Ijeoma Kola: 0:13

Welcome to another enlightening episode of the Cohort SysSys podcast, where we give voice to the stories, struggles and successes of Black women and non-binary folks with doctoral degrees. I'm your host, dr John McCollough, and today I'd like to introduce Dr Tara Pixley. With an MFA in Photography and a PhD in Communication, she's a visual journalist, strategic storytelling consultant and esteemed professor with over two decades of media production and editorial experience. As a queer, first-generation Jamaican American raised in the Southeast US, she's deeply committed to reshaping visual narratives around themes like immigration, blackness, lgbtq plus communities and the global South. Her work challenges conventional portrayals of gender, race, class and sexuality in photography, both in her personal projects and scholarly pursuits.

Ijeoma Kola: 1:07

She's a 2022 Pulitzer Center Diversify Photo-I-Witness Photo Journalism Grant recipient, focusing on the pressing environmental justice issue of LA urban oil production. She's also a 2022-2023 Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow, working on a project called Source of Safety, which addresses identity-aware safety resources for visual journalists. If that wasn't enough, she's also a founding member and executive director of Authority Collective, championing inclusivity and transformative projects in the realm of visual media. So much going on. Welcome, dr Pixley, to the podcast.

Tara Pixley: 1:48

Thank you so much for having me and thank you for the lovely opening.

Ijeoma Kola: 1:54

You're welcome. I mean, you do so much. So tell us a little bit about yourself. We know you are Jamaican American. We know you grew up in the Southeast. What else should we know about you? Who is Dr Pixley, outside of her amazing bio and all of her wonderful accomplishments?

Tara Pixley: 2:12

Oh my gosh. Well, thank you so much again for having me and for creating this space so wonderful. I don't know, I think, if I were going to say one thing that is really integral to who I am as a person that is not in my bio, it's that I had children very young. I had my son two weeks after I graduated undergrad. I was at Florida A&M University getting my bachelor's in philosophy and journalism, and it was certainly an unplanned early parenthood, but I think that that had so much impact on who I became and my work ethic and just my relationship to the world. And so my two children my son is now 17, kate and Noble, and my daughter is 13, bryn and the two of them are wonderful little human beings and they really inform so much of my work and they've been such amazing role dogs. Just like you know, I'm like mommy's going to grad school and they're like, okay, we need to pack up the car and drive across the country from Atlanta to San Diego when they are two and six years old and start a life very far away from all of our family. And so that, being in grad school, my doctoral program, without really any family or friends network that we had in existence. We built a new one. That was really incredible in Southern California. But just having that shift in my perspective and my relationship to people in space throughout my career has really informed so much of the work that I do, and I think I'm really really lucky to be able to move through these different spaces.

Tara Pixley: 4:05

I didn't really understand when I was starting in my doctoral program that academia is its own profession.

Tara Pixley: 4:11

I was a first generation college student. No one in my family understood what it was to get a PhD really, you know, neither. My mom didn't even go to high school. My father didn't finish his, you know, didn't go beyond high school, and so everyone valued education a lot, but we did not have a frame of reference for a doctoral program and I wanted to get my PhD, as I said, to be undeniable. I didn't want to give anyone a reason to say I didn't have the credentials to do X, y and Z. So I'm actually thinking about getting an MBA in a lot of degree now and just like, what is the next level of what else do I need to do to make sure these people can't tell me no and that I can speak from experience and expertise. Yeah, so very, very long-winded answer, but I think those are the things that have really informed who I am as a person is being a young parent and working through a lot of different spaces of journalism and academia and now consulting, also doing equity work and working in the nonprofit space.

Ijeoma Kola: 5:22

Yeah, okay, I have, ah, trying to decide which direction I want to go into because I have two like different lines of questions that I want to ask. I'm going to ask one and hopefully I can remember to get back to the other one. So I believe and if someone is listening, a past guest is listening and I'm completely wrong, my bad, but I believe that you're one of the first guests on the podcast who has shared that they started graduate school with very young children who also made a move across the country. I think oftentimes, when folks are talking about you know where to go to grad school. We actually just had a workshop earlier this week where our speaker was telling us, like you know, your advisors might tell you, apply everywhere, go everywhere, but like that's not necessarily the reality for black folks.

