What Kind of Doctor Do I Want to Be?

We can resist the violences we know firsthand, to truly equate teaching and learning with openheartedness, with survival, even with nurture.

This is Dialek :: Dialect, a column by Khairani Barokka on language, culture, and power.

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I waited for so long.

I waited, lying down on a futon, in an on-campus art studio, flanked by my digital collages on the walls. For news from the two professors who’d examined me in that room for hours on my dissertation and creative portfolio, who’d left to discuss my results among themselves.

And when I learned that I passed with no corrections and was awarded a PhD in visual cultures, I covered my face with my hands. My body began to shake uncontrollably for quite some time.

It was one of the happiest days of my life. Like so many people who attempt a doctorate and pass, it was hard-earned, was long-awaited, and at times felt impossible. I’d been thinking about my creative project for nine years at that point and working on it in earnest for four. I’d wanted to get a PhD since at least my high school days, when I’d naively assumed the path before me would be easy, brisk, and just.

What I didn’t say, when I gratefully announced the news online, was how very close I came to not receiving the degree a few months before. Through no fault of my own, but—without divulging too much—because of racist and ableist abuse from within academia itself.

So when I posted my achievement with pride, something child-Okka had dreamed of for decades, it was a Watch me. It was a Never tell me I can’t do anything, ever again, addressed to the world. It was a Try to hurt me, to stop me, and I’ll come back stronger than you ever imagined. Even as I recognize that the ability to “come back stronger” is an ableist concept. That sometimes you can’t, and it’s not your fault, nor is it something to be ashamed of. That what “stronger” means, to an ableist world obsessed with certain markers of achievement, is so often different from what strength really looks like.

When I posted that announcement, it was with sheer relief at miraculously getting to be in a room with four professors who loved my work, and told me so, after those very recent battles.

It was with utter gratitude at having two friends storm the room to hug me right after, the same gratitude with which I tearfully answered the phone with the news when my partner called, when I told my parents in Jakarta. My father, who’d visited the local mosque and prayed fervently for me that day.

It was with a disabled woman’s relief that I was allowed to lie down during the entire exam on said futon, kindly furnished by my examination chair (thank you, Susan). Particularly after four years of being repeatedly denied various access needs that were my right, wrestling with extreme pain and c-PTSD while attempting to write about it, in an environment that so often exacerbated these things. I wanted to share this announcement with people who had helped me, had been rooting for me.

Yet I am aware that posts like these on social media are always both celebratory for some and painful for others, especially for those who do not finish a PhD and would have dearly liked to, through no fault of their own, through being in a system not made for us. Or for those many for whom the examination process is brutal, racist, and traumatic. These many who are blocked from achieving, particularly at the doctorate level, include fellow women of color in particular, and/or fellow disabled and/or D/deaf people. Or for communities of trans people, low-income people. Anyone told we do not belong where we are. If I hadn’t passed, I hope I would have felt just as much pride that I had tried my best to survive, to even thrive, in all-too-often abusive systems.

I’ve had nearly two years now to enjoy being called “Dr.” in correspondence. In that same time, during a pandemic exacerbated by state and corporate neglect, ineptitude, and eugenicism around the world—during which time, like so many, I’ve lost several loved ones in all too short a period—I’ve been thinking about the circumstances in which we attach this title to ourselves as disabled women of color, in which circumstances we do not, and why.

Professionally, as I now work at a university, it helps to have “Dr.” in my email signature, to sign off on presentations and papers that way. If I want to make headway in institutions, it’ll help. But what does being a doctor (and, especially now, it is important to add: not that kind of doctor) mean for the collective, for our familial networks and chosen kin, for our communities? What does having a doctorate mean?

This is a story each person who earns their degree has to figure out for themselves.

What’s certain is that the world seems swamped with doctors who have no insight, empathy, originality, or ethics. That there are many aspects of academia that do not lend those within it to easily access what stores of these traits we have. That in this pandemic, there are bloodthirsty doctors with no sense of justice—who are eugenicists, thinking of people as though we are not people. That the world is also home to vast numbers of people who’ve never set foot on a university campus or been enrolled in formal education and are unique intellects.

My grandparents on both sides of the family did not have the opportunities of their children, or their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Two of them stopped formal education mid-elementary school. Still, I should be so lucky to ever have half the wisdom they gained in their lifetimes, their empathy and kindness, the dignity and respect they commanded in their communities. What we do have in common is a sense of responsibility to the world, as well as an awareness of our shortcomings, a persistence in trying to be better.

