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creativesage · 5 years

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(via Your failure of imagination is not my problem – anthro{dendum})

January 10, 2019

Written by: Zoe Todd

In November 2016, I flew to Zurich to deliver a talk on my work on Métis legal-ethical paradigms, prairie fish, and the Anthropocene. When we booked the tickets earlier that summer, it didn’t occur to me that I’d asked my hosts to book my travel for the night of the US Presidential election. So, as I set out from Ottawa, the Canadian capital, on the evening of November 8, I entered a strange and disorienting patch of space time that took me through multiple timezones, geographies, and national boundaries while the fate of American governance hung in the balance. At 6 PM, in the Ottawa airport, things still seemed hopeful. Maybe Trump wouldn’t win. Two delays later, I finally made it to Toronto. There, at our international departures gate, things were taking a turn for the grim. TV screens around us showed that Hillary was slipping, and Trump was gaining steam. I turned to a fellow passenger and said ‘wow, we might wake up to a Trump presidency’. Her face widened in horror: “don’t you dare say that!”.

As we boarded the plane, many of us realized there was no wifi onboard. There would be no obsessive refreshing of twitter feeds or CNN polls as we flew over the moonlit expanses of the Atlantic. We were locked in, for better or worse, for the next seven hours. As we flew up and over the eastern coast, over Newfoundland and out into the Atlantic, whatever was going on back in America was inaccessible to us. When I awoke in the morning, we were readying to land at Heathrow. Just seconds before the tires touched the tarmac, I felt an overwhelming sense of nausea. I can’t explain it, but somehow I knew in those seconds when we came back into contact with the earth, that Trump had won. (The canny pilots waited until we were about to deplane to announce the election result, and the spirit of the entire economy section deflated, save for one man who shouted a muted ‘woohoo’ before reading the room and shutting the heck up).

This made for a dramatic backdrop for my first visit to Switzerland.

The evening of November 9th, strangers gathered in a large auditorium style classroom on the campus of ETH, the fabled Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics university in Zurich. My lovely hosts welcomed me, and I gave a talk on Métis law, watersheds, fish collapse, kinship, and oil and gas spills in my home province. At the end, the audience engaged in a deeply respectful way, asking questions about Indigenous theory, environmental issues, etc. However, the mic made its way to a young man who seemed to be somewhat agitated. He lobbed a softball question at me about spirits, I think. And then, his body language shifted. He had caught me in his snare! Aha! If I believed in spirits, then clearly this wasn’t science! I can’t remember the exact details of his next question, but it was not the words that mattered. It was the form, the energy, and the weaponization that mattered. He pounced on the mic — and launched into an accusation of my work being ‘anti-science’ (a sin to end all sins in a STEM institution).

I tried to answer, but he kept going, working himself into a froth. This clearly wasn’t about the content of my work, or even about ‘questions’. This was about the affront of my Indigenous presence in his rational space. How. Dare. I. Exist. In. Academia.

My hosts grew concerned with his hostility, and he was eventually asked to leave. When he left, the audience erupted in spontaneous applause. And we continued on.

(They weren’t going to let a Trump win, or the emboldened rage of the right, stop them from being good hosts, from looking after their guest, or from enacting some basic forms of care for their invited speaker).

A little while later, I shared this experience with a mentor. I shared my account of being heckled by a member of the audience. She compassionately corrected me:

“You were attacked, Zoe. That is an attack.”

Since that conversation, I’ve reframed my understandings of my experiences of white hostility in the academy. They are many. They are sometimes hilarious (“he said what to you?” a colleague will laugh as we parse out the latest experience). They are often dispiriting (you can only put up with hostility from dominant society for so long before it starts to wear you down). They are monumental (‘a whole department behaved that way?” a friend will whisper in shock as I share a story over a long overdue lunch). They are sometimes mundane. I am not the first nor the last to write about this — so many brilliant BIPOC scholars have outlined their own stories of surviving white hostility in academia and beyond. Sara Ahmed (2018) draws on her work with interlocutors working in diversity policy contexts to demonstrate how refusal to absorb certain forms of hostility from dominant groups impacts those who speak up:

“Another practitioner describes: “you know, you go through that in these sorts of jobs where you go to say something and you can just see people going ‘oh here she goes.’” We both laughed, recognising that each other recognised that scene. The feminist killjoy, that leaky container, comes up here; she comes up in what we hear. We hear each other in the wear and the tear of the words we share; we hear what it is like to come up against the same thing over and over again. We imagine the eyes rolling as if to say: well she would say that. It was from experiences like this that I developed my equation: rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy.”

