Tory bargains (How to pay for social mobility)

diary entry from May 2023

Concrete slabs in the university building that you can probably climb atop. You're zoning out of a talk and your mates, who are also bored, blame themselves (or just assume it's due to their own brain mechanics). But you blame the speaker for being boring. You hate on people for speaking when people don't want to listen but have no choice. You wonder if that is something to do with your a complex around supressing your own voice in the past.

Sunlight on an angle on the laminate plank floors. Three sneezes and Amber says Bless You. The McElroy Brothers say that blessing is in fact saying something about the blesser not being offended, or being concerned about the well-being of someone who has just made a loud noise. On second Benedryl of the day.

Ethics. Why is it ethics in an institutional context and just being a decent human person when it's a group of people not in a job. I hate job talk and I've had enough. I want to live my life learning about what's interesting and not about how to be employed. But overall I'm happy that I only have to sit through stuff like this from time to time in exchange for getting a free degree (of course, previously, everyone got a free degree)

Paying for social mobility (thoughts begun in May and finished October 2023)

• talk about your lived experience and identity, sometimes in buzzwords on a post-it note, sometimes artfully through your creations
• use your face to show them how you look
• describe your interests. Couch them in terms of ways that others can absorb into their organisation as diversity
• feel fury and grief, consider the mechanisms of love, tragedy, beauty and injustice. Think about how you might frame these things as organisational recommendations in a report. Or capture them from others in a Google Form as well as consultations over complimentary biscuits.
• indicate which demographics you belong to by ticking all boxes that apply
• evaluate their performance by filling out questionnaires and giving spoken interviews, sending them into the abyss, never to know what becomes of them
• pinpoint and signpost the location of the organisations on the present cultural landscape, at all times. Ensure you foreground the power they wield over you, even as your work appears to resist it