Ijeoma Kola: 6:07

But then also, I think, this element of moving, the moving that is so commonly associated with an academic life, whether it is moving for grad school or moving for an academic job, or moving after three years if you don't like that place, or moving for tenure, you know, whatever it is, that kind of instability is often often clashes with having a family and no family stability. So I would love if you could just speak a little bit more to the decision to move cross country. Could you explore any institutions on the East Coast where you and your family were before you came to California? Just what was that transition like? I feel like it's one thing to move yourself across the country. It's another thing to move yourself and little children. So I just left to know a little bit more about that.

Tara Pixley: 6:53

You know, honestly, I'll tell you my story of then and then also my story of now, because I have a moving story that's like kind of unfolding right now, related to my career in academia, and I will say it's much easier to move younger children than it is to move older children. When, when I was taking my my son that he had just finished kindergarten and my daughter was in this- really wonderful preschool that we loved, but it wasn't.

Tara Pixley: 7:21

it wasn't this big big deal to move them. You know they were so young that they're I want to. We talked to my son. He said, kaden, are you worried about anything? Are you sad to leave your friends? And he said I'll make new friends. You know that's him at six years old and it's true. We made new friends immediately. All of us did, and so in retrospect you know that it wasn't as emotionally and strategically difficult as as now, which I'll get to in a second. And I think something that's important is I didn't have a lot of family help with raising my kids, so it wasn't like I was leaving like this great network.

Tara Pixley: 8:05

And because I was a young parent.

Tara Pixley: 8:06

I didn't have other young parents or I didn't have other parents around me, like I was the only one of my friends that had children. So I actually moved to a more supportive community where there were other parents when I went into grad school in San Diego because I was moving into graduate housing that was geared towards families, and so we actually went from having very, very little support for raising two young children to having a ton of support and being in this vibrant, beautiful community of people of all ages with children of all ages, and our kids grew up together over those six years of grad school. It was really amazing and I had then we had a very different experience when I got my job after grad school and my kids were about 10 or 11 or 12 and eight or nine, something like that, and their dad and I were no longer together.

Tara Pixley: 9:08

But we're very friendly and collaborative co-parents and so when I moved to LA, we had to make the decision of are the kids going to move with me or are they going to stay with him, and we had a lot of logistical difficulty there and then they ended up moving with me in LA and now I got a job as a professor at Temple and I'll be starting in Temple this semester, actually next week Congratulations.

Tara Pixley: 9:35

Thank you. I'm very excited, but that introduced a lot of logistical difficulty because now my children are my sons going to senior year of high school, my daughter's going to her last year of middle school. They have their friends here and even though I don't have any family or and I have way less support now, everyone move their separate ways after grad school and LA is not not the easiest place to make friends or parent friends. So I don't. I am in that space again where I'm like I don't have a network here. But I have to make a choice for the kids and so I actually negotiated to stay two years longer in LA and to move to Temple to Philly after my son graduated high school, because I just couldn't, for me, it wasn't ethical for me to choose my career over his career and he's in a point where he needed to make good choices about his football career and where he gets to go to college.

Tara Pixley: 10:37

The last couple years of high school and so important for you, informative and the same for my daughter. You know, middle school is very formative time and disrupting their lives at that time. For my own remove was not, it didn't sit right with me. Like I said, they've been my role dogs this whole time. They've always been like we support you, mom, we want you to have what you need. So that time I chose them in and it's been difficult but it my university was like very agreeable and is letting me teach online. So you know there's different experiences but I think ultimately you have to make the choice is best for you and your family at that time and I also think it's really important to be open to experiences like moving across the country was probably the best thing that I could have done for me and my children.

Ijeoma Kola: 11:26

And.

Tara Pixley: 11:26

I did look at sorry your other question. I did look at universities around me but I didn't get into those or or they didn't give me a package that was feasible. So I went to the university they wanted me and that happened to be across the country.

