Dismantling systems of state violence
In this episode of Imagine A World, Emily Russell (2020 cohort), a Ph.D. candidate in political science, discusses her upbringing in a large family, combining theatrical performance with political science, how she uses both to understand state violence, her sweet tooth, and so much more.
Guest
Photo courtesy Micaela Go
Emily Russell (2020 cohort), from St. Clair, Michigan, is pursuing a PhD in political science at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. At the University of Michigan, she received bachelor's degrees in political science and the environment. Emily plans to research state security forces and work toward a just, global transition to human-centered security and peacebuilding. As a Kathryn Davis Projects for Peace fellow, she co-founded Playwriting for Peace in Pristina, Kosovo, which uses applied theatre techniques to prevent security force enlargement. She has also written and staged Hopwood award-winning political plays.
Emily was awarded the Beinecke Scholarship for independent research, which included a global examination of disarmament conducted on-site at the UN monitoring body for human rights law in Reykjavik, Iceland, as well as a multi-year project on post-colonial security forces, involving archival data collection in London, England, and fieldwork in Delhi, India. She is an NSF research fellow.
Hosts
Imagine A World is hosted by Willie Thompson, left, and Taylor Goss, right.
Taylor Goss (2021 cohort), from Lacassine, Louisiana, is pursuing an MA in music, science, and technology and an MPP in public policy at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. He graduated with college honors from Louisiana State University with bachelor's degrees in music and entrepreneurship. Taylor aspires to connect musicians and policymakers, using the arts to communicate societal needs and provoke policy change.
Willie Thompson (2022 cohort), from Griffin, Georgia, is pursuing a master's degree in business administration at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He graduated summa cum laude from Morehouse College with a bachelor’s degree in economics and a minor in Chinese Studies. He intends to create and contribute to organizations using the arts as a conduit for community building and intercultural education.
Imagine A World's theme music was composed and recorded by Taylor Goss. The podcast was originally conceived and led by Briana Mullen (2020 cohort), Taylor Goss, and Willie Thompson, along with Daniel Gajardo (2020 cohort) and Jordan Conger (2020 cohort).
Special thanks to Sanaa Alam, Rachel Desch, Sydney Hunt, Chan Leem, Kara Schechtman, Takondwa Priscilla Semphere, and Rahul Thapa.
Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Emily Russell:
We inherited a world that had gone through centuries of colonialism and centuries of extraction and centuries of building up what we're now facing. And so it's not surprising to me that it will take some time to unwrite it or to write it differently. And even as I've aged, I've started to feel like so much is cyclical and so much recurs and so much changes that I think that once you start to conceive of the world as not like a thing that you are changing for some designated end goal that you will reach, but rather this journey that you're on with a changing world as you yourself are changing, as the world itself is changing.
You can imagine everyone's lifetime is actually going to be taken up with service back to the world that they're born into. And it'll look very different for many generations from us just as it looked different for the generations previous to us. But none of us is sort of getting out of this world without that being the requisite and without it being our lifetimes that we take.
I'm Emily Russell. I'm a member of the 2020 Knight-Hennessy cohort and a fourth-year PhD student in political science and I imagine a world without state violence.
Willie Thompson:
Welcome to the Imagine A World Podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars. We are here to give you a glimpse into the Knight-Hennessy scholar community of graduate students spanning all seven Stanford schools, including business, education, engineering, humanities, law, medicine, and sustainability. In each episode, we talk with scholars about the world they imagine and what they're doing to bring it to life.
Today, we're speaking with Emily Russell, a PhD candidate in political science. During our conversation, you'll hear Emily's experience growing up in a large family, tapping into the worlds of theatrical performance and political science, how she uses both to understand state violence, her sweet tooth, and so much more.
Hey, what's up everybody. Welcome to another episode of Imaginal World. I am your co-host, Willie Thompson, and I'm joined by my co-host, Taylor Goss. Wow, we've got a special guest today in Emily Russell. We also got Takondwa on the line, but she's just observin, so just wanted to give a shout to her. Emily, how are you doing today? How's your life? What's going on?
Emily Russell:
It's good. We were chatting about the quarter is over, so I'm at the phase in the PhD where the quarter sort of is always over and never over because I'm post classes. So yes, we're looking ahead for break and it's still a sunny, nice day here in California, so all is well.
Willie Thompson:
Sounds great. And we were talking about plans. You going to Seattle for a bit of the break and then you're coming back?
Emily Russell:
Yep, going to Seattle for a bit and then I'll be back. My big goal for break is to launch my microgreens garden. I don't know if y'all have ever eaten these, but they're like the baby sprouts of your favorite vegetables. So they grow way quicker than any vegetable that you can grow, but then they serve the place in your salads and your soups and all that. So I'm very hopeful that I can grow them in the winter because I don't think they'll take long. TikTok has led me to believe that it'll be fairly straightforward, so I'll report back.
Willie Thompson:
Wait, so what greens are in the microgreens?
