Hey! I’m Miyuki.
Photo by Kristen Murakoshi, 2022.
My hand holding up a venn diagram I made to represent Beautiful Scholarship.
Portrait and theory map of Ntozake Shange I created in 2019 for the Black feminist Study Theory Atlas.
Portrait and theory map of Audre Lorde I created in 2019 for the Black feminist Study Theory Atlas.
Portrait and theory map of Hortense Spillers I created in 2019 for the Black feminist Study Theory Atlas.
Here’s how I came to believe that Beautiful Scholarship is a portal for our collective liberation.
I applied to a PhD program back in 2014 because I loved learning. But once accepted, it was challenging to keep my passion alive when seminars were in fluorescent-lit rooms for 3 hours long, after 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 to want to talk about the implications of these theories in our real lives.
Fortunately I found a kindred spirit—Ra Malika Imhotep—in one of my seminars who agreed that the life of the mind can (and should!) be pleasurable. What began as a collaboration to work on a small zine on Black feminist thought turned into an ongoing embodied spiritual-political education project, 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 each day. Because we tended to our bodies and spirits, we were able to see the thinkers we studied as similarly complex beings 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…
BEAUTIFUL SCHOLARSHIP & EMBODIED STUDY
As a long-time zinester and artist, it felt natural to develop methods such as drawing the monthly portrait of the thinkers while listening to them giving a talk online. After the study sessions, Ra and I would select the most poignant notes, which I would then visually translate into a theory map, leading us to create the Black feminist Study Theory Atlas. 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. I began offering Beautiful Scholarship consultations to support visionary scholars and changemakers to activate the beauty of their offerings, and to bring back the body to the life of the mind.
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.”
Yes! Let’s make your revolutionary theories irresistible!
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)