Rippling Voices Interview #4: Sarita Jayanty Mizin, PhD
Sarita Jayanty Mizin, PhD, is an English and REGSS (Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Faculty director of its Intersectional Women’s Center. She is an avid teacher and learner who changes her community through both activism and teaching feminist and postcolonial theory.
(Note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.)
1: On your biography on the Universities of Wisconsin website, you are described as a “humanities teacher and scholar working at the intersections of fin de siècle literature, women of color feminisms, and postcolonial theory.” Could you give a brief description of the meanings of these terms, how they intersect in your work, and what it is about these subjects that interests you?
Sure! So, fin de siècle refers to literature from the time period of the transition between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. My grad school training was in feminist theory and postcolonial studies, which can be understood as the readings and concepts I use to analyze texts from that time period. So, just like an emphasis on a school of philosophy or a branch of physics, postcolonial and women of color feminisms refer to the group of thinkers whose ideas assist me in deciding what I pay attention to.
For example, when I’m thinking with ideas and concepts from women of color feminisms, I’m referring not just to the identities of specific scholars, but also their methods. For example, Audre Lorde is a poet and Black feminist who centers the concerns of women of color in her writing and the questions she asks. So when I read a text from a historical time period, I use these more recent thinkers to help me notice and attend to the themes and topics that women of color feminists are interested in in my analysis, such as the impact of gender and race understandings. Postcolonial theorists are interested in thinking about the ongoing impacts and legacy of colonialism worldwide as it shows up in different kinds of cultural texts, like novels, films, and even political rhetoric. When I am reading with women of color feminists in mind as well as postcolonial theory, I might notice where themes of colonialism show up in a novel and how they impact how characters understand their gender and relationships, even when the influence of colonialism might not be immediately obvious.
These approaches interest me because I was lucky enough to do some archival research in graduate school and found both literary texts and histories that most people in the United States had not heard of or known. This initially sparked my curiosity, and now what I find most interesting is how these stories and fantasies about life in the nineteenth century are still so alive today. My work now focuses on how so many current leaders and thinkers tell stories about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to manage and influence people today.
2: In that same biography, you call yourself a “teacher-learner,” and state that being a feminist requires learning from the outside world, and even from students, rather than just being an informer. How do you put this into practice in the classroom, and how does this method of teaching reflect feminist ideas?
Feminism is, to borrow Sara Ahmed’s words, a “world-making project.” What that means is that feminism is invested in analyzing how it is we live, both in the past and present, amidst all kinds of social institutions and structures. It seeks first to understand how these institutions and structures impact us (religion/church, schools, family, etc), and, from that understanding, creatively explores possibilities for other kinds of social arrangements.
How this shows up in the classroom for me is in the form of some core premises:
Knowledge is never wasted. The idea that all knowledge must be immediately used for a particular purpose is an exploitative and extractive take on how learning works. The world is so unpredictable. You never know what small piece of knowledge might show up years later in a chance encounter with an important person in your life. More knowledge gives us a bigger toolbox so we can be prepared for the happy accidents that might occur across the scope of our lives.
Learning is constant, and everyone has something to learn. I find this inherently feminist as it removes some of the emphasis on hierarchical approaches to knowledge. We can respect expertise while also being open to recognizing when we still have more to learn as we receive new knowledge and change our own priorities and understandings.
Curiosity and interest are skills that can be taught. My feminism is an investment primarily in other people and a world outside of ourselves. We can focus on changing our own perspectives and mindsets, but ultimately, that is about how we interact with and consider others. I think a lot of people imagine that we just “like what we like.” But this hides how much our social experiences and the chance shape of our lives has influenced our interests. I think a focus on adopting a mindset of curiosity is a key part of feminism. In my classrooms, I try to teach students how to generate interest and curiosity for themselves, even when they might feel resistance to a text or topic. Sometimes we have to ask questions of ourselves, as to where we think that resistance comes from, before we can ask questions of others.
People might read this and say, well, what does all of that have to do with feminism? And I would say, well, feminism cannot begin if we are not willing to first be students asking questions of ourselves and our world, like “How do we know what we know? Why do we do what we do?”
3: You are also the current head of the Intersectional Women’s Center, which, according to the University, is “an antiracist center whose mission is strongly informed by Women of Color Feminism.” While it seems like a lot of universities have spaces for women and spaces for people of color, it seems less common for there to be an explicitly “intersectional” space where antiracism is an integral part of that space’s feminism. What specific principles of Women of Color Feminism inform this center, and what do you believe this approach makes the center more effective or inclusive?
I think what informs our center is specifically the vision that the student-feminist founders had in mind, mainly that they identified places where our university’s culture needed to be improved for the benefit of all faculty, students, and staff. Additionally, the initial founding students included a number of women of color and WGSS students who had learned how to see these systemic inequalities through their coursework as well as personal experience.