Emily Russell:
Oh, you can do any, but I'm going to do sunflowers and broccoli.
Taylor Goss:
Broccoli is a good call. That wouldn't have come to mind for me. That's more substantial than I thought the greens you were growing would be.
Emily Russell:
Right. I think it is still as substantial as you're imagining, which is basically their stems grow. The stem of the blossoming broccoli plant will grow and then that little sprout you can harvest. And so you can plant all the seeds really close. You don't have to space the plants so you can just have a big tray of all these sprouts and yeah, it is as minimal as you imagine.
Taylor Goss:
Was this purely TikTok inspired or was there some Facebook game, farmer game that you were playing that made you want to do this?
Emily Russell:
That's an inspiring question. Microgreens are just great. They're all over our farmers' market. If you go to the Cal Ave farmers' market, if you go anywhere they sell them. I think I'm inspired because I have a patio right now, not like a yard or anything. And so I'm trying to think of what can be grown in containers on that patio and this seems like it won't need so many roots or so much space. So it's promising for that reason. And no sort of digital farm game inspired me, but maybe the laziness of not wanting to walk to the farmers' market has inspired me.
Taylor Goss:
As good a reason as any.
Willie Thompson:
Although I will say that Cal Ave farmers' market is a really nice place to go.
Emily Russell:
Yeah. It is actually kind of a treat if you make it down there.
Willie Thompson:
It's very true.
Emily Russell:
I don't know if y'all are coffee people, but there's a place called Zombie Runner on that block and it's pretty tasty.
Taylor Goss:
I thought you were going to say Backyard Brew. That's my haunt.
Emily Russell:
That is a few steps away.
Willie Thompson:
And just to be clear, this is the last question I ask about the microgardens and then the microgreens, then we get into the meat of the discussion to use the term of phrase. So you're going to eat the broccoli but you'll not eat the sunflowers, is that right?
Emily Russell:
No, this is such a great clarification. You eat the stems, like the sprouts of both. So you eat the sunflower... Just as you would grow a sunflower, you stop it after two inches of sprouting and you eat those sprouts. They all seem like beans sprouts before. Microgreens are the same size. So you never actually get a broccoli, you just get a broccoli sprout. So maybe instead of microgreens, we should be calling them sprouts. But yes, I will be eating both. Sunflower will be consumed. Oh, fun fact. I used to be allergic to sunflower seeds as a child and fortunately I outgrew it.
Taylor Goss:
Through sheer force of will?
Emily Russell:
I don't know. I think your taste buds change over time. I don't know if that's how allergies work.
Willie Thompson:
Me either. I am glad you can now eat sunflower. You said sunflower seeds or sunflower period?
Emily Russell:
I think both. I mean both appear to be safe to me now.
Willie Thompson:
Appear to be safe. That's funny. I can't wait to taste one of these. You got to bring some this to Denning, some of these sprouts to Denning so we can veg out. But we're really excited to have you on today for this episode. Obviously just because of who you are, but especially because of what you study. We've already heard that an amazing imagine world statement you've given at the beginning of the episode. But before we talk about the world you imagined, let's talk about the world you were born into and have experienced thus far. So where are you from and what was your journey here?
Emily Russell:
Yeah, I was born in a exurb, which is like a rural place even beyond the suburbs, just north of Detroit. That place it's interesting. If you know where Detroit is, there's a bridge and a tunnel that lead to Canada. And so you can see Canada from the shoreline in Detroit. And I'm from the next bridge up. That's how I describe it. So the next bridge that you hit that takes you to Canada, that's where I grew up. You can see Canada from my hometown. It's right across this seemingly passable river.
It's a short distance away, but I'm on the Michigan side of that. I grew up in a family with a ton of cousins. So my mom has eight siblings. She's one of eight. And so all of those aunts and uncles live super close by. I grew up with a big community of cousins as part of my immediate family. I stayed in Michigan for undergrad. I went a couple hours away to University of Michigan.
Willie Thompson:
Go blue.
Emily Russell:
Yeah, go blue. That was a great experience and I loved going to college there and I wouldn't trade it. In fact just before this we were chatting about Stanford being sort of empty on the holidays. But in truth, Stanford is always a little empty compared to the big public school I'm used to being in where there's 40,000 students running around, not 4,000. It was actually really dense sort of fun college place to be. So I officially majored in environmental science and political science, but I was always sneaking around the theater school and circling the playwriting program as well. But yeah, my first love academically was the environment and it wasn't until halfway through that degree that I was finding myself much more called to some of the social and political organizing that was happening around the environment than I was to the natural science.
At the time that I started college, I feel like there was the science of climate change and things like that were so obvious and so many scientists had already told us everything we needed to know. So back then I thought it's a social and political systems issue. And so anyway, I got really tuned into studying political science instead. I still did both, but more interested in the social side of that.
Taylor Goss:
Was organizing or activism connected with the arts in your household growing up? Was that something that you've discovered early on? How were your passions fostered as a child?