Ijeoma Kola: 11:40

Nice. Thanks so much for sharing that perspective, especially around moving with young kids versus moving with older kids Definitely something that I'm thinking a lot about. I have young kids now thinking about like trajectory, so that's that's really great context for me, and I know that there are people who are probably listening who might also have kids thinking about going to grad school or currently in grad school and thinking about the next step. So that's really really helpful context I'm glad I remembered.

Ijeoma Kola: 12:07

The second thing that I wanted to follow up on from your opening thoughts was you said something along the lines of you're thinking about getting additional degrees so that people can like won't say no, give you no reason to say no, and I've always thought of the PhD as like the ultimate, like I am an expert. There is absolutely nothing that that you can say to me because I am an. Those three letters give me enough credibility. But to hear you say that you're thinking about pursuing additional degrees, not necessarily for the learning capacity and not to say that that isn't one of the reasons, but you specifically called out like for credibility and respect. So can you talk a little bit about one, why you wanted to pursue a PhD in the context of credibility, but two what it is about being a black woman with a PhD that still wants to get additional certifications in order to continue to earn respect in her field.

Tara Pixley: 13:07

Yeah, and you know, I would say it's not really about respect, like I say that kind of jokingly, like so that no one can deny me, but yeah, really, it's about expertise and access. I decided to get a PhD because that was the highest level of education and I valued education. I was a good student, I love positive feedback from from professors, right. So I just was like I'm going to keep that going. That's what I think I'm supposed to do. I did as I said. I did not understand that academia was its own profession, and so I'm thinking I'm going to get my PhD studying journalism so that I can be a professor of journalism, because I'm a journalist and this is what I do. I want to teach it as well. I want to impact the future of journalism by impacting journalism education, and I had a lot of critiques of journalism education. So if I have a problem with something, I have a rule I have to go do something about it. I can't complain about something that I'm not willing to do something about.

Tara Pixley: 14:06

So yeah, for me getting a PhD was about, you know, just getting access to being a professor. And as I got an academia and I learned, wow, there's this whole, there's this whole thing with its own conferences, and you know I'm learning what this is and I was, I was really behind because a lot of my, my fellow, you know, my classmates and my cohort they even though many of them were also first and second gen Americans, they had more proximity to that level of knowledge. They had gone to the UC system. So our ones were teaching them something very different than what I was receiving in terms of access and like access to certain knowledges at an HBCU. And I went to an art school for my MFA. They weren't really preparing their MFA students to go on to doctoral education. You know they're preparing to be an artist. So, yeah, I had all of these different perspectives and getting a PhD helped me get this different perspective on academia and with that, like now, I'm in a position where, you know, my PhD has gotten me, has opened so many doors. I do feel very respected and appreciated and validated in many spaces that I would otherwise not have been previously. But there are things about society that I think are still, you know, like having legal expertise would be very important and helpful for my community, for my activism work, for my students. So that's something that I'm interested in just knowing more about. I have zero interest in being a lawyer, I've never wanted to be a lawyer, but having legal expertise and that knowledge I think would be incredibly useful. So that's something I've been thinking about. I don't really want to go to law school but you know I'll check it out. I like logic.

Tara Pixley: 15:59

And then the thing with thinking about business school. Actually, the other day I'm, I sit on a board and we're doing a CEO search and someone mentioned to me like Tara, have you thought about putting your name in? And no one had ever put me and CEO in the same sentence and I was just thinking about like that really threw me. It was, you know, it was very gratifying and validating and certainly appreciated. And I was thinking about growing up.

Tara Pixley: 16:28

My mom was in secretary for CFO of a big bank and I used to do my homework sitting on there like the highest floor in the tallest building in Atlanta and the tallest building south of the Mason Dixon line, where all of these entirely white male rooms, you know, of power, had something that I I had no connection mentally. There's like no possibility in my mind that I could be one of those people. I didn't even understand what a pathway to that look like. And so to actually have a powerful, wealthy white man turned to me and say well, what if you become the CEO? I am, you know what if you apply, that was like mind-blowing.