Assessing the center in terms of ‘effective’ or ‘inclusive’ really depends on the experiences of people who interact with the center. It is up to our community and student workers to be in touch with what’s happening on campus and design programming to answer the community’s needs. The campus will continue to change, and it is important that the center reflects that dynamism. I don’t want to compare our center to other centers, as I think you really need to be on the ground on a campus to know what work a particular space is doing. Websites are really unreliable and often outdated, and many in this area of work are aware of the need for protection while doing it, and therefore, they don’t always publicly share all the information.
I do know that the principles from women of color feminism that inform our work include bringing attention and a platform to whoever is most vulnerable in our campus community at the time, responding to the needs of people on campus as they themselves define them, and focusing on education in relation to how learnings from feminism, specifically those related to gender, race, class, ability, and many other aspects of identity, include knowledge that can improve the lives of all. We also really focus on mentorship and intergenerational solidarity, as in the US campus environment where students are increasingly being interpreted as “paying clients,” the lines of power and hierarchy don’t always play out along traditional lines in relation to administrative structures or external pressures. For example, I’ve seen student groups lobby for changes successfully when staff members could not for fear of losing their jobs!
4: Recently, you co-edited two books– one called The Doom of the Great City, written by William Delisle in 1880, and another called After London; or, Wild England by Richard Jefferies. These edits included commentary on the relevance of its apocalyptic/environmental, landscape, and racial themes to today, and appendices for educators in a variety of disciplines. Could you explain more about what this book is about, the work you did, as well as how these stories might connect with a modern audience?
I’ve thought a lot about these projects, but the key unifying factor is noting how knowledge about the human impact on this earth is not a new phenomenon, and that even in the nineteenth century many people noticed how industrialization and colonization were changing people’s lives, the landscape, and all aspects of the environment.
Our focus in bringing both of these novels back into publication is to circulate this information along with pointing out how many of the climate disaster fictions people love today today, like the entire 28 days Later series or even Avatar, are also relying on some really imperialistic logic that often sees colonialism as the answer that can solve the climate problem for people in the global north. It’s an old story. Floods, blights, or even class structure or perceived religious persecution keeping you from successfully exploiting land at home? Why not head to the colonies, where life is better? Pay no attention to the people already living here. It is also the story of America, no?
This logic sets up so many hierarchies that encourage audiences to see some people and lives as more valuable than others. Our hope is that if people can see this in a nineteenth-century text, maybe they will be more easily able to identify this thinking that persists in many of the stories they enjoy today. The curation of a text, the teaching of it, that’s the part that can make that difference in developing this analytical skill. I know, because I’ve had teachers who have given me this learning.
5: REGSS studies are fields that, especially in recent years, have been called ideologically biased, useless, or a threat to men. Clearly, I don’t believe that, or else I wouldn’t be writing to you, but I’m interested in how– a person who has done graduate work in these fields- would respond to these claims, and why you believe this field valuable as an academic subject and/or in broader life. In other words, how does this academic “theory” have a tangible impact on the world?
Hah! Yes, well, I think the feminism people see as a “threat” is more of a straw feminism than the actual feminism I practice in my daily life. What I mean by straw feminist, is that it’s a version of feminism you could only believe in if you’ve never actually read the work of any feminists. Also, there are many feminisms and they don’t all agree with each other, just like any other critical field.
Feminism definitely has had an impact on the world, to the point that people are already legislating against its language, its concepts, and its increasing popularity on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The word “bias” is also so tricky, as I believe everything has a bias because once concepts are in the hands of a person, they will apply their own experience and knowledge to them. This is just how learning and communication works; we learn as ourselves, and also develop skills to distance ourselves from parts of our discipline. It’s a dialectic. Feminism prioritizes embracing what we can learn from our personal experience, a kind of knowledge about the world, and it also encourages us to develop the skills to try to step outside of ourselves for a moment and think about others, to imagine being less like ourselves, to see things we might not otherwise see. And it has different methods for this.
If someone feels like feminism is a threat to them, well, my response would first be to ask: What are the tools they’ve been given that have trained them into this thinking? I am assuming, of course, that they are presenting this belief in good faith. I would ask questions investigating why they feel that way, where that message comes from for them, and what they feel they have lost. So often, however, people with power aren’t actually operating sincerely. They might not even believe what they are saying, and definitely do not want to learn what feminism is. Rather, they want to use a specific idea of it for their own purposes. If any other set of ideas worked towards that end in the moment, I’m sure these powerful people would just as readily use another concept to benefit themselves at the expense of others. And note, when I say ‘powerful,’ in the US, this often means ‘wealthy.’ I need to say what I mean. This is a culture where ideas and power are for sale, and there are tools that have made public opinion available for purchase. That is a consequence of the hollowing out of public education, for sure, the loss of the ability to distinguish reliable sources and discern quality information when encountering rhetoric and media.