Emily Russell:
I don't think I thought of myself as much of an activist, but at all I wouldn't have said that. But I will say growing up in a really big family, you do learn a lot about community that then becomes very second nature. So I would never classify it as sort of activism, but watching tons of people rush in for each other all the time. So in the case of any event, any celebratory or mournful event, having a bunch of people rush in with food, and care, and be on your side, and give you material and spiritual support through all of those things, I think is not activism as such, but it did teach me a lot about how I wanted to show up for others and show up in my community.
I think that that was separate from the arts for me in some ways growing up because in the arts, I really got my start in the theater because I wanted to hang out with my sister and she auditioned for a play. I don't know. I was young and I didn't think that I was interested in that. I was eight to be clear. I was actually properly young and my sister was 10.
Taylor Goss:
A prodigy!
Emily Russell:
Well, my sister got a role in this local play and I went to every single rehearsal and watched her and memorized the entire script because I practiced her lines with her. And this went on for months. And then the week of the show a main character had to drop out and the person who had been playing this main character was 16 and I went to the director and I was like, "You know what? I know the rule, so I'll do it." And so as an 8-year-old I got cast some small community theater play that I stepped into at sort of the last second. It was really fun.
So ever since then, I don't know, my sister and I performed together and did all these plays together after that. So I think those things were separate in my mind, but as practices, but all based in who's around and how to spend time with the people that you love.
Taylor Goss:
Sure. Whenever you said it was skulking around University of Michigan doing theater on the side, I'm imagining you sneaking away from your political classes to go do plays in a basement. What did it actually look like? How did those two things intersect or not in undergrad?
Emily Russell:
Honestly, kind of like that. In the way that University of Michigan set up, the main campus for all these programs, political science and all of this, all the liberal arts degrees are on what's called the main campus and then you have to take a bus to get to the theater school. So it was literally like I got on a bus and I went north and entered a theater and I was a slightly different person, did a slightly different thing, tapped into a different side of my brain and came back to not reality, but came back to the world of facts shortly thereafter.
But I actually really started to appreciate that separation. I've talked about this before as crop rotating. You can only grow one crop on the plot of land at a time and then you grow a different crop the next season, but in the same plot so that you're always sort of getting fruits, but they're of a different type. And this is how I felt with political science and playwriting was that, "Okay. Sometimes I'm in the world of facts and sometimes I'm in the world of measurement and dealing with these patterns that give us some solace and understanding." And then sometimes I am up in the world of stories and feelings, which give us some reason to care about the facts at all.
Taylor Goss:
That's so beautiful. I love the crop rotation analogy. That's great for me. Of course, I studied music technology and public policy and I too often experience those world as pretty separate, at least academically. But there's always something about your cognition and your analysis of those two worlds that somehow help each other or just the way that you look at the world then you analyze it. I'm going to carry the crop rotation analogy with me. That's great.
Willie Thompson:
As will I. It's a really good metaphor. I also like the focus on an interdisciplinary education. So when it comes to your imagine world statement maybe as a transition because it feels like the work you do as a playwright also is embodied in your imaginable statement, but in a very subtle way. The first question I want to ask is what brought you into the topic of state violence?
I feel as if that is something... Everyone who has a PhD, they have a reason for why they're doing it. PhD is a decision. You don't flirt with that. That's a commitment. And so when it comes to state violence, I'm wondering what brought you into that field, especially considering the times we're in now where... I mean according to the Council on US American Foreign Relations, there are like 26 conflicts happening right now in the beginning point around the world from Israel Palestine to South Sudan, to the Congo, to places in the Americas. So what brings you to state violence as a topic of research?
Emily Russell:
I mean really the candid answer and the personal answer is that I grew up in a working class family and around the time of the recession, a lot of people were facing layoffs and other forms of precarity. And so people in my family took up jobs that would allow them to keep their healthcare and things like that. What that meant for members of my family who didn't have a college education was that some of them ended up taking jobs in the local prison. And that change really, really impacted them and impacted me by way of bearing witness to that and to those changes. All those conflicts that you mentioned, and we'll get into the details I'm sure about all of this, but I'm really called to this work now because I think there's truly nothing more important than justice for those who are impacted and victimized.
But the truth is that I came to know just how violent and just how unjust that system was because I was really proximate to the harm that it created for those even who have to carry it out and maintain it. That whole process of bearing witness to economic changes and then the way that people in those economic conditions take up these types of roles and are asked to take up these types of roles on behalf of their states and the people who take them up are often very different from the people who are victimized and sometimes not.
Sometimes there's deep overlap and deep turnover between these communities, but I really got aware of state violence in that sort of proximity. It's interesting that you referenced to all of these conflicts which we'll talk about and are happening right now, and it is truly a really solemn thing to discuss and to study, but there's a way to where the violence that I study, because it is violence by governments, it's actually very normalized.
