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Hello and welcome to Embodied Study for Our Collective Liberation, a podcast where I speak to beautiful beings studying in ways that center the body and our liberation.
My name is Miyuki Baker and I support visionaries to activate the beauty and embodiment of their offerings in service of our collective liberation. My ancestors come from the brackish waters of Wampanoag Land, Galway Bay, Gyeongsangnam, and Sasebo but I’ve been a guest on Ohlone Land, AKA Oakland, California, since 2015, where my favorite neighbors include Redwood, Oak, and Sausal Creek.
Before I share why I’m starting a podcast, let me tell you how I came to believe that Embodied Study is a portal for our collective liberation.
When I was in my 20s, I spent a few years traveling the world making zines about queer art and activism, going on bike tours, and living on a shoestring budget. In search for some stability and a community of passionate learners, I did what many who love to study do—apply to PhD programs. But once accepted off of the waitlist at Berkeley’s performance studies department, it was challenging to keep my passion alive when seminars were in fluorescent-lit rooms for 3 hours long, and when I was routinely being asked to read hundreds of pages each week. In most seminars, I felt both like an imposter who didn’t know any of the important theorists, while also one of the few students who seemed eager to talk about how these theories mapped onto our own lives.
Fortunately I found a few kindred spirits, including Ra Malika Imhotep who agreed that the life of the mind can (and should!) be pleasurable. What began as a collaboration in 2017 to work on a small zine on Black feminist thought turned into an ongoing embodied spiritual-political education project called The Church of Black feminist Thought.
Through monthly study sessions that revolved around curiosity, care, embodiment, and food, my love of learning thrived. Rather than studying theory to master it, we were gathering around theory that would help us live better and freer each day. Because we tended to our bodies and spirits, we were able to see the thinkers we studied as similarly complex beings who we were in conversation with.
Out of these gatherings emerged a container that would hold a group of people to study with a thinker or theories, as well as the concepts of BEAUTIFUL SCHOLARSHIP & EMBODIED STUDY!
As a long-time zinester, artist, & musician, it felt natural to develop methods such as drawing the monthly portrait of the thinkers while I listened to them giving a talk online. Or eating mac-n-cheese before making art about a theorist who referenced mac-n-cheese. After the study sessions, Ra and I would select the most poignant notes, which I would then visually translate into a visual theory map, leading us to create the Black feminist Study Theory Atlas in 2019. These methodologies helped us co-create the learning environments we wanted and needed to feel alive and embodied.
Since then, I’ve met many other scholars, both in and out of formal institutions, who shared similar experiences around impostor syndrome and the culture of academia that forgets our bodies and our connection to all our relations. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In the past 3 years I’ve made Visual Theory Maps for scholars and changemakers who wanted to share their work in ways that felt spiritually enlivening. And I’ve now led 2 cohorts of people to practice our own embodied study methodologies
I think of myself as responding to the brilliant Black Feminist scholar Toni Cade Bambara who once said it was “the role of the artist to make the revolution irresistible.” I agree wholeheartedly. Why? Because I believe in:
Learning that strengthens our connections to each other, to the more than human, to our own and collective joy and freedom!
Learning that feels good in our bodies (because we honor our limits, and listen to what is pleasurable)
Learning that is accessible to everyone (not just those in formal institutions)
So why a podcast?
One of my teachers at UC Berkeley who helped me see through until the end of my PhD was the scholar and filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha. She helped me see that I had a lot of value to contribute to the field, and encouraged me to keep experimenting, writing and talking about my methods. This podcast is a new way for me to create an archive of what embodied study is for people I see as my colleagues, whether they identify with the words “embodied study” or not.
Some self-employed people join coworking pods to find people working in similar fields with similar values. Well I’m starting a podcast. I have a list of people who inspire me, who are possibility models for the work that I do, and who I also just love learning from and with that I view of as colleagues. Generally they are independent scholars or practitioners in their field, or if they do belong to an institution, they also have a branch of their work that is highly uncontainable within their institution. With this podcast I hope to publicly share these connections and admirations with those who are also excited by embodied study.
And while I’ve interviewed many people in the past, starting with my project in 2010 Asian, Gay and Proud, then my project interviewing academics of color, Beyond the Ivory Tower, and finally with my dissertation project interviewing people with race, class, and or academic privileges practicing community reparations in 2021, I have never once released the actual audio recordings of our conversations; only the transcriptions. I hope that this audio will be a more accessible format for many people. Just like The Church of Black feminist Thought, my goal is to make this podcast feel like you’re in the room with us, listening in to relationships deepening in real time.
One of my mentors, the formidable Dr. Melissa Bird, who is running for congress in Oregon once gave me a format for how to effectively bring my offerings to the world. She asked me when I was finishing my dissertation, how do I want readers to feel, know, and do as a result of reading it.
And so I’ve asked myself the same thing for this podcast.
I want you all to feel: possibility and excitement; which might feel like zings of electrical currents running through your body; I want you to know: that each of you already has embodied study practices that you probably first started doing when you were a kid, and also that including our bodies in our study is a really fun way to do it! And last but not least, what do I want you to DO? To share your beauty with the world in small and large ways. As my possibility model Alexis Pauline Gumbs elaborated for me in 2020 during the very first day of The Black Feminist Breathing Chorus, when Lorraine Hansberry said “We can impose beauty on our future,” she meant all the structures that we’ve created in our lives, whether through our friendships, our gardening, or our art. And I insist that when each of us shares our beauty, that we can practice collective liberation.
On a very practical level, here are some questions I plan to ask each person, although anything is subject to change 🙂
What do you think study (yours and in general) has to do with our collective liberation?
Can you tell a story about your relationship to study? How has it evolved/changed/transformed/gotten stuck? Are there any key thinkers/movers/changemakers who have shaped the way you study?
What are some practices of embodied study that help you show up to your work on this planet?
Can you talk about the physical/embodied and relational aspects of being an independent scholar?
And lastly I’ll be asking each person to offer an embodied study practice & maybe a text that matters to them to share!
So with that I invite you into this portal. Get comfortable and remember to breathe.
Sending lots of love <3