6: These classes are also under threat. As you’re surely aware, the current U.S. President, shortly after retaking office, signed an executive order called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” meant to rescind federal funding for schools that teach certain “uncomfortable” truths about race, gender, or sexuality, such as the privilege that comes with having certain identities instead of others. Some states have passed laws restricting these kinds of subjects at the college level. From the perspective of someone who teaches this, what do you think a country without knowledge of any of these concepts would look like? How would the quality of academia be affected?
Well, I think we’re already living in that country, as many states had previously adopted or tried to enact similar laws even before this executive order. If we think this is new, then we are folks who are lucky to have so far been exempt from these efforts until now! Many have been working around this for decades. And even without explicit laws, in this landscape of inequality, many do not have the time and space for understanding these concepts outside of personal experience. “Privilege” is an especially tough one, because it’s about what you don’t have to experience, versus what you do.
I think we really need to make knowledge and information available to everyone, and these laws seem like censorship at its most basic form. It’s actually really difficult to even access this information in the first place, either through education, internet access, or economics that create free time to even learn. . . in our country, people have vastly different experiences of education.
I’m also concerned about our country’s attitudes towards learning in general. It’s complicated. Public schools have always been tools of colonialism, and they have also been sites where students used the learning and skills they gained there to challenge these systems. It does feel like right at the point education was changing and K-12 teachers were really interrogating some of its more colonial and nationalist learnings- that’s when the tide turned, and public schools were now seen as a threat to the powers they were originally designed to reinforce. So, no wonder powerful people want to destroy them! They are one of the first places children learn about the nature of authority outside the home, but it is also one of the first places they start learning about how to subvert and challenge it, a place where many experiment with dissent!
7: Going off this– as part of your activism, you created a program at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire to mentor first-generation students and students of color, called the Magliocco Scholars. Given the previously mentioned state of the government, such programs matter more than ever. How did you go about designing this program, and how would you describe its impact on students so far?
I think you have to ask my students themselves! Our recent English newsletter had some comments from Sophia Curran-Moore about it.
I designed the program, yes, but could only do so because we had the funds! We cannot do any of this work without funds! A generous community member, John Magliocco, whose children had positive experiences at UWEC, wanted to fund more students so that they, too, could have a positive experience.
It’s this kind of thinking, a care not just for your own children, but other people’s children, that I have learned from the teachings of postcolonial feminists. I saw this quality in this donor. So, after being approached by the chair of my department about it, I designed the program based on what we already know works for student retention in higher ed from the data we have: building community and mentorship connections, thinking about possible careers early on for opportunities like internships, and getting involved on campus through organizations outside of coursework.
I would add that I share all this data with students as well, and say that these are the things we know help you have a better experience. Why would we hide that from them? We don’t have to trick them into believing it. These students are smart; they know what to do with the information. I just wanted to be sure they get the information early on so when people ask them “English? what are you going to do with that?” they have all the data at hand to share something like, “well, statistically, I can do a huge range of things and still be more employable than most business majors following graduation.” It’s true! The data suggests it.
And, I am not surprised that the students who have been in the program have been empowered with this information ended up joining and even leading a number of student orgs, doing internships across campus and the community, and have also gone on to graduate education. Look at them go! They astound me.
8: I want to now focus on the small things that people can do to change the world for the better, small things that can add up to a better world. Do you have any stories of something you or someone you know did for other(s), that perhaps felt small at the time but left a great impact?
I have too many stories! I love my feminists and have seen them do so many amazing things for others. For example, I’ve seen Dr. Rose-Marie Avin, the person our center is named after now, even in retirement. She reaches out to students to check in and see if they are doing okay while lending any community support she can offer.
I’ll also never forget that one of my dissertation advisors, who is now my co-editor on those books we discussed, heard me speaking about my dissertation project and just said, “I really think you need to take a course with Suzanne.” Dr. Suzanne Edwards is a feminist theorist working in medieval studies - and I had already made my graduate course schedule for the semester and did not really see how the course would fit in my schedule. And I’m no medievalist! But he really emphasized this, so I decided to audit it anyway. Long story short, that gender and sexuality feminist theory course with Suzanne changed my thinking, my dissertation, my life! I’m so grateful to Michael for recommending this, and to Suzanne for her teaching, to Rita, the director of the first gender equity center I worked at, and to the many other feminists this small suggestion brought into my life.
My world has been so enriched by their presence, their minds, and their generosity, and I know I would not be here doing this work without them. How vibrant the feminist community is! Even when we all disagree with each other about where we go next! In the end, it’s about how we all treat other people on the day-to-day, and I’m lucky to have seen so many feminists try their best to live that out.
