A letter to my mom about my academic journey:
Dear Mom,
My passion for left-wing academia may have been inevitable. Growing up, I have fond memories of discussing the works of Derek Bell and Jonathan Kozol around the table. Their names, and the names of other academics whose minds so deeply impacted you and Dad (as well as myself) were not always mentioned, but their theories lived in our homes like shadows, ever present. The books Dad read me at bed were just as likely to be about Cesear Chavez as they were to be about Mrs. Peter’s Seven Silly Eaters. It was a coin toss if our family outings would be to the mountains for a hike and a picnic (as you always wanted them to be), or to a protest against the invasion of Iraq or in support of striking workers. It is easy to attribute most of this passion to Dad, he is the leftist academic, the one who studied under Bell, the one who told us of his adventures defending death row inmates in Alabama, the one whose work required we attend pickets and canvas for Obama, but to attribute even the majority to him would be doing all of us a disservice and undermining the influence that you had on my desire to follow this path.
It was you who taught me what it looks like to take this love of theory and activism and put it to use in the real world, to find ways to apply what I learn in ivory towers to not only my everyday life, but everyday lives of those around me,. While the pickets and the door-knocking were influential, my best memories from childhood are of you, instilling an understanding that everyone belongs into the thousands of children whose lives you touched. My fondest memories are of you coming up with ways to make waterslides accessible, and modeling how my peers could communicate clearly, even if they didn’t have any words.
From the start of my undergraduate journey, I was determined to forge a path based on the passion for social action that both you and Dad had instilled in me. Hence, I don’t think you would be shocked to learn that, while my undergraduate journey did not end in the same place it began, it ended with me completing a degree in the interdisciplinary field I set my heart on over six years ago, with minors in policy studies and women’s studies. This combination of degrees is setting me on a path distinct, yet parallel to both yours and Dad’s.
Courses like Women, Culture, and Development, Political Institutions and Processes, and Policy Analysis have all allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of how our institutions and systems function. In Women, culture, and Development, I was introduced to the ways in which neoliberal policies have impacted women around the world. Hearing about these policies and their impacts was not only enlightening, but brought me back to the kitchen table debates of childhood. There were many days during this course when I would get back to the apartment I now live in, the first home of mine that you will never see, and call Dad to ask him if it was IMF’s he ranted about in the evenings growing up, or tell him I finally understood why you two so firmly opposed NAFTA. Learning about these things in a detailed manner helped me understand how institutions around the world are weaponized to enforce patriarchy, and how this weaponization disproportionately impacts multi-marginalized people. I articulated this lesson in the highly opinionated essay, Misogyny and Abortion, which I wrote for my final. This essay articulates the ways in which anti-abortion legislation around the world works not to save lives, as proponents often argue, but to punish women. The anti-abortion policies discussed in this piece work to demonstrate how our institutions and policies routinely work to further marginalize oppressed groups.
Complementing that piece, the policy proposal that I created in Policy Analysis serves as a vision for what a brighter future could look like for abortion care, at least in the US. This piece, Reproductive Care Analysis, takes an in-depth look at our current policies regarding reproductive care and, using a logic model, a stakeholder analysis, and a goals and alternatives matrix, explores how reproductive care could look in a world that seems further away from ours every day. While you will never read this piece, or nearly any of the other pieces I have on here, I like to think you would have appreciated this one. Writing it reminded me of you, of the passion with which you taught me about the importance of reproductive care and the powerful role this type of care had in our family’s life.
While I spent plenty of time critiquing our institutions in school, I also learned about how activists, like you and Dad, have wielded the tools necessary to make the world a slightly better place, and how I can do the same. In Histories and Movements of Gender and Sexuality, I learned about how activists across the world have stood up to oppressive systems. I learned how they framed their movements, utilized their resources, and tapped into the emotions of themselves and those around them to fight for change. In my final project for that course Women in the Black Panther Party: Combating the Carceral State, I explored how women in the Black Panther Party weaponized their gender to fight for those who were unjustly incarcerated (like my grandpa). Completing this project not only helped deepen my understanding of what successful organizing can look like, at what tools are at the disposal of activists, but also helped me develop my ability to research nuanced and underreported subjects. The project was an archival project, something which I think you would have found fascinating, so to find information about these activists, I had to dig through a plethora of different archives to find materials that were relevant to my research. This project really honed my research skills, as I had to learn how to efficiently sort through thousands of pieces to find the artifacts relevant to my research.
The archival project wasn’t the only project I did that helped me gain a deeper understanding of activism, projects like my podcast about the American Indian Movement, my research paper on how unions could build coalitions with the environmental movement, and my research with the UWB Labor Colloquium all helped me refine my understanding of organizing while also helping me to grow my ability to write, research, and critically think. But one project, more than any other, has defined my academic career as well as helped me grow an understanding about how our institutes function and how we can change them, and that is my work on 107 Days.
Of all the work I have done in my academic career, this is the one which saddens me the most knowing that you will never see it. 107 Days, works to understand the Harris campaign as a social movement, and looks at the ways that, despite its loss, the Harris campaign succeeded at mobilizing Americans across the country for change. In the book, we also investigate how the lack of time Harris had (107 days compared to Trump’s 3000+) and the misogynoir Harris faced as a Black women led to her loss.
Working on this book as a co-author, I have had the privilege to work with professors across various fields, learning from their expertise and being pushed to better myself as an academic. This work has helped me develop my critical thinking skills, my writing skills, and my research skills. It has deepened my understanding for the importance of diversity and equity in education and has helped me gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the ways in which activism functions.
While the academic aspects of the book are very important, the work I have done on this book has served a much greater purpose than checking off IAS learning goals, boosting my resume, or (hopefully) helping me get into grad school, it has allowed me to honor your legacy and your wishes for me long after your death. Working on this book has allowed me to rediscover a passion for social movements and activism that you made me promise would never fade, yet which I let dim after you died. Talking to organizers across the country has reminded me of the importance of mobilization, and the love that I had for that type of community work. The work I have done on this book has also worked to reenforce the importance of your lifelong devotion to education. While I never doubted the importance of your work, working on a piece that investigates the attacks on our public schools just reifies the importance of the work you have done.
I know you’ll never see any of this, but I hope that in the work that I have done in school, as well as the work that I have done at PlayGarden, I would have made you proud. I hope that I am making the Gamache name proud and honoring your legacy by not just continuing the work you and dad have done but expanding on it.
Sincerely,
Leiney
Leiney Gamache 