What Do Professors Do? Posthumous Letter of Love to Ma

Abstract

Assuming an autoethnographic orientation and a shifting performative lettering style, I write posthumously to my mother in response to her question, what do professors do? The letter is a reflexive contribution to contemporary decolonial debates about unrelenting forms of colonizing knowledge, ways of overturning exclusionary credentialing systems, and liberatory modes of knowledge creation. Engaging with the epistemology of the heart, I write to Ma about the fecundity of silence and being a stranger; the (re)making of critical compassionate space in academia; the tenuous movements between different epistemologies; the slipperiness of language and the ambiguities inherent to connecting diverse socio-epistemic worlds; as well as her legacy of socio-epistemic agency. Perhaps communities of insurgent scholars and activists and those who hold humanizing imaginaries in their bosoms may read my letter as an invitation to embrace the heart as the catalytic organ of, and for discernment, comprehension, contemplation, radical agency, and epistemic love.