Seungmi Cho (she/her)
I first met Seungmi Cho at a party for PhD students in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Social Work. I was not a student in the program but was planning on enrolling as a minor the following semester. It’s never fun walking into a party where you don’t know anyone, but I can’t think of a more friendly space than at a party of social workers. Seungmi was my first friend there, and I was relieved to see her in my first social theory class in the School of Social Work when I did eventually enroll. She received her BSW and MSW at UW-Madison and is currently pursuing her PhD. She’s my hero for so many reasons and I hope to capture that below. This is the first of four journal posts, which will be a transcription of a conversation we had on a snowy day on campus.
Midori Samson (she/her)
Part 1: Art vs. Science, Managing Pain, and Antiracism as Personal Liberation
Seungmi Cho: (with a chuckle) So, can you tell me again… what is this? What role are you in?
Midori Samson: I feel like I always want to talk to you when I need a social justice booster or check up! I think I’ve told you about my organization, Trade Winds Ensemble. Sometimes I think we feel insecure—like, we’re musicians, so we must not know anything other than music. Which isn’t true of course…
S: It’s not true at all.
M: And so I think we always are like, “we need outside people, we need to talk to smart people and people who know about other things!” You’re my person who I always think about as being able to talk about race and justice and the things we feel insecure talking about as musicians. These are things I know we’re embodying in our work in TWE, we’re just maybe not as academic or fluent.
S: And I’m excited to talk to you because I’m in a process of learning and trying to destabilize a false binary between art and science. I think our dialogue can help us both.
M: I didn’t know that was part of your interest!
S: I’m exploring using critical auto-ethnography, which is a critical method of inquiry. It’s kind of new and somewhat still emerging, and one of the features of this form of inquiry is that it breaks down this false paradigm between art and science. It tries to appreciate that knowledge can be sentimental and emotional and that voice can be a form of knowledge in itself, in addition to observable facts. It also appreciates that different groups of people generate and engage with knowledge in different ways depending on their sociopolitical location. For example, the way a white man discovers facts obscures the nature of reality for women of color who generate knowledge through discursive processes, which may be lived or embodied through a form of work, or service, or artistic expression. Both of these can exist and they don’t need to obscure one another. But because of dominance, facts often obscure truth and the nature of knowledge for white men as observable obscures a discursive truth that poor people of color sometimes embody and hold.
M: What’s the word you’re saying? Discursive?
S: Yeah, so in terms of a process of engagement with dialogue—can not be directional necessarily. It might be messy or cyclical.
M: Is this all incorporated into your research now?
S: Well, just last week I turned in my preliminary examination, which in some ways is corralling my ideas and brings a critical lens to the research that has been done so far. When I get to my own dissertation research, I’d like to present my ideas of antiracism as intervention and use critical auto-ethnography on my own biography as a transracial adoptee/social worker/social scientist-researcher to illustrate antiracism as praxis. But I’m taking the week off because the preliminary examination was very tiring! (I hurt my back just from typing for long hours. I imagine you can relate to those kinds of injuries.) So, last week I was just working on my back pain.
M: That's a serious thing we go through all the time! I am always managing my pain.
S: It’s like how do I drive and do housework?? What do I do if I hurt myself doing schoolwork??
M: Do you go through a cycle of first working hard and then burning out and then taking time off?
S: The prelim for me, I tried to get it done in six weeks so I could hand in a draft, get feedback, and get it done by the end of the year. Last week, my brain got tired and I could feel all my pain. But now I feel like I have to hype myself up for the pain again. So I think one of the reasons I’ve gravitated toward musicians is because of the obsessive relationship with their work; I feel the same about my research question. I have a musician friend and he expresses the feeling of always wanting more from himself. I certainly feel that way with my work in terms of antiracism. The idea of never being enough is obviously difficult to live with on a personal level! But in terms of work it feels exciting to have a sense of purpose forever.
M: Forever…
S: Forever…
M: I keep trying to remind myself that a doctorate means beginning a lifetime of work. We don't have to get it all done now.
S: In talking to people who don’t have an obsessive relationship with their work, I think they are hoping that in a couple years I’ll be done and they'll get me back. And I have to calibrate their expectations that this is going to be 45 years. Then after 45 years I’ll be in a sustained good mood and they’ll have me back in their life.
M: That is something I’ve had to say since starting to play the bassoon, “This isn’t going to slow down. Sorry.”
S: But I get excited thinking about that! Like I’m embarking on an endeavor.
M: I really hate the term work-life balance. Right now, my life is my work and that’s ok! I’m trying to say things like work-friends balance and work-relationships balance. It’s ok that I love what I do right?
S: It’s definitely ok—and for me, within my vision for antiracism my commitment to this problem area is also a mechanism by which I’m trying to generate my personal liberation and also collective liberation. Some of my previous activism overseas and in South Korea involved building coalition with Korean unwed mothers who are fighting to strengthen the welfare state (so they could raise their children versus being coerced into sending them overseas). In some ways, that was collective action, but what surprised me about it was a sense of belonging that emerged from engaging in that very public act of resistance. So I’m hoping that my dissertation research will also help me explore antiracism as intervention for adopted individuals—not just macro level intervention.
M: The individual part of that—that is social work, right?
S: Right. As a generalist social worker, we’re taught to think across levels of individuals, groups, and systems. But putting the focus on individuals, I think, can have immediate clinical implications that can help families who might be doing everything right with increasing cultural awareness and celebrating cultural holidays, but are missing antiracism as a mechanism that can destabilize whiteness in the adoptive family home and can implicitly send a message that adopted children of color are different by nature; versus the problem—with white supremacy—that adoptive families and children of color can work together to resist that form of normalization.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
