“You just have to compartmentalize,” said a faculty member to my client, an international graduate student from the Global South. The student had asked their advisor if she had any advice on how to write a dissertation in the midst of growing f@scism in the US and the government’s increasing revocations of student visas.
While the suggestion to compartmentalize might resonate with some people, my client experienced it as a thoughtless and empty recommendation. In the face of looming threats to them and their family, they find it impossible to compartmentalize.
“To separate into isolated compartments or categories” is how Merriam-Webster defines the word, evoking the image of a bento box with dividers isolating rice from dumplings from green beans.
But the worries my client has about their safety cannot be teased from the creative labor of knowledge production, cannot be cleaved in two and stored in their refrigerator.
Of course, there is no easy answer to my client’s question.
Perhaps the only response is to recognize that no answer is adequate for the current moment.
As Angela Cox, PhD, wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, “You do not have to have the answers. You do not have to offer solutions. You can just be there in the moment with another's pain and see them.”
And this is exactly what my client and I did—sat together on Zoom in mutual recognition of the horror of the moment and inequitable impact of state policies on Black and Brown international students.
Then, we brainstormed together how I could support them to write while they are concurrently feeling so much grief. Because, yes--their dissertation is emerging out of their grief, not from a separate compartment in their body-mind. 💜