Oh, You Have a Degree? Then You Must Have a Job!

Laurie Penny had a piece in the Guardian yesterday, in which she discusses the enormous amount of fear and stress young people feel about their student loans and their prospects for employment.

This is something I know.

Oh, is THAT what I'm meant to do!

Penny writes from London, where I have struggled to live before, and I know how difficult it can be (homeless! In January! In Camden!). Though I live now in Ontario, the path my country and province are following is the same as London - increasing ideological austerity even in the face of concrete evidence that it is fiscally reckless and harmful for almost everyone. Though, as with everything in our mess of a hierarchical system, it is most harmful to the people who have already been harmed by it - that is, single parents (mothers, usually), people with disabilities, people in industries with low job security, marginalized racial groups, people without homes, and on and on. The poorer you are, of course, the harder austerity measures hit.

Hi, I'm New Here.

Hi! Welcome!

Here are some things that describe me. I will probably write mostly about being those things, and some other things, and what that means for me in the world. Anything I write that is not directly about being those things in the world is still kind of about being those things in the world, if you know what I mean.

As one of the Base Assumptions of this blog (and, you know, feminism) is that the personal is political, I will try my best to be unflinching in what I write here. There is a lot about me that is not likeable, but I will try to be brave about that, because I think it's important to examine the ways our individual lives are impacted by broader social structures. I also think it's important to illustrate that the process of situating your life and your decisions in cultural context does not automatically rob you of agency, or whatever, and that we will get nowhere if we can't at least agree on that. I believe in recognizing my own privilege, and I will do my best to ensure people who belong to a group with which I do not identify will be able and encouraged to speak for themselves here, especially when discussing issues that impact those groups more directly. I believe that listening to marginalized voices of all varieties is necessary to move the struggle for meaningful equality forward, and that likewise - or therefore - those voices and stories are often ignored. Also, though, I will try to be careful in identifying the line, insofar as that's possible, between listening to stories and relying on anecdotal evidence, which is subject to that most pernicious of effects, the confirmation bias, and I will try to make sure that the speech here is based on fairness and openness. I will likely discover that this is much easier said than done (foreshadowing!).

 I hope to build a safe space here, like the many online spaces that have made me feel safe and welcome, and from which I've learned so much. I hope to add my voice and the voices of whatever community hopefully forms here to a vitally important conversation about power and its manifestations, and I expect to learn a great deal here too.

And we're away!