We all have different pathways of contributing to what we care about, to our notions of a just, kind society. For some of us, that pathway involves going through formal education for an often-inordinate amount of years, and multiple degrees. But this is not the only way to achieve things, to help people and ourselves, and it is not always the best route for everyone. Formal education, especially at the doctorate level, comes with costs to mental, emotional, and financial health. The academic job market was collapsing before the pandemic, spurred on by the corporatization of the university, and attendant mass casualization of academic jobs, with slashed benefits and overwork.

What does having a doctorate mean? This is a story each person who earns their degree has to figure out for themselves.

The “Dr.” honorific can cause ambivalence, when spaces of formal education are still so often elitist, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, ageist, and ableist—precisely because they are overwhelmingly framed by colonial notions of what a “good education” entails. So many don’t finish their doctorates due to these structural forces; so many have done everything they could bear. It is not a lack on the part of those who don’t finish. Overwhelmingly, it is a failing of these broken systems that too often do not prioritize a human’s whole wellness, that value only their output according to very specific rules. Rules that are too often ruthless when it comes to the needs of D/deaf and/or disabled and/or chronically ill people, of parents (especially women), of people who may live far from campus, of people of color, of trans and gender nonbinary people, of low-income students. Currently, government policy in the United Kingdom, where I live, does not require any restrictions related to the pandemic, meaning no universities enforce masks, hand sanitation, social distancing, or anything that would ensure its disabled and chronically ill students, staff, and faculty survive—in a world of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, they only “strongly suggest.”

I once read a tweet saying “universities are violence.” Thank you to whoever wrote that. I’ve felt that. I’ve experienced that at every institution of higher learning I’ve attended and am reminded of so many of those I care for who have become grievously ill because of universities, who have been forced to work in distress and with no safety, who have been exploited. The important work of Sara Ahmed on universities and complaint certainly comes to mind. If we look at the material history of what universities are, it is so evident. What languages subjects are taught in, what subjects are taught, and with which pedagogical styles, have all been linked to outright violence.

For example, what counts as formal education has always been tied to colonialisms—whether European colonization of Southeast Asia or Javanese colonization of other cultures in Indonesia’s borders—as have its measures of “success.” In Southeast Asia, Europeans instituted systems of formal education that were designed to bar natives from gaining power and resources, to homogenize their language and ways of thinking. When the colonized made gains, those with the upper hand received them first; for instance, the first Dutch-sanctioned schools for native girls were primarily accessible to the Javanese elite. Power always talks; power always teaches.

And of course, universities in the United States are tied to stolen indigenous lands and built on violations of Black bodies, on slavery. In the United Kingdom, universities continue to be linked to slavery, eugenics, and the continued colonization of so much of the world, through complicity in extractive capitalism.

At the same time, as people are forced to conform to colonial ideas of “education,” innumerable kinds of knowledge are being systematically denigrated and threatened, if they haven’t already gone extinct. We must protect place-based local knowledges and support the revitalization of indigenous arts and languages. As we reclaim and protect these knowledges, it does not mean we must idealize our ancestors and ancestral histories beyond recognition, but we must take the best of scorned and dying and vital traditions and nurture futures for them like seeds (including protecting actual seeds). Because within these place-based knowledges are possibilities and visions, particularly in the fight against environmental destruction and climate change.

So what kind of doctor do I want to be? I want to be one who recognizes that underlying structures within academia are broken and built on brokenness, that academia erases systems of education from the heritages of many. I want to be a doctor who works with others who also recognize that the system doesn’t have to be this way. I want to be the kind of doctor who acknowledges that a “PhD” is merely three letters behind a name. That the true measure of worth—especially in this enormously violent time, when eugenicist public policies are applied to a pandemic—is a compassion for others and self, solidarity in action, and a recognition of the importance of a multitude of voices, languages, educations.

I want to apologize to anyone hurt by my announcement of a doctorate, or anyone who thought it implied that this system is a meritocracy. It is certainly not. I survived eighteen years in and out of postsecondary education with help from so many, with a core support group during my doctorate, especially of fellow women of color in the arts, of fellow disabled people, and my Indonesian kin. I don’t know how much an individual can change harmful rules and education systems for the better. But an individual—many individuals, a community—can survive. If we choose to, we can work together and do good work.

I think of those of us who are doctors—and anyone who’s achieved traditional markers of “success” in formal education—who are disabled, women of color, migrants, queer, from any communities disrespected by existing power structures. And I think of how we need to sit both with pride at having attained the system’s measures of achievement against the odds, and with an acknowledgement that the system is one of great harm. We need to feel measures of success that are truly internal and based on our values.

With any luck, together, we can try to resist the violences we know firsthand, to truly equate teaching and learning with openheartedness, with survival, even with nurture.