Good Trouble: Post-tenure Interruptions to Our Academic ‘Routines’

For me, in my discipline of Art and Design, and my roles as a professor and civic engagement institutional leader, there is the good work of problem solving that we do and good trouble we create by continually learning to understand and speak the languages of our community partners while sharing our own.  Through this sharing, we build social justice exemplars that live into our institutional rhetoric that frequently promises to act in the public good. Not too long ago I walked in a uniform topped by a white conductor’s hat and gloves with a small cadre of willing transportation advocates down the center of Woodward Avenue in Detroit. Three lanes of vehicular traffic on one side heading north, 3 lanes of traffic on the other side heading south, we caused some trouble to the routine traffic as we walked in between the yellow lines, and collectively made a ‘train’ composed of ladders, mop buckets, yellow umbrellas, dry ice, a leaf blower and two shovels. Along the way, our train paused to pick up passengers. This example, I hope, gives some sense of how my work as an artist and designer appears as an interruption. Causing trouble. I believe that my role as a professor of art and design and as an institutional civic engagement leader is to provoke the introspection and questioning that comes with good trouble.   The good trouble that we can cause to help interrupt our traditional academic routines and ways of thinking about and doing our teaching and research as community engaged faculty members and administrators.  In this piece, I will share some examples of the “trouble” I cause through my work, to help us think more critically and creatively about public interruption as a radical social strategy to bring awareness to and advance change in our communities.