can do. Rather than frontal attacks, it's guerrilla work, because wherever you have any strengths, wherever you have any possibilities, any openings, that's probably the only - See, again, when I was thinking about this this morning, and I talked about this before, but for some reason, the question of what I would tell a director brought on the question of, in terms of the larger context I write here this morning, I think if anything, it's become clearer than ever that the struggles are linked. For example, the struggle to uphold Palestinian rights is intimately linked to the struggle to defend democracy in the US. That in turn is intimately linked to women's and transgender rights. The only thing I can offer is to make use of this opening to see that the program reflects these linkages at a deep level. That would be my only other wish. My only other advice is to just keep making sure that we keep those linkages, that we try to have them reflected in our program so that we don't go off and do our little thing. And as a result, become complicit and much worse. We are all complicit. As a person that I was talking to yesterday before I saw you - and I loved seeing you yesterday [at a preliminary hearing for seven University of Michigan pro-Palestinian protestors]. But there was this woman from the Unitarian Church of all things, and she was just lovely. She's 80 years old. Chatting with her before we went in. She says - where was I going with this? We were just saying, hmm -
02:01:09A.B.: The way things are linked, we don't want to be doing our own little thing and -
02:01:16R.L.: End up doing much worse -
02:01:18A.B.: - end up being complicit. Then you said, we're all -
02:01:21R.L.: Complicit. That was the conversation yesterday. Just the recognition. We were both talking about that, and I was telling her some of my own worries about being complicit, and she's like, "Forget that now. We're deep. We're all so complicit. That's not the question. The question is what you can do despite the fact that you're complicit." I think there has to be that acknowledgement. We can't wish for any pure space, there's no way. But we hope. Well, what we can do. But just not to have blinders to that. I'm not gonna have any big flourish. [Laughter] If you want me to have a flourish, I'll try, but I don't know -
02:02:10A.B.: No, that was flourishy. [Laughter] It was flourishy. I was going to ask you one follow up question about it, which is, what are some things you have found to do? In spite of being complicit, what are some ways that you have found to be in alignment with your own values while a genocide is happening?
02:02:41R.L.: What I have tried to do, I was going to the [UM Ann Arbor Gaza Solidarity] encampment to support the students. It's interesting because why didn't I go to Dearborn? In fact, I asked some of the Dearborn faculty that showed up there on occasion one time when I was there, and I asked like, "What are our students doing?" Because I was retired already. I didn't have a good sense of that. But I understood it's a completely different position for our students. I still would love to have those conversations. But because the activism was happening in Ann Arbor, so I was pulled in that direction. Because I just needed - because it got to the point where I just needed to be with people who were doing something because I was just feeling so overwhelmed with the tragedy of it all.
02:03:44R.L.: Then I showed up at the - I would go to the encampment every once in a while. I was not a regular part of it, but I would go, I would show camaraderie, I would do some of the things that needed to be done at the library they had set up and so on. Then I have also done petitioning. I have gone to court, as you saw me, I've done that a few times. I have gone to some of the gatherings that TAHRIR Coalition has had, again in Ann Arbor, where they've talked about the repression that's occurring and what to do to support. Then also what I can contribute. There's the funding question too, what I can contribute monetarily, especially with what was happening in Gaza. Again, one has to be sensitive to that. I don't know how much we want to include, because these days we are being targeted so much. I'm retired, so I'm probably just fine. People are being deported, all kinds of things. I'm fine because I am a citizen now, but what I'm saying is that -
02:05:10A.B.: There are real risks.
02:05:12R.L.: But there are. I think for me, it's fine whatever you decide to put in. For others, one would have to be careful because there are so many risks involved today. I'm doing it through those different means. Funding, if I can do that. Showing up for certain things, doing online petitioning and et cetera, et cetera. In fact, I keep thinking what else I can do because the writing is important too. I’ve not done enough of that, Amy. I'm trying to think of those kinds of things too now.
02:06:06A.B.: I'm looking at the last three questions. I know that you've written out some answers to some, so I'll ask you these, but then I'll also give you a chance to look back and see if there's anything we didn't cover. What do you hope changes, if anything, for future directors?
02:06:30R.L.: What I hope for is less precarity. A kind of a sense that there is a bedrock commitment to this area, that it's not like peripheral and to be dispensed with whenever it suits the administration at different levels. A kind of a bedrock commitment that would be steady that the director can count on. This is very wishful thinking, I think. But you did ask what I wish for.
02:07:18A.B.: Yes, I did. [Laughter] What, from your experience of being director, do you hope continues for future directors?
02:07:28R.L.: I think the fact that things do not seem completely cemented has an upside to it. I hope that that aspect of the upside remains, which is that when things are not completely cemented and formed, that whoever comes in as director can have the opportunity to help together with others to continue to shape things, so that there continues to be this sense of like, we can make things better, greater, and more in alignment with our principles, and more in synchrony with the important changes that are happening in the world around us. That we can continue to keep aspiring for something new, some vision that we keep creating along the way, that that vision itself keeps evolving. What I would hope for, for them, is that just as it was with us, that things do not become closed. That they remain open enough that the director feels that they have some shaping role, some excitement that's tied with trying to shape things. That's what I would hope remains.
02:09:15A.B.: How do you see the Women's and Gender Studies program fitting into the larger picture of your career and life?
