When I expressed my trouble making connections with professors and graduate students during my first year, my mentor told me, “find your people.” I didn’t realize the depth of this advice until much later in my graduate education.
The graduate school application process requires that we pitch ourselves according to our research goals, topics, and who we would like to work with. While I recognize its usefulness in finding programs that work for you, in my experience predetermining who is, and who is not, conducive to research greatly narrowed down who I sought relationships with during my first year. Additionally, I never considered my interests changing or issues arising with the faculty I had sought to work with. In short, what if things didn’t go as I planned? What if the community I had expected at my university wasn’t there? This isn’t to claim that those I found at my institution weren’t helpful, but what if it wasn’t my community that I claimed and would claim me?
I first started graduate school aiming to contribute to phenomenology through a decolonial lens. While my courses catered to research in this area, something was lacking. The ideas weren’t sparking joy to the degree that I expected, and the terrain was growing less and less exciting as I was expected to start producing work. I was growing hesitant and regretful. When I was venting to Dr. Jackie Scott about my difficulty finding a community and even facing some discrimination in the classroom, she encouraged me to “find my people.”
Who were my people and where are they? I wouldn’t know until I immersed myself in those around me and participated in a variety of things, playing with the potential that I could work in a variety of fields. What if I was now interested in law and economics? What if I liked metaphysics? Maybe I should look into the history of philosophy. Could I be a Kantian? While the last one is still not true, a course on Kant did give me an excuse to delve into Western and Indigenous metaphysical differences. And despite these topics lacking an explicit connection to my core drive towards decolonial thinking, they helped me sort out who I wanted to think about, honed my philosophical thinking skills, and gave me a greater view of coloniality and how it operates today. Up until this point, I was used to approaching philosophy according to content, so engaging with things I was unfamiliar with encouraged me to work on philosophical skills and research abilities. Additionally, the professors from these courses were valuable interlocutors. Despite our disparate areas of research they still offered valuable advice, guidance, encouragement, and most of all friendship. Maybe similarities weren’t what I needed in a community, but I needed differences and productive friction. By approaching issues from an entirely different standpoint than my interlocutors, I better realized where I stood in relation to this canon and how I wanted to move forward with my research.
Once I played with my potential and delved deeper into what I needed from a community, the spaces where I could find more of “my people” then followed. Another professor and mentor, Dr. Jesus Luzardo, offered the possibility of doing an independent study on a topic of my choice. I chose to focus on indigeneity and the way this racial identity has appeared across time and in various legal, social, and political contexts. Not only was the freedom to explore and investigate a topic exciting, but having someone willing to work through ideas and readings alongside me was all the more enriching. We met regularly to discuss the chosen texts and established a timeline to produce research. Even returning to some aspects of Kant, I demonstrated how indigenous metaphysics, as described by Vine Deloria Jr., can use Kant to motivate the preservation of nature and the world around us. I later presented this at several conferences. These events allowed me to meet peers with interesting and unique research of their own. The community we form doesn’t need to be limited to a single university. We later started reading groups and met in bars or online to talk regularly.
Independent studies and the opportunity to explore my interest outside of the classroom have become the most vital component of my education. Meeting peers, receiving reading recommendations, workshopping materials, and discussing texts together has accelerated my research and expanded my interest way beyond any single class experience. Jackie’s advice to “find your people” only now resonates with me to its fullest extent. Classrooms are composed of people and the opportunity to engage with others in this space is only the start of education. Classes can be stiff, structured, and one-sided. Sometimes that’s helpful, but if this is all that is offered in higher education then that is also a serious problem. Sometimes we require collaboration and community engagement. Classroom discussion is a start, but informal settings and mutually enriching activities like reading and research groups are where these pedagogical lessons flourish.
Thinking in terms of our singular classroom is too narrow; instead, I think that community-based learning makes for an effective education. While we can structure the microcosmic classroom to model our pedagogical values, finding a way to move beyond that and help students settle into a community of peers and friends offers a greater benefit not only for their education but also for their mental and social health. As current and future university instructors, we also should create an inclusive learning environment in our classrooms, department, and campus. We should take it to heart and interact with organizations like Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) or find ways within our ability to rethink our approach less from the perspective of an individual but towards groups and allow people to come together. Our classroom is one space among many where these opportunities can appear.
Reflecting on Jackie’s encouragement to “find your people,” I strongly believe at the simplest level that people learn from people. While classrooms are an avenue where we can be exposed to other people’s thoughts, I believe that finding your people and community beyond the classroom is truly where learning occurs.
Rene Ramirez
Rene Ramirez is a Ph.D. student in Loyola University Chicago’s Philosophy Department. His interests are in Critical Philosophy of Race, Indigenous Critical Theory, Decolonial Thought, and Social-Political Philosophy. Currently, his research focuses on indigenous philosophical thinking as it relates to metaphysics, religion, ethics, politics, and methods for a decolonial future. He is also a Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) Organizer for LUC’s MAP Chapter.