Tara Pixley: 17:07

And so then I started looking at the job description and I realized I'm like I actually could do this job there, but there are a couple things that I'm not knowledgeable about and they're primarily business specific things, and so that was like well, how do I get that expertise and how do I be the whole package that I would like to be, so that if I am in a position to have a CEO or some other C-suite role, that I can hit the ground running and do an excellent job? And so I was then looking at, like you know, instead of maybe a whole MBA I'm kind of tired or school, but like also maxed out on the student loans, you know, like business certificates and from Wharton and things like that so you know, it's not just about respect.

Tara Pixley: 17:51

I think it's about positioning yourself to have the knowledge and expertise to do the things that you want to do in the world.

Ijeoma Kola: 17:58

Yeah, well, thank you so much for clarifying and sharing that. So let's talk about your kind of academic trajectory. How did you first get interested in journalism and communications? Was there a class that you took in undergrad? Was there something that happened in your childhood? Why pursue that academic path?

Tara Pixley: 18:20

Yeah, I think I was just like watching too much superhero stuff as a child, where all the superheroes moonlight is journalists. Like I got in my head that the way to change the world, if you didn't have superpowers, was to be a journalist, and in many ways I think that that still has some some truth to it. But Also, journalists don't change the world. Journalists tell the story of world change, and so I'm on a different path with that mentally. But at the time I was very into being a journalist and so I always wanted to be a writer and I thought I was going to be working at I don't know Teen Vogue or something in New York, and so I started writing.

Tara Pixley: 19:03

Like I co-founded my student E Shaper in high school with a friend of mine who also went on to be a journalist, and then I got into this wonderful program that was a newspaper for high school students 14 byteens in Atlanta called Box, and that space was just so wonderful. I learned so much there and I got my first photo and story published in the Alerna Journal Constitution when I was 17. And so then I was really bitten by it. When I saw my stuff in print, I was like, oh, this is what I will be doing.

Ijeoma Kola: 19:45

And so.

Tara Pixley: 19:46

I went to college for journalism and I got internships in journalism and my first job out of college was as a photo journalist. And so at a certain point I transitioned from writing to photography. I loved photography. I still do a ton of writing. Now I write a lot about photography, but I also write news and stories to accompany my photography and film work.

Tara Pixley: 20:13

And yeah, so it really started in high school and then continued through college and that was my career. And then I transitioned to journalism education Because, as I said, I had a lot of opinions about how things should be being done and I wanted to be sharing those opinions because they were not being heard in the newsroom. Nobody cared what I had to say. I was like a 27-year-old with two kids working in the low ranks of editorial. No one was interested in my opinions.

Ijeoma Kola: 20:46

But then I go and get a.

Tara Pixley: 20:47

PhD. I got the same opinions and all of a sudden they're flying me out to tell them about it.

Ijeoma Kola: 20:55

I love it, I love it, I love it. So what were some of the successes and challenges that you experienced during your time at UC San Diego? You already mentioned one of the positives being the graduate housing environment kind of being able to grow up and to have your kids grow up around other kids in graduate housing. But what were some of the other highlights and some of the other challenges of grad school?

Tara Pixley: 21:22

Well, I'll speak to the challenges first so I can end on a nice note. As I mentioned, I didn't really understand academia and I was behind my peers in terms of my exposure to it. But I far exceeded my peers in terms of work experience and many of the people I was in classes with had gone straight into PhDs from their undergrad or they had just done a year of something. They didn't have full careers where they had been a professional and were coming to grad school. There were a couple of folks like that, but generally I was unusual in that regard and so I wasn't coming.

Tara Pixley: 22:05

I didn't understand this kind of like advisor, advisee, you're kind of some sort of parental figure and I am a child and I should just take whatever you say at face value. I didn't know that. That was an unspoken agreement and no one told me because it's unspoken, and so I was constantly transgressing the hierarchies of academia unbeknownst to me. I was like I'm in a class, classes are where you ask questions and you critique and you clarify. I didn't know that when they said we're going to talk about Foucault and Marx and whatever, that, I was just supposed to passively consume that knowledge and accept that all of these white men were speaking absolutely truth or whatever.