02:09:27R.L.: In my case, I think that I tried to express that I don't see it as an isolated thing, because I had, over the years, a few different such communities where I felt like I had an emotional, almost like an ideological home, right? Philosophical, political. I had these spaces to rest and to think and to grow. I see WGST as one of those places to, together with others, to envision, to labor, to create, to aspire, to grow, to learn. This is so important for those of us who have committed ourselves to a life of learning. We want that always, that we have some nurturing spaces where we can rest a bit and do that, and where we feel like others are really with us in that in some shape or form. WGST was one of those places for me. I don't see it as unto itself. The Committee on South Asian Women was another place for me like that. The feminist scholarship division in ICA [International Communication Association] was yet another place for me like that. I see them as these spaces of nurturance in one way, although I had to do difficult work, but I also see them as nurturing spaces in some ways for myself. That allowed me in my life trajectory to - see, I haven't talked about the -
02:11:52R.L.: In our life, everything that we're learning is a continual forging of our consciousness. It definitely always has some implication for what we're doing in every sphere of our life. So if right now I'm spending time with my granddaughters, then I bring my whole self to that. I bring my consciousness, how it evolved, what I learned, the spaces, nurturing spaces in which I was able to think those things through and learn who I am, are part of what I bring now to my hopes for them, to my hopes for how they might engage with the world, how they might care about justice. All of those kinds of things, my hopes for their caring about those things, about things much larger than themselves that matter. Justice that matters. I would say that all of these things start to cut in so many different directions. Not very overtly always, but they're there. I wanted to end with my granddaughters, Ashima and Raina.
02:13:23A.B.: I love that.
02:13:30R.L.: Amy, now this is probably - I didn't even talk about my mom because those years were so important to me. I wasn't directing at the time. I did not, but you and I know that was important.
02:13:42A.B.: Do you want to say anything about your mom before we finish?
02:13:44R.L.: Yeah, I can come back to Raina and Ashima. But I just wanted to say that my - because the thing is, I have always at heart - Look, I have been an academic. There's a part of me that's always wanted to be an activist, but I think I'm more of an academic. [Laughter] I've forayed into the activist aspect just a little bit, enough for me to not feel completely that I had just been a - enough to feel like I was an okay person, like I did what I needed to do. So I continue to try to do that. The thing is that then, I think I've always also been, in some fashion, a caregiver at heart. It's funny how I approach the one thing with the other as my background and my consciousness. I approach caregiving with some sense of what's important in the larger world and the struggles that we have with the world, including what we learn about that in the academic programs and what we teach about that. I think I bring my caregiving self, which also seems to be something that I just cannot seem to shed [laughter], I bring that also to the institutional setting, because I've always tried to care for people and the programs and what have you. I just think that these things intersect eventually also.
02:15:25R.L.: The caregiving for my mother, I felt like that was something that - I never doubted for a moment that I needed to be there for her, because it was just larger than - it's hard to express, but it was a purpose above purposes for me. Like it was what I needed to do. It was a very hard life balancing, but it was a life of great purpose because I knew every day why I was here. Then I brought that also to my institutional life because it wasn't a life where like, "Oh yeah, you take it or leave it, everything's fine. If something works, it works. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work." No, because as a caregiver you know you have to see things through. You carry that into other things you care for because you have to see them through. You have to care for - they have to be taken seriously. Just as when you care for a person, anything else you care for has to be taken seriously. You have to make sure that you did what you could, while also trying to keep yourself together. [Laughter]
02:16:57R.L.: I will end with Ashima and Raina. My hope is that with everything going on now in our programs, in the world, in academia, that we are still able to have places of joy, experimentation, fighting for justice. Because I'm not sure what kind of world we are bequeathing, you know? All we can do is just to try to bring whatever spirit we have into that situation, whatever we have learned, and then the rest we give. We give to the world because we won't be here to see what those contexts are going to be like.
02:18:04A.B.: Thank you so much for this conversation.
02:18:09R.L.: Of course, Amy. Another time we just have to chat to chat.
02:18:13A.B.: Yeah, we do. We do. We need to do that.
02:18:17R.L.: Because I haven't even asked you how things are going with everything, but another time. You're doing lots of good things. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. I hope you'll be okay with my sing-song voice, because -
02:18:28A.B.: Oh, your voice is so beautiful. I was actually thinking that while we were recording. I was like, "Wow." Everybody's voice, you hear it and you know it, but then when you're recording it in a studio with headphones on, you're hearing everything. I was like, "Wow, your voice is so beautiful and resonant." [Laughter]. Let me tell you, when I started doing these interviews, I had laryngitis. I pushed them off as long as I could, and then I just did them with laryngitis. I symbolically lost my voice on Inauguration Day, and then I didn't get it back for like, three weeks. [Laughter] I was like, well.
02:19:11R.L.: I can see why, too. [Laughter]
02:19:16A.B.: Yeah, it was quite funny. I was in my classes with a jar of honey tea trying to get my voice out. Anyway, this has been really wonderful. There are things I knew because we've talked, but there are also other things I'd never asked you before. I feel like I learned more things about you and from you from this, and that was really meaningful to me, so thank you.
02:19:45R.L.: Oh, of course, Amy. Really, we will talk another time when you have time. Listen, I just loved meeting you yesterday.
02:19:55A.B.: Oh, me too.
02:19:56R.L.: Yeah. It was just like one of those things where, now this minute has to last me a long time. I just wanted to put it in my pocket and just never let go. It was just such a great happenstance, Amy. Well, and I know this is like, wow, there's so much going on, but we will connect. Today - I can't believe this is like two and a half hours or something.
02:20:29A.B.: Oh, I know. Yeah, two and a half hours.
02:20:33R.L.: I didn't know how much time was slated. I wasn't even counting. [Laughter]
02:20:37A.B.: No, me neither, me neither.
02:20:40R.L.: Go do your many other things, and I will be thinking of you, and please be well, okay?
02:20:44A.B.: Thank you. Yes, you too. You too.
02:20:47R.L.: Please, Amy, take good care.
