Yesterday I signed the paperwork officiating my tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at Arizona State University. Many of my friends, in the midst of congratulating me, asked how I feel. And I don’t know.
Yesterday, as well, my first professional artwork was also published: a collage titled “After” in Worlds of Possibility. I know how I feel about this one. I’m beyond giddy that something so deeply meaningful and encouraging to me may find resonance in the hearts of others, people I know and love dearly, and those I may never have the chance to meet.
I’m trying to parse what makes me so ambivalent about tenure. It’s an accomplishment that many people aim their lives toward, constantly mapping its facets for years — What do I have to do, by when, in order to achieve tenure and the job security that comes with it? What and whose expectations do I have to meet to make it? What kind of hoops do I have to jump through and how quickly? — and acting in accordance.
The question of what comes next is often sidelined. More importantly, so is reflection over what we turn ourselves into through this continual hustle to meet expectations. What kind of person have I been cultivating by trying to read, infer, and unerringly meet the ever-shifting standards set to cross this imperceptible bar? What has it done to my political and ethical commitments, let alone understanding of self in relation?
In April 2024, as I turned in my tenure packet, I realized academia would always ask more from me if I let it. And it would be a certain kind of more, not the more of consistent struggle for decolonization or liberation, but a more defined by the structures of the academy and aimed at their continued reproduction — more articles, more committees, more meetings, more awards, more to attempt to validate the system is working.
The system isn’t working. I’m told I need to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals because they’re more prestigious or rigorous, but the journal claims copyright, puts the work behind a paywall, and then sells it as data to train generative AI. I’m not only uncompensated for this work, but I would have to pay the journal to reprint my own essay in the future. And they’re making money off of it, both in selling access and using it to train AI they hope to have do this free labor in the future.
The system is racist and extractive. Those articles that make it that far in the first place have to go through peer review that is often a form of white supremacist gatekeeping, holding scholars to canon and field as a means of policing the politics of the argument such that it doesn’t radically challenge the status quo. All the while, knowledge from marginalized communities is used to build the canon, but exoticized and reductively called “data” rather than “theory,” the fragments that whiteness chips off holistic worldviews so that it can piece things together the way it wants and then call the creation universal knowledge while the fragments were dismissed as localized culture.
This is not a system I want to reproduce. So I’ve been spending this year pausing. Asking myself what actually aligns with my political commitments to decolonization, community building, and imagination, as opposed to what I think I need to do because it’s expected of me. I’ve been rehearsing saying no to the latter, even when it’s viewed as necessary to my work.
It’s not. It’s not necessary to my work. It’s the labor necessary to maintain the system. Those are two different things. I want my work to be something different. I want to demonstrate something different through my work.
When it comes down to it, the job security tenure affords is only job security insofar as the system remains as it is. I understand why that leads some to aim their efforts at reinforcing the structure, securing its maintenance, keeping it in place.
I do feel a relief at having tenure. It’s a momentary weight off. But I harbor no illusions that it means the weight is off forever. Nor that I could keep it off if I tried. I could try — I could do everything expected of me, feed right back into that machine that constructed tenure in the first place, try to ensure this feeling of relief remains forever.
Of course, doing so would simply be shouldering the weight of meeting expectations again. The act of attempting to secure the relief would, in the act, take it away. I would pick the burden right back up out of fear of losing the security I never can actually hold.
Tenure is an accomplishment, but it’s not the substance of what I’ve been creating. It’s a marker that others recognize that substance, have deemed it valuable. But the people affording me tenure are not actually the audience I want to reach. And I already know the value of my work.
If I had to choose which one I would most like to celebrate today, it’s the collage. Publishing artwork is also an accomplishment, surely. But the artwork holds substance — in its inspiration, in the act of creation, in the meaning I make of it, and the meaning it allows others to make. It’s something that could only come into being through relations with others, and marks that network more than it does a solitary achievement.
Here’s what I wrote in my artist’s statement:
“After” is inspired by those in my life who have the bravery to be soft and vulnerable in a world that makes that dangerous and scary, and the deep and beloved connections we’ve formed together across differences, dreaming of collective change that can enable worlds where such softness and vulnerability don’t have to be so risky–emergent worlds of reciprocity and care.
Frameworks developed from whiteness and coloniality place emphasis on individual achievement over collective meaningmaking, and ask us to celebrate having won, conquered, or dominated. But I want to celebrate the softness. The vulnerability. The tentative connections that grow from fragility to strength through attention and care. The friction that sharpens and hones. The grief that we weather together. The transformations we hold each other through. The laughter that leaves us unable to breathe for a few moments of sheer, overwhelming joy.
Today I’m celebrating creating art that brings us together. And I’m celebrating this moment of rest and rejuvenation I have, knowing that it affords an opportunity to recommit to the decolonial labor I want to partner in, build community connections even stronger, and imagine more boldly beyond what we’re handed.
Today I’m celebrating the ways that relations sustain and enable, and what we can create through those networks of support.
Jenna Hanchey 