It only sort of comes to our big attention when there's a reaction to it, when there's a fight back, you might say. And so in a lot of ways this is sort of the violence that sustains so much of the world. So much normalcy is built into these systems of violence, specifically incarceration and policing not only in this country but in many of these other places. And so it was realizing how every day that violence was.
I mean, you say in a PhD you have to think about something every day. And in some ways I was thinking about this type of thing every day because of the proximity. And so yeah, I think there's a way that we think of these instances of violence or conflict as being so random or so coming out of nowhere when actually the status quo is a pretty violent one.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah, absolutely. I woke up my daughter. It's something that when I think about the prevalence of conflict in the world that we live in and to what degree we accept violence as a means to an end, to me, I can only imagine how emotionally exhausting that can be. And it reminds me of a Langston Hughes poem called Tired, where he basically represents this idea that this idea of cutting the world open to see what is keeping it from being good and to find out what worms, so eating at the rind. I'm not saying yes poetically as he did, but basically, it's a really good poem. It's very short.
And that makes me wonder two things. In your experience, what types of things fester and create the conditions for state sanction in conflict and violence? What are the conditions that create these worms to use this Langston Hughes metaphor that are eating at the rind of maybe our humanity? I'm going to try to embody poeticism there. And then how do you maintain a sense of self and optimism about what it takes to get to either the other end of conflict or to reimagine what a world with less violence, or maybe if we're really going to imagine a world with no violence would look like?
Emily Russell:
I love that poem and I'm grateful that you brought it and I appreciate you bringing it into the conversation. In terms of how we think about where this violence comes from, so the state is said to have a monopoly on violence. So we're supposed to accept that the state is the one that can commit as much violence as it chooses and as it needs to maintain itself. We think of democracies as maybe better able to limit that in some ways. But of course, many of the world's largest democracies we know are responsible for a huge proportion of that violence that gets committed. So for example, 40% of the world's total incarcerated population is incarcerated in just three democracies.
So it is a really big issue not only for us here, but also around the world. And our ability to understand where this violence comes from and even to just notice it, requires us to call into question the esteem that we hold democracies in, particularly when it comes to this. And if we do want to hold them in this esteem then to use the powers that democracies give us for accountability for those violences which have become so commonplace and so every day in so many people's lives in those places.
But another thing is that we know that governments in the history of all conflict, governments are actually the biggest perpetrator of all human rights. So if you look at who has committed the most human rights abuses in the history of conflict, it's governments. And so even though they have this... They're supposed to have this sort of monopoly on that violence. I think as we're entering an era where that seems to be overused or is at least coming more to our attention, we're questioning that as a basis for justice.
In terms of where it's coming from, I say all that only to say that in my dissertation and in a lot of my work, I theorize that there are actually economic determinants of the use of this violence. In the same decade of literature where we're understanding that the state is going to have this monopoly on violence, they're also talking about the way that states are built and the sizes and shapes and densities that states come to take up based on two things, and one is coercion and one is capital.
In my dissertation and in a lot of my work, I'm looking at, well, what are these capital incentives that are generating this excess coercion? How are we getting such normalized high levels of state violence and coercion and what capital processes is that linked to? In particular, I'm looking at how resources are extracted either from people through labor or natural resources.
So you mentioned the Congo, and that's sort of a good example right now of extracting of a mineral and extracting of a resource that is going to be sold. And so in order to get that resource, well, the state is going to do whatever it has to do to extract that and that extraction, which will bring them capital, which will bring them money, they'll employ as much coercion as needed to get that capital out.
In the same vein, a lot of people, of course work in those mines... And so there's also this element of labor and labor extraction that's happening. When you look at even the histories of some of the world's large democracies today, including the US, we are a post-colonial country. Technically we came from colonialism. We emerged from a system of extraction that is based on the taking of land, the taking of labor, and the use of land and labor resources to build up a country.
So I look at those things. I look at the history of development and the ongoing patterns of extraction to understand how coercion is being used in governments and countries today.
Willie Thompson:
And then to that point of inspiration and hope, right, because I just listed only 26 conflicts according to the Council on Foreign Relations. I'm pretty sure there are more depending on your perspective. And every continent has its own set of conflicts. So what are some of the things that would give you optimism and hope about a future where there is less state sanctioned violence? I'll leave it there.
Emily Russell:
In terms of optimism, my undergrad advisor always used to say there's no such thing as too much reading for freedom, which I think is a bell hooks type thought.
Willie Thompson:
Sounds like it.
Emily Russell:
I think that in my daily life I feel, if not slightly... I know I'm not in control of these systems, but I do feel slightly like we can keep an edge by knowing at least what's going on and there is something to awareness and being able to link these phenomena. It does give me some optimism that, "Oh, we might find a root cause of these things. Oh, we might get to the bottom of this someday." I think that being able to do intellectual work and even intellectual work derived from experience and all of that to come to those understandings, I think gives me some optimism.