In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine (2015) states: “Because white men can’t/police their imagination/black men are dying.” (cited also by Kellaway in this interview with Claudia Rankine in the Guardian). White imagination is murderous.

As Ahmed references in her above mentioned 2018 piece, in his work in the UK with the UCL campaign “Why Isn’t My Professor Black?”, Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias C—- (2014) challenges the failure of the white british imagination to formulate the academy as one that includes Black professors:

http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/videos/isnt-professor-black-nathaniel-coleman/

These forms of white imagination, which inform violent white supremacist actions against Black people in America, the UK, and other white supremacist nations, are pervasive. I do not want to co-opt this work that Ahmed, Rankine, and C—- are doing, but rather to explain how it informs my own understandings of how white imagination operates to evacuate — sometimes very aggressively evacuate — Indigenous bodies and thinking from academic spaces.

Informed by this work, what I have come to realize is that many of the hostile encounters I have experienced in academia are, at least on some level, about failure of white people’s imagination. Failure to imagine Black, Indigenous and other racialized bodies in the hallways of academe. Failure to imagine epistemologies beyond those that fester in euro-western academic paradigms. Failure to imagine possibilities beyond jealously guarded white (often male) syndicates. Failure to imagine that white folks occupying space on stolen land ought to perhaps….ahem…tread a big more humbly. They are also about racism, white supremacy, sexism, classism, elitism, insecurity, jealousy, and greed.

But it is failure of (white settler) imagination that I can tackle the most directly with the energy and resources that I have at my disposal right now. (I keep doing my fallible best to disrupt white supremacy, sexism, and other forms of structural violence, but those are a much longer term struggle). When someone lashes out at me at an invited event for my use of Indigenous methodologies, Indigenous philosophy, Indigenous citational praxis — I reframe it for myself as their failure to imagine something bigger than they occupy. Through this framing, I am able to stop, or at least try to stop, taking these attacks personally. To mentally reframe these attacks in a way that doesn’t destroy me. I have to do this to survive. (I am not saying you have to do this. Everyone’s survival is multifaceted and complex).

But, I also want to address my white academic colleagues directly: this hostility is happening on your watch. When you invite Indigenous scholars into your colonial institutions, as guests, as colleagues, to share our knowledge on lands stolen and violated by the institutions you occupy and uphold, you have a duty to be good hosts and good colleagues. The toxicity or dysfunction of your department, the decades long disputes that shape your Faculty or Senate or tenure processes – these are not my problem. If these explode during my visit, you might want to, energetically speaking anyway, clean house a little. Because your guests aren’t consenting to travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles to be attacked or mocked. When you invite a guest into your space, there is an implicit expectation you will be on your best behaviour. In fact, visiting is one of the things that deeply informs Métis being. Hosting and being hosted is one of the ways we build up our nationhood, renew kinship obligations, and restore relationality. We take hosting, and being hosted, very seriously.

This goes beyond visiting and hosting, though. It stretches into the very fabric of academia. To how we conceive of how to be and how to formulate knowledge. But the casual dismissal of pervasive white settler hostility in academe is conspicuous when juxtaposed with how frequently any form of refusal or accountability from Indigenous scholars (and BIPOC scholars) is immediately parsed as inexcusably hostile. Isn’t it a little rich for white scholars to be able to be dismissive, rude, to raise their voices, to shout, to bodily intimate people, to go out of their way to humiliate Indigenous and other scholars? But if we so much as firmly refuse this, let alone openly address it, we are unprofessional and shrill? Marked as ‘difficult’ and whispered about by the very people who take glee in ‘cutting us down a peg’ at any opportunity?

