This semester I start my last leg on my education journey—PhD student. I type that sentence, erase it, retype it, look away, and repeat the cycle a few times before I accept it all sounds cliche. I imagine myself as the brown girl emoji with hunched shoulders and upturned palms, before pausing to listen more closely to what’s going on down the hall with my teens. Though I’ve been a parenting student before, I realize tonight this is going to be a much different journey.

I’m in a serious season of transformation, and truthfully, my mind is so compacted with thoughts and things to do I haven’t the energy to find original and fresh words; instead, I want to get there. Get to the point already, so I can move on to grading papers and editing syllabi.

So, here I am. Grad student, again. Forty-something. Mom of high scholars. Wife of two decades. Adjunct across three campuses. Whew, that’s a mouthful to consider.

We are two weeks into class and I’m challenged. Creatively, fully and deeply challenged. I keep asking myself, “who am I,” because this work requires an answer, or at least a dart shot at the bull’s eye. I drive an hour to two hours to and from class every week, and I find myself asking again, again, “who are you?”

Perhaps, it isn’t that I am asking who am I, but more deeply, what do I want to do with myself? What, of this life, do I want to create? Being the mom of teens requires a different approach to everything. I am constantly mindful of who they are becoming, alongside me, and how I’m helping them navigate spaces and narratives. That requires me to be mindful of who I am, and what I’m modeling for them.

In fact, there is not a day that I am not mindful of their perception and experience of me through this process.

The past few weeks I’ve been struck by something again and again—over a decade and a half ago I read Their Eyes Were Watching God as an adult woman and that reading sent me on a wild goose chase to absorb everything there is and was to know about Zora Neale Hurston. I read everything I could get my hands on, closely, and soon started to daydream about becoming an ethnologist or ethnographer. I wanted to continue her work, finding the stories and souls of Black folk, particularly Black women, and writing them. I dreamed of talking to people, hearing old stories like the ones Granma would tell me about her childhood as a sharecropper, and recording them. I imagined pictures and artifacts, hammy-down recipes and quilts/afghans. But it was all nebulous. Sort of flighty, like a hummingbird hovering over a stalk of lavender. I had no clue how to approach this kind of creative work, so it rested in the back of my mind.

I didn’t even know what questions to ask, or even how to visualize what being an ethnographer would look like in our current world. Anthropology has been a great interest of mine (as well as culture), since I started undergrad over twenty years ago, but I always had this feeling that I was late to the party. Like somehow, all the world’s peoples and cultures, their arts and languages and foods, it all had been discovered, recorded, shared, and there was nothing left under the sun or moon for me to do. Set aside, my great reluctance to jet set around the world, or country even, and that meant there was no one and nothing for me to “study.”

But Zora, Zora made me dream. She used literature and creative writing as a tool, a vehicle for her work—brilliant.

My VRM course challenges me because before sitting in class a few weeks ago, I had no concept of this field. Sure, I knew about cultural and ethnic studies, media studies, art history, anthropology, history, ethnography, film studies, etc.—what I didn’t know is that all of them are capable of merging into one. Quite truthfully, I’m still full of awe that this field exists. This field that combines three academic traditions I am quite passionate about.

This class will provide a theoretical and historical background for considering three scholarly traditions—from the arts, humanities, and social sciences—that research about and/or with visualization tools (cameras; digital media) and/or visual objects (art, photography, film, video, digital media). You will be asked to write about and also within visual technologies including the video essay, ethnography or documentary, and digital storytelling. You will be asked to consider the practical, intellectual, and disciplinary stakes of translating academic writing to other, non-traditional, visual formats. you will learn to keep an academic blog.

—Visual Research Methods Course Description

I share this information for a couple reasons. First, this will be my academic blog’s home, and in case you are not familiar with Visual Research Methods, but are either interested or would like to follow my journey, this will hopefully give you a better idea of what I’ll share. Second, it’s interesting and cool.

I keep telling myself it is okay to simultaneously find something challenging and cool, frightening and exhilarating. I am all of those things and more.

I’ll be sharing all of my class work here. This includes academic papers, essay reviews, and short films/creative work. I’ve thought about starting to blog seriously, again, for the past couple of years; this class is the perfect catalyst to move me towards that goal.

In addition to this academic work, I am also aiming to blog/share the personal side of my journey. One of the things I’ve discovered recently is there aren’t a lot of academic blogs by Black women, who are mothers and wives—if any. We are here, thriving, yet our voices seem absent. (If you know of any, please leave links in the comments.)

My aim is to marry academics with life, sharing how I am negotiating life as a wife and mom, academic, and woman of color.

It’s time for me to grade papers, read, and figure out how to continue to pack my house up for an impending move.

Transitions.

Thank you for joining me.

-ki