But I would say what gives me energy around that optimism is being in community with people who are working in diverse ways to solve this. So I'm very inspired by a lot of people I work with in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area in collectives and bookstores. I work in prisons, and I think working in all of these different community spaces close to people who either have experienced state violence or are oriented toward getting to the end of it as well, I think is a reassuring place to be in.
Taylor Goss:
When you talk about community and even you even referenced the notion of reading for peace and spreading awareness, and that to me sounds like storytelling to some degree. I know that there was an initiative that you were a part of called Playwriting for Peace, and I wondered if we could delve into that a little bit. Where were you in your career at the time that you took part in Playwriting for Peace? Where was it? What was the goal and what did you learn from that experience?
Emily Russell:
Yeah. That was a really beautiful time. So in my undergrad, myself and another playwright from Michigan, we were really interested in bringing tools of storytelling and tools of playwriting to other communities and doing that writing and doing that, creating in community. And so we founded a program, we got a grant to go to Kosovo for a summer and basically work at this border, which was somewhat contested and somewhat separated after the conflict.
I say somewhat, but I mean pretty separate. There's a bridge that crosses between these two halves of this town and the Italian military guards that bridge. And so we basically brought communities together in writing workshops in that area and did it for a whole summer. We had these amazing places that we ended up doing these workshops in. There was an old warehouse and then there was this beautiful greenhouse inspired building that had been built.
Then we performed and we brought these students, high school aged students largely together, and we did playwriting workshops all summer, and did them in a variety of ways, and went to libraries and art museums and all around and learned so much about Pristina, the city from all the students there. And really just gave some background into some writing processes that we used and that type of thing. In the end, every student had written a short play and we had them performed in this amazing place called Kino Armata, which is stage and a theater. It was formerly military barracks. So it used to be this really kind of cornerstone place where the war had been at least fueled and now it's this amazing beautiful theater.
So we performed the pieces there. Our students were the first to perform and to have theatrical work on that stage. So they had played movies there before and some music, but this was the first theater that had been done on that stage. And so it was really, really special. It was a beautiful experience.
Taylor Goss:
That's amazing. Whenever you and your collaborators first conceived of the project, why playwriting? Why theater as a vehicle for this barrier crossing?
Emily Russell:
There's sort of that trope of the lonely writer, you sitting alone doing their thing. I think the exact opposite-
Taylor Goss:
Recording a record in a cabin somewhere. Yeah.
Emily Russell:
Right. The exact opposite thing is required of theater, right? Because you actually can't... Surely you could write a play by yourself, but you can't perform it often by yourself. Surely there are one person shows, but theater really requires community to be put on. I mean, in sort of a traditional way, you have lights, you have sound, you have an audience, you have a bunch of people going off each other's energies to tell these stories. And so I think both me and my collaborators lives had been really transformed growing up by the process of theater and the way that we experienced that as a community building and world building for us.
So it's another thing altogether to have someone reading your own words and enacting your own stories with you or in front of you and for your community. So yeah, I think that I also stand by the fact that theater is very community driven and requires a collective to be put on. So it allows for a lot of those connections in real time and in a ephemeral space of a stage which doesn't repeat itself. It's not filmed, it's not recorded. It happens once and whatever you create together is there and then it leaves with you in some ways. So that is a community form of writing and creating I think that we had both been changed by.
Taylor Goss:
Speaking of that stage, the image of the military barracks becoming a stage for theater is a really striking one. And I'm curious about whenever the students' plays were performed on that stage, what sorts of stories did they tell and what did it feel like as an audience member watching them tell those stories?
Emily Russell:
They were really diverse and they ranged from serious things like incidents of domestic violence or other personal tragedies, harassment and things like that. These sort of very poignant identifications of something problematic in society and in their lives to things that are very humorous and even satirized forms of those sort of traumatic things. So there was someone who did the four horsemen or something. I don't really know what this allegory is.
Taylor Goss:
The apocalypse. The horsemen.
Emily Russell:
Exactly, yeah! So they did the four things that... But then those characters, this is the one that's standing out to me in memory right now, were so funny. So the way that the war character would joke around with the disease character, was so humorous. So the tone changed, of course through every play. And that was something also beautiful that every playwright's work was featured in the same night. So you sort of had that... You win in a lot of worlds in one world, but we were also really moved by the transformation, I think. And back to Willie's point about hope, I think seeing parts of the world that have formerly contained something that we think of as violent or oppressive, being transformed into something that is creative and actually having physical evidence of the embodied experience of being in that place where a transformation has occurred is really special.
Another example of that, just briefly, I was recently at a conference in London and there's an art gallery called the Serpentine Gallery. And that apparently it was a weapons storage house, and now it's like this beautiful really transformative gallery in the middle of a giant park in the middle of London. So I think that there are sort of examples of this in the world that maybe are more common than we think. I don't know, going to those spaces is also a source of like, "Oh, we can do this. Oh, things do change and here's the evidence."