A further concern: if you are a white scholar treating me, your peer and colleague, with hostility and contempt, it gives me a VERY good indication of how you treat Indigenous students. In 2004, Comanche scholar Joshua K. Mihesuah wrote about the reasons that Indigenous students drop out of school in the USA, and among the most significant reasons he lists are hostility in academic environments:

“Many dropouts and “stopouts” (those who leave for a while but return) choose not to conform to the values of the dominant society, and many remain frustrated because the academy does not meet their needs.” (Mihesuah 2004: 191)

“There still is a lack of respect among many university faculty, staff, and administrators for Native cultures. In Flagstaff, for example, despite the Navajo, Hopi, Walapai, Havasupai, and Yavapai Apache reservations’ geographic proximity to the border town (there are twenty-two tribes in Arizona), it is surprising to learn that few faculty have visited those communities. Insensitivity and stereotyping, both blatant and subtle, of Indigenous peoples are pervasive in classrooms. “Given” tribal names such as Papago, instead of the self-determined Tohono O’Odham are still used by professors; Squaw Peak and Squaw Peak Parkway are names that persist in Phoenix (although they have been renamed after fallen Hopi soldier Lori Piestewa); and despite Natives’ concerns about the ski resort on Natives’ sacred Mount Humphreys in Flagstaff, plans are in the making to expand the resort by using reclaimed water for snowmaking (which many Natives and environmentalists fear will increase the number of ski runs). New legislative and congressional lines have been drawn to include Flagstaff and large portions of the Navajo and Hopi reservations. Natives have high hopes for more political clout, but many non-Natives are concerned that Natives will get more than their share of funding, although there is no historical precedent for this concern. These topics are debated in classrooms, and quite often, Native students are too intimidated to speak up to express their views and stance about the ignorance of their instructors and classmates. Students continually fail Gateway courses (basic math, English, and science) because professors tend to have a “cut it or you’re out” attitude.” (Mihesuah 2004: 192-193)

Many of the behaviours Mihesuah details here are things that students have quietly brought to my attention that my own colleagues have perpetuated against them at myriad institutions across North America and Europe. So, again, if you can barely treat an Indigenous professor with respect, I can safely assume students are not being treated with respect either. So let’s cut the niceties and start addressing this white academic hostility directly.

(January 12 edit: for an article that explores what happens when white hostility is formalized into a wholesale dismissal of a discipline, please see Dr. Robert Alexander Innes’ piece “Introduction: Native Studies and Native Cultural Preservation, Revitalization, and Persistence” in American Indian Culture and Research Journal 34:2 (2010) 1-9. In this piece, he articulates how a white political science scholar in Canada elevates a misinformed understanding of Indigenous scholarship to dismiss the entire field of Indigenous Studies. Hostility indeed.)

Ultimately, I hope that white settler scholars will step up and do the labour necessary to address the way that their peers lash out at Indigenous scholars and other marginalized communities. I hope that my white peers will pay attention to the tone their peers use when they don’t understand an Indigenous philosophical approach, or how they respond when they feel threatened by Indigenous law and praxis. I hope they will challenge their colleagues when they, unabashedly and unapologetically, attack that which challenges their very ontological claims to knowing and being. I hope they will take note of the ways that BIPOC scholars are policed for their tone, language, wording, bodies, and being but white scholars are often allowed to be inexcusably hostile and violent.

You can take a cue from my colleagues in Switzerland, who kindly told their peer to find a way to engage respectfully or to leave. I mean, if you are hosting a guest or building any kind of collective, why would you allow your community to treat someone disrespectfully? It’s really that simple.

Works Cited:

Ahmed, Sara. 2018. Refusal, resignation, and complaint. Feminist Killjoys blog. https://feministkilljoys.com/2018/06/28/refusal-resignation-and-complaint/

C——, Nathanial Adam Tobias. 2014. “Why Isn’t My Professor Black?”. http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/videos/isnt-professor-black-nathaniel-coleman/

Mihesuah, Joshua K. 2004. “11. Graduating Indigenous Students by Confronting the Academic Environment”, pp. 191-199 in Indigenizing the Academy, Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, editors. University of Nebraska Press.

Rankine, Claudia. 2015. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press.

Zoe Todd

Zoe Todd (Métis/otipemisiw) is from amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), Alberta, Canada. She writes about fish, art, Métis legal traditions, the Anthropocene, extinction, and decolonization in urban and prairie contexts. She also studies human-animal relations, colonialism and environmental change in north/western Canada. She holds a BSc (Biological Sciences) and MSc (Rural Sociology) from the University of Alberta and a PhD (Social Anthropology) from Aberdeen University. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She was a 2011 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar.

