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Independent Scholarship

Negarra A. Kudumu

February 5, 2021

For the purpose of this discussion, I am thinking of scholarship as the production and knowledge and meaning, often but not exclusively in the form of texts, by individuals possessing specialized expertise, acquired over time through the lived experience of the various domains where discipline exists and is replicated.

And within that, an independent scholar is someone who, like me, contextualizes themselves in a pre-existing radical tradition of progressive thinkers¹ not bound by the oft rigid requirements that traditional academia presents. Academia, like the museum and the library, can be considered the final frontier, or battlefield, where individuals and their related power networks meet and compete for power.

Simultaneously, and soberingly, another defining characteristic of the independent scholar is that we are often locked out of access to financial resources, the ability to regularly engage with students, and the benefits of scholarly networks of support and mentorship that are part and parcel of working within a university system.

The issue of financial resources is notable because rare is the independent scholar who can make a life solely off of their scholarship. While I have been paid fairly, more often than not for my writing and speaking engagements, none of it pays has ever been able to pay my monthly expenses. The great irony is that starting salaries for junior academics, even at the most prestigious of the world’s universities, is often a pittance, especially when compared to the debt many academics incur, particularly in the US, to put themselves through graduate programs.

I first began to think of myself as an independent scholar after presenting at an academic conference in 2016.

The interest and comments that I received after the presentation, and the subsequent engagement I received from university professors on social media, helped to create a pipeline of writing and speaking opportunities for me, most of which were facilitated by artists who understood immediately that my scholarship was my artist advocacy practice made visible. It has really been artists who have helped me to see this about myself and I am forever grateful.

The other, and perhaps the most enjoyable piece of being an independent scholar, is that I can create my own trajectory. I do not have to follow an institutional path with ideals I do not ascribe to or rules that are oppressive. I don’t have to run the risk of doing all the right things only to still be told I am not good enough, which in real terms means: not making tenure, thus not making a better salary, and also not having access to funding and publishing opportunities.

Independently, there is the freedom of choice, both in my research and in the opportunities presented to me. I also get to engage with traditional institutions in a way that feels healthy to me. This often manifests as opportunities to speak in an unfettered manner. There is an assumption that academic rigor falls to the wayside just because one isn’t connected to an institution. That is as gross a generalization as the one which declares that all scholarship coming from within academia is valuable.

In my day-to-day, I spend a lot of time bookmarking and reading articles and books, talking to artists, and conducting studio visits (pre-pandemic). I am a very old school, underline, highlight, make-notes-in-the-margin kind of reader. I type on a laptop and though I [apparently] love writing under pressure, I am best when I write over weeks, taking the time to come back to a text with fresh eyes. My writing process is only dictated by the very flexible deadlines that those who commission articles from me set and my own schedule that thankfully, I can adjust as necessary. I have organized a council - some institutional academics, some artists, some Indies like myself - who are a mix of aggressive red pen editors, grammar gurus, theory nerds, and polymathic savants, and they consistently force me to raise the bar stylistically and topically.

Though I wholly believe this path was put before me, rather than an overt agentic choice on my part, if I could choose, I would choose this route again and again. It is part and parcel of what allows me to effectively navigate the intersection of my art and healing praxes. It thoroughly grounds me in a tradition of progressive thought that neither desires nor requires the recognition of the status quo to be relevant or valuable. It achieves its relevance and grows in value to the degree to which it is useable in and among community.

Challenges - Rewards - Opportunities - Constraints

Should you ever decide that you want a PhD, the very criticism that made you interesting and attractive as an independent scholar may very well be what keeps you out of academia, because of course the institution does not want anybody that is not willing to bend towards its way of doing things.

Life and Work of Scholar 1

What separates a scholar from others is the degree to which they are able to drill down to the fine points of the topic in question.

Teaching is a very specific skill set that, in my estimation, should not automatically be assumed to be the domain, inherent to the domain, of scholarship.

Life and Work of a Scholar 2

When I think about self-directed study, I think about these kinds of engagements: engagements with the artists, engagements with the artworks themselves as often as possible, engagement with the texts that have been written about those artists and about those works, engagement with artists and ideas in similar genres, engagement with the scholars and the writers and the other kinds of intellectuals that these artists are thinking about and deriving inspiration from. That’s what my practice has been and continues to be.

Scholarship + Healing

When I consider what my independent scholarship has looked like, it is precisely a practice that is not about vertical silos, but rather about intersections. That is why one of the mantras associated with my business is, ‘At the crossroads of art and healing.’