Willie Thompson:
Yeah, for sure. To me, what it sounds like you're doing and your work as an academic, your work as a playwright, and I swear folks listening, we do not plan to have three people who do something isolated back to back to back, but it just goes to show how multifaceted the community is. It really embodies this notion of, to me, the academics is like the head. You're thinking a lot about a stuff. You're really grappling with these tensions, these topics. Then there's the hard part. You're doing this work in community with people to create something out of some of the darkest places of their own experience.
And then you're doing hands and feet. It's like a full body experience. We're like acting out these plays. People are not just engaging you intellectually, engaging with you emotionally. They're also sort of prompting some sort of response from the audience.
Taylor Goss:
We've talked a lot about the ways that art and playwriting in particular can be really inspiring in the service of analysis or emotion or some level of personal grappling with state violence. But I'm wondering, as you're thinking about art and its role in political expression has evolved over time, are there ways in which art is not suited for retribution or regenerative justice? How do you think about art now as a driver of social change?
Emily Russell:
This question touches on some really important things, and one of them is that while community building is really possible and healing is really possible, and there are tons of experts on this who do use arts in these transformative ways and sometimes even in service of things like transformative justice. I'm of the position and I tend to believe that communities impacted by this violence, what is really important for those communities is material justice. Sometimes I'm concerned really with a justice at a very deep level, and we would have to guarantee people safety and security and reparations for harm that is done in a really deep way before we ask communities to move towards this transitional phase of coexistence and flourishing, and what we might imagine in this utopic peaceful horizon.
I think that blurs a lot of what's necessary in the interim, which is really true material rewriting and justice granting for affected communities which often may not be achieved in just get together and forgive the fact that oppression has occurred. There's a really important, I guess, path on the way to that vision of coexistence, which requires special and material attention to whatever oppression has occurred among the people who have responded.
Willie Thompson:
That makes a ton of sense. I mean, it basically gets at this notion that to do any of this work takes time and there's no five to 10-year plan to reach true reconciliation, I think. And there's value in the attempt. I mean, what South Africa did with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there have been efforts to try to do this. And what I hear in your articulation is that the kind of change it takes to do it well and do it right probably extends beyond our lifetimes if we're being honest. And I think that's something that's really hard to hold onto and believe in and to commit oneself to just given the world that we live in. So that makes a ton of sense.
Emily Russell:
I think that's true. I think the one thing that is, maybe not optimism granting about that, but the one thing that makes me think of is that, yes, these solutions will extend beyond our lifetime, but also that their causes came way before us. So we inherited this world with all of this inequality. We inherited a world that had gone through centuries of colonialism and centuries of extraction and centuries of building up what we're now facing.
It's not surprising to me that it will take some time to unwrite it or to write it differently. And even, I don't know, as I've aged, I've sort of started to feel like so much is cyclical and so much recurs and so much changes that I think that once you start to conceive of the world as not like a thing that you are changing for some designated end goal that you will reach, but rather this journey that you're on with a changing world as you yourself are changing as the world itself is changing. You can imagine everyone's lifetime is actually going to be taken up with service back to the world that they're born into. And it'll look very different for many generations from us just as it looked different for the generations previous to us. But none of us is sort of getting out of this world without that being the requisite and without it being our lifetimes that we take.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah, girl. You spitting. I ain't going to hold you. That was a fire. Yeah, I don't have anything else to follow up on that. I think there's nothing else to follow up on that. I think that was beautifully said, and it really makes you think differently about this idea of inheritance. I think sometimes we think of inheritance as it's a thing of privilege as opposed to a thing of obligation. And I really like the way you described that. Real quick before we get into some of the more Knight-Hennessy, sort of improbable facts part of the discussion, I don't want to have the whole conversation about you being a PhD student. We'll now even talk about your actual dissertation.
Emily Russell:
So in my dissertation, I am working on some of these issues with India, the other large democracy in the world where I'm studying the colonial creation of certain forms of extraction, including labor and land resources. I'm looking at how those modes of extraction have affected coercion and other things. And so this summer I spent time in Northeast India with folks on tea plantations who are engaged in sort of generations long laboring conditions, which are really difficult, and they have a really unique relationship to the state and to other communities in their area.
A lot of my dissertation will take place with those communities in mind and with those communities at the forefront of understanding how these systems of labor, specifically over these many generations since colonialism has affected state relationship and coercion and all of those things that we've been talking about.
Taylor Goss:
That's so fascinating. I am looking forward to maybe one day being able to read that dissertation, although I don't know how much prerequisite conversation we'll have to have for me to understand it. But it sounds like really important work and something that connects a lot of dots for the work you've described up to this point in your life. So thank you for sharing that with us. As we are sort of discussing, connecting the dots, let's turn a little bit more toward your experience since becoming a part of Knight-Hennessy. How has being a part of Knight-Hennessy affected you as a person and as a student at Stanford?