[Entire article — click on the title link to read it at anthro{dendum}.]

#indigenous #indigenouspeople #academia #racism #prejudice #discrimination #culture #anthropology #sociology #decolonization

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topicprinter · 5 years

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Hi all, I recently wrote this post about how Drip screwed over its most loyal customers and I thought perhaps /r/Entrepreneur would get value out of my lessons learned.----If you’re not familiar, Drip is email marketing software that’s pretty heavy on the marketing automation front. I won’t do them the courtesy of a link, so you’ll have to Google them if you want to check it out.They’ve been around since 2012 or so, founded by someone I trusted, but he sold the business to Leadpages a few years ago, and it’s been going downhill ever since.I’ve been using them for years as the backbone of two “side” businesses: IndieHive, which covers this website for freelancers and the related products and services that I sell, and Everleads, a curated lead generation site for freelance designers and developers.In 2016 and 2017, I really dug deep into Drip. I built out dozens of interconnected workflows to carefully shepherd my subscribers through various funnels and sequences with duplicate emails or annoying content that’s not relevant to them. I integrated my web front-end with their APIs so that I could customize the site for subscribers. I wrote bridging scripts to connect it to Mixpanel for analytics, and I used Zapier to hook Drip up to even more services. It was the heart of my entire business, and it was awesome.But throughout 2018, things started to go awry.I kept experiencing glitches in the workflows where people would get stuck on workflow steps that should be instant, like “remove tag”. Or people would end one workflow and start another, but not have any of the data that the first workflow had set. There were honestly dozens of these little glitches, but individually they were minor.Also troubling: deliverability started to slip. Not precipitously, and I can’t prove that it wasn’t just my emails, but I have heard from others that they were having issues with getting their emails into people’s inboxes in 2018.But the most egregious thing for all of this was that support was basically no help at all. I probably opened two dozen support requests in 2018 and I’m not sure they actually resolved a single one. We’d spend hours going back and forth so they could even understand the problem. Then they’d almost always say one of two things:“For a workaround, just insert a number of delays between steps in your workflows so that the system doesn’t get confused!” So all my workflows had little 5 minute delay steps to try and make sure things worked correctly. Which they still didn’t. Wtf.Or they’d just say they need to escalate to the developers and then I’d get an email weeks or months later from some random support engineer letting me know they were still looking into why the most basic functions of their software don’t work right. Awesome.Alarmed by this, I repeatedly researched alternatives throughout 2018, but nothing seemed worth going through the pain of migration and the risk of just having similar issues somewhere else. So I kept resolving to be patient with Drip and hope (pray) that they were hard at work at undoing whatever architectural disaster had led us here.And then…In early January 2019, while I was on a relaxing cruise with my wife for our 15th anniversary, I got an email from Drip:https://ryanwaggoner.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/drip-bullshit-pricing-email-2.pngSo basically: “Hey, we’re raising our prices in 12 days! You can keep your current price if you switch to an annual plan!”And if you read it carefully, there’s something pretty important missing from this email.It doesn’t say what the new pricing is**. Seriously wtf.**So I emailed to ask. They responded the next day (so now I have 11 days) to reveal they were doubling my monthly price.Drip raised my price from $184 / month to $368 / month with 12 days notice.That’s just about the worst way imaginable to treat your oldest and most loyal customers.And it was the last straw for me.Now, to be clear, I completely understand wanting to grow a company in a new direction, or thinking that you need to raise prices to reflect more value.But you don’t do it when your platform is half-broken, you don’t do it with 12 days notice, and you grandfather in existing customers, at least for long enough for them to migrate. Also, you tell them the price when you tell them that prices are rising.It’s hard to imagine how Drip could have been more disrespectful to their customer base than what they did here.So as of last month, I switched all my subscribers to ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign for Everleads and IndieHive, respectively. That’s thousands of dollars that Drip won’t be getting from me. I managed to get both setups completely migrated off just before their billing renewal dates, in one case with literal minutes to spare.It was a pain and required some late nights but it was worth it to deny them another penny.I’m not alone in feeling upset about this. Twitter was ablaze for weeks with people who were angry and bailing for greener, more respectful pastures. I’ve taken a sick joy in watching a lot of people migrate off Drip with much larger lists than mine.I also cancelled Leadpages in favor of Instapage. I was already unhappy with