Marissa’s two (very interesting) blog posts brought to light many good points and questions about identity and how that is negotiated for people who occupy multiple roles.  Marissa mentioned the types of roles that were discussed at the USER-S meeting last month, namely Teacher, Researcher, and Student.  I did not attend the USER-S meeting and instead spent the day at the annual conference of NYCORE (the New York Collective of Radical Educators) and with that in mind, I would like to complicate the discussion a bit by tacking on yet another possible identity, that of Activist.  While activism may be contained in the roles of Teacher, Researcher, and even Student, I believe it is important to also highlight this aspect of our potential professional selves as separate but integral to the rest.

I believe that many of us would agree that much of our work as doctoral students and teachers is meant not only to create or expose knowledge, but also to eventually change existing social structures in order to trigger the evolution of a more just and equitable world.  In the Santos article that we read, he concludes by saying that “social emancipation is, thus, every action aiming at denaturalizing oppression (showing that, besides being unjust, oppression is neither necessary nor irreversible) and conceiving of it in the proportions it can be fought with the resources at hand”.  Part of this process of emancipation or activism as he describes it is the realization that both knowledge and action are “precarious” and that the worth of a way of knowing or a particular action should not be how famous it is in the larger institution of academia, but rather the practical good that it might accomplish in the world.  As a teacher/research/student/activist who would like her future work to not only add something to the literture of Disability Studies, but also make a difference in the lives of indivual kids with disabilities, this article served as a reminder to maintain that Activist idenity in the forefront of my mind while exercising my Student identity, because it may be that the most useful knowledges for my stakeholders may not necessarily come from the Great Theorists.  What I took away from the NYCORE conference and the readings was that I should not suppress my Activist identity.  On the contrary, it should inform all of my other roles just as my Teacher/Student/Researcher roles inform each other.