Emily Russell:
Yeah. So we were talking a little earlier about the fact that I came straight from undergrad during COVID. And so what had happened was that I interviewed for Knight-Hennessy two weeks before the world shut down for COVID that February before I came. And so I had met my whole cohort in person at these interviews. And then there were the last new people I met for literally years. And so when we got to campus later that year and things were still really confusing and separated, and quarantined, and lonely, we actually all knew each other and we all had each other's contacts and all of this.
So it ended up being a real lifeline at the beginning of what turned out to be a really big move for the PhD to have so many people around who were going through the identical experience, but also who had some shared affinity with you in some way and who you had met before. So it was this relief to see a familiar face across the country after a lot of solo journeying. The first few years, Knight-Hennessy was really amazing just for giving just a beautiful community to work from and to be with.
I think another thing academically, beyond just sort of the social world that it put us in and the family it created, is that everyone in Knight-Hennessy is very inspired to do many things and moves in that direction always. So always your peers become a really good litmus test for how much are you working on those same missions and are you in alignment and are you moving toward those goals? So I think being able to be co-inspired by everyone around you is a really lucky thing.
And even just grounding you as you're on this really transformative journey into what your goals should be and how your mission should be aligned in the world and all of that. So I think those ways, Knight-Hennessy was super, super impactful.
Taylor Goss:
I was just having a conversation with a friend about how incredible it is to know the folks in Knight-Hennessy so deeply on a personal and social level, but also get to sit next to them on a bus and have a conversation that I would gladly listen to in a Q&A or a masterclass. My friends are people that I deeply respect for their work and get to just have casual conversations about things that I would pay a ticket to go see. Yeah. It's a really beautiful community for those that you described.
Emily Russell:
Totally. And then there's sort of the basic answer, which is also that Knight-Hennessy does give you funding, and in some ways that funding is a security blanket to be a little more bold. So you don't have to take on all of the risks that the people around you might have to take on in terms of getting a topic identified for your PhD immediately and going the path of least resistance toward a job and toward those types of things. At least in my experience, I feel like knowing that I had Knight-Hennessy and knowing that I had a little extra room to play meant that I could take my time a little, as well as be a little risky, be a little bold with what I was trying to work on and trying to find out about the world.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. We find ourselves in this sort of interdisciplinary cohort where not only the interdisciplinary notion exists, but also we're given the opportunity to really follow that path because of the financial security as well. It's a beautiful and awe-inspiring privilege to move through this world with. I think you've described it really beautiful. Thinking back a little bit further to your Knight-Hennessy application, that was before even the interview that you mentioned, pre-COVID, something that everyone who applies Knight-Hennessy does is write eight improbable facts which are things that someone might not expect would be true about you.
For me, this was something that took a lot of time, maybe the most time out of anything on the application. Would you be willing to share one or two of your improbable facts with us?
Emily Russell:
Yeah, I can share one. I'm going to share a silly one to keep the levity in our chat. Something we didn't talk about in this conversation, but something that I did do before I came here was that I had spent a summer living in Iceland. My improbable fact is that I can speak Swedish. And the reason that this is so valuable to me, I learned Swedish because I was going to be in Scandinavia, and I wanted to know the language. The reason it's valuable to me, what I came to know is that every Scandinavian culture is really candy obsessed, including Sweden, including Iceland.
I too am candy obsessed. And so the most important thing to me that I learned in the process of studying Swedish was all the different ways to say candy, to refer to different types, including the fact that there's bulk candy and confectionary stores and all of these different places that you can go to get your little daily gummies. That was a really big perk of learning Swedish to me.
Willie Thompson:
Wait. So you got to give us the ways to say these sweets in Swedish in case.
Emily Russell:
In case you ever find yourself there. Okay. So in Sweden, the term is lösgodis.
Willie Thompson:
Lösgodis?
Emily Russell:
Yes. It refers to the little candies that you pick up and put in your little bag one by one. One of each sort of thing. And the equivalent of that in Iceland is [foreign language 00:41:41]. And that means a little bit of everything.
Willie Thompson:
[foreign language 00:41:45]
Emily Russell:
Exactly.
Willie Thompson:
[foreign language 00:41:46]
Emily Russell:
Yes. You're ready.
Taylor Goss:
Did you have a favorite sweet in Iceland?
Emily Russell:
Well, the thing about [foreign language 00:41:53] in these candy stores is that you get a big... You just get a bag and you fill it with one of every little candy. I don't have too much favoritism, but there's a big fried egg gummy, and that's kind of yummy.
Willie Thompson:
A fried egg gummy?
Emily Russell:
Yes.
Willie Thompson:
Like gummy in the shape of a fried egg?
Emily Russell:
Exactly.
Willie Thompson:
Okay. All right. I just-
Emily Russell:
Oh, yeah, no, it tastes like peach or something really pleasant.
Willie Thompson:
Okay, got it. I don't know if I've ever had a savory gummy. I think that's a bit of an oxymoron.
Emily Russell:
It's a bit beyond me as well.