Leadpages, mainly because it feels pretty clunky and dated, they aren’t very responsive to user feedback, and they’re still missing some pretty basic things (like being able to pass form data to the thank you page. Seriously?).Side note: I was going to link to the Leadpages idea portal, but they apparently shut it down. Makes sense, since it was filled with hundreds of good ideas with many, many customer votes that had been ignored for years.Regardless, even if Leadpages was awesome, they own Drip and I won’t give another penny to such an unethical company that treats its customers so poorly.And this migration was a huge pain (which is what they were counting on), partly because of how complex my Drip setups were, but also because ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign are both pretty different from each other and from Drip. On the surface, they all do some of the same things, but once you dig in, things diverge, which made the migration especially painful.Drip is complicated. Stupidly so. In fact, it’s so complicated that there are a number of problems using it:It doesn’t really work. I mean, it does like 99% of the time, but that last 1% means that some of your subscribers are going to have a bad time. And it’s not just that their emails won’t show up. They might just get stuck in a workflow, or skip some emails in a sequence, or get things at the wrong times, or lose data, etc. And since this happens randomly, the number of subscribers who experience it accumulates over time.The customer support reps don’t really know how it works, because it’s too complicated. So you end up spending hours writing up descriptions of the problem and putting together screencasts to show how things don’t seem to be working, and the only response you get is that they’ll have to ask the developers.It encourages you to setup really fancy complex automations which, even if they did work, are way beyond what you actually need. Just imagine: you can do anything! You can track everything! You can have an unlimited number of tags and fields! Track and automate all the things!Your setup can end up being really brittle and deeply tied to the Drip architecture, which is a problem if you want to migrate off. And it’s hard to expand and modify over time without breaking all kinds of things for your subscribers who are in those automations.The setup is hard to document. It’s easy to end up with a large collection of documents and spreadsheets and screencasts to try and explain not only what you did, but why you did it.It’s hard to audit and debug when things go wrong. And things will go wrong. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s happening with your subscribers, where things went off the rails, and how to get it back on track without screwing things up further.In the end, Drip for me felt like a really shitty programming language. Technically possible to do almost anything, but so painful that in the end you wish you hadn’t bothered.By contrast, ConvertKit is simple. And yes, I think it’s too simple in places. I think there are some genuine gaps in the functionality that makes it a little too hard to get done the things you want.But I’m also aware of the fact that I’m coming from Drip and a really convoluted setup, so being forced to simplify is probably a good thing.And ActiveCampaign is not simple, but it’s powerful in a bunch of ways that Drip should have been. Additionally, it has the distinction of actually being, you know, functional. Crazy, I know.Also, ActiveCampaign apparently is more open to feedback than Drip. I posted a Twitter thread listing some things that I like about it and Jason VandeBoom, the founder of ActiveCampaign, setup a call with me to go over some of my feedback. And ActiveCampaign isn’t a tiny company; they have hundreds of employees and are much larger than Drip. It meant a lot to me that Jason would just jump on the phone with a random customer to see how they could improve.Meanwhile Drip’s emails aren’t even signed by an actual person. During this whole debacle, I don’t think anyone from Drip actually responded to anyone’s tweets or complaints. A couple days after the initial announcement when things were blowing up on Twitter, they sent this out another email that was basically "sorry, not sorry"Just like their price increase, all of their corporate communication just screams “We don’t care about you. Go away.”So I did.I’m actually really glad that I dropped Drip, after all that. Partly because of how much better ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign are as tools, but mostly because it taught me a lesson about how you need to be careful when you’re a small company about who you integrate with, because while your interests may align now, that could change at any point.But this rant has gone on long enough, so I’ll save that point for a future post.Disclaimer: just in case Drip decides to sue me (which would be so on-brand for them at this point), ALL the descriptions of Drip’s functionality, failings, and communications is to the best of my recollection and should not be taken as a literal word-for-word account.----Happy to answer any questions about my experience with Drip, ConvertKit, or ActiveCampaign. Would also love to hear anyone else's experiences with any of those (or others you'd recommend in the space of email-based marketing automation).Original post: https://ryanwaggoner.com/drip-pricing-review/

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

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