Willie Thompson:
Sounds like an everlasting gobstopper. But one last thing on this candy thing because it sounds like you have a sweet tooth. Is that correct? Do you have a sweet tooth?
Emily Russell:
Oh yeah.
Willie Thompson:
Okay. Give me your top five candies.
Emily Russell:
Okay. Nerds Clusters. You all had those?
Willie Thompson:
Okay. Is that five or one? Are we going in descending or ascending order?
Emily Russell:
Ooh, that was actually number one. So I'll descend. See, whatever first comes to mind is supreme. So yes, Nerds Clusters, Swedish Fish, Sour Patch Kids. But the thing about these... So I like all of these nearly equivalently. I'll finish with Twin Snakes maybe and Haribo Cherries. But about all of these, I prefer the red gummies in each of these candies. So nearly any candy can be in my top five if it has that either really sweet feeling or that really sour feeling. But I'm going to have a little preference for the red ones, which I don't know if I'm just tricking myself, but they taste... I don't know, they get that strawberry, cherry flavor, which I'm drawn to.
Willie Thompson:
Wow. I don't think I've ever heard someone put Swedish Fish in their top five. Takondwa, I don't know if you have a sweet tooth. Is it in your top five? Is Swedish Fish?
Takondwa Semphere:
I actually have more of a sour sweet tooth. So I feel like... I'm just trying to clarify. The Swedish Fish are... I was literally trying to Google half of the things you guys were talking about.
Emily Russell:
They're like red. They're red, kind of sweet.
Willie Thompson:
Red and-
Takondwa Semphere:
Texture is not like Haribo gummy bear. It's more like [inaudible 00:43:56] Right?
Taylor Goss:
It's tough like a piece of jerky.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah, your bicuspids are doing double time-
Taylor Goss:
They're doing some work.
Willie Thompson:
... to get through that. Well, okay, so actually let me just check my potential bias on the Swedish Fish piece. Now, do Swedish Fish taste the same in Sweden? Or do they exist in Sweden? Or is Swedish Fish just an American appropriation, which is par for the course when it comes to American culture? But I just want to make... Because I could be missing something. Maybe I go to Sweden and they're fish and they're gummies.
Emily Russell:
You're not missing anything.
Willie Thompson:
Okay. We just have different top fives. But I appreciate you engaging in that exercise and now we know what to get you. When you defend, we'll just get you a basket full of sweets.
Emily Russell:
So true.
Willie Thompson:
Well, cool. Before we leave, last question of the day is people who are listening to this podcast who are interested in joining this Knight-Hennessy experience, this community, what advice would you give them about applying, about being part of this community and seeking to be one of the members of this special experience?
Emily Russell:
I would say... And sorry if this has been said, I feel like we all probably say the same things on these questions. I would say that when I came into my cohort, felt a really deep sense of belonging and I felt that, I think because everyone was very genuine stewards of the causes in the world that they were called to. And there's something about that, that made people really compassionate listeners and friends, and everything that came with it.
And so I think my advice is to do what you were going to do. Do what you were going to do anyway. And maybe just follow that energy where it takes you. And if Knight-Hennessy becomes part of the journey for doing what you were already going to do in the world, then that's a beautiful thing. And also that the genuine sort of pursuit of that thing is how you should be on your application. So however, you're going to apply, you're going to talk about what you did in the world and there's nothing you could manufacture on that journey that would be better than just doing the things in the world that you want to see exist in the world.
So yeah, my advice is keep going on whatever journey you're on toward whatever thing matters to you, and the genuineness of that pursuit will speak for itself on your application.
Willie Thompson:
I know you prefaced your response by saying that you're pretty sure people respond the same way. I actually will push back on that and say that everyone actually gives the sentiment might be similar, but the way in which everyone describes it is very authentic and genuine and unique, I would say. And I think that's just reflective of the deep work that we all have to do to say, "Why are we going to Stanford? Why are we applying to Knight-Hennessy?" Because even on the other end of all the benefits, you really have to sort of have a very good idea of what you want to do and why you want to be here.
We just found out that Takondwa is potentially team Swedish Fish, which we'll just have to get into this after the podcast is over because that's alarming. But, Emily, we appreciate you so much. Thank you for spending some time with us and for sharing your life story, your work thus far, and just for being here and representing a cadre of folks who are doing a lot of tough, really difficult work and still finding joy and levity and community in the face of that. So just want to say thank you so much and really appreciate you coming on.
Emily Russell:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Willie Thompson:
All right, take care.
Taylor Goss:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Imagine A World where we hear from inspiring members of the KHS community who are making significant contributions in their respective fields, challenging the status quo and pushing the boundaries of what is possible as they imagine the world they want to see.
Willie Thompson:
This podcast is sponsored by Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, a multidisciplinary, multicultural graduate fellowship program providing scholars with financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford while helping equip them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world. Follow us on social media @knighthennessy and visit our website at kh.stanford.edu to learn more about the program and our community.