Tara Pixley: 22:47

So I was asking questions like well, why do we start with Marx? Well, why are we studying this thing? Well, why is this person so valid and why is this person not valid? And then I asked the crazy questions where I was like. So I noticed that a lot of the scholars were studying actually come from the UC system or are like from the West Coast. Is that because there's just a shit ton of knowledge production coming specifically from here? Or is it a total bias, because you don't think that other people's knowledge is about?

Tara Pixley: 23:15

And they were like what is happening? Here, and I will say that now, in my perspective being a professor, I was coming in really hot. I actually had a full on argument in class. As one of my professors in our first year, that terrified all of my cohorts.

Ijeoma Kola: 23:33

They were like why is she?

Tara Pixley: 23:34

doing this. I was like, well, they said this thing and now they're going back on it, and that can't happen.

Ijeoma Kola: 23:39

I need clarity.

Tara Pixley: 23:40

So I was like not everyone's favorite and they really tried to push me out In that.

Tara Pixley: 23:49

First year there was an agreement amongst the faculty that I learned later that I wasn't going to succeed and that I, in fact, was not cut out for grad school. And luckily we have this really arcane process of taking tests anonymously, like we had one week to write eight essays. They get graded anonymously, and so everyone, as it was told to me, the faculty who were tasked with preparing us for grad school, had already given up on me and decided that I wasn't cut out for this and were actively working against me, telling me they were going to give me an A, but then actually giving me B, which, as you probably know I don't know if this is true everywhere, but anything less than an A in a doctoral class is a letter of not, you know, it's basically saying you don't belong here. And so they were doing these little tactics. And then I took that test, the exam where I'm writing about all of these ideas that they've been instilling us, and I passed with flying colors, to everyone's surprise, and they couldn't do anything about it because it's anonymous. So they thought I was going to fail. I didn't fail. I did better than several of my other cohorts, according to the professor who I'd actually originally argued with. Who was the one? Who was like listen, I'm just going to give it to you straight no one believes you're going to do well. Everyone's kind of betting on you failing.

Tara Pixley: 25:21

And then a couple of people continued to try to push me out. One of them was actually the chair of my department, a white woman, who tried to find every excuse that she could, oddly enough, to get me to lead grad school procedural things, just all kinds of things. But I kept winning grants and awards and having projects and publications, and I was actually the first to graduate on time in my, or the only person to graduate on time, doing all of the things that were required of us in my cohort. I'll say that. And yeah, so I like a challenge and they challenged me because I had challenged them and I learned a lot from that. And I will say that if I had come into my doctoral program without having had 10 years of being messed with by white people in journalism, if I hadn't been yelled at and tried to have people try to push me out in journalism, all of the things that happened to me in grad school had already happened to me and I was like y'all have nothing on the crazy folks in journalism. You don't even know how to do this. So I was like that's cute, but you're not going to get me.

Tara Pixley: 26:41

And I'm so glad that I did show up with that kind of experience previous experience because that would have wrecked me, like the way that they went about doing that, the insidiousness of the and the way that they call into question your intelligence, and that was something that no one had ever called. I was a valedictorian of my high school. I was half of my class every year. No one had ever tried to make me feel stupid, unworthy, yes, like invalid, untalented these other things that had happened to me in journalism, yes, but no one in journalism had ever called into question my intelligence, and so that was a new one in academia. But I'm really, ultimately, I'm grateful for that and I'm grateful that they were doing it to me because I could handle it, and I think that also helped me know what sorts of shenanigans think about too, and so I can better prepare my colleagues and my friends and that has been very meaningful for me.

Tara Pixley: 27:43

So, in terms of highlights, really just having this space to learn, I learned so much. I'm a different person intellectually. The way I understand the world is just radically different, in large part due to the time I spent in my doctoral program and even though I had a sense about the world, the way that the social order functions, related to race and gender and citizenship, like I was living those things but I couldn't put my lived experience into words and I certainly didn't have the like centuries of writing to contextualize. Well, this is how we got here and these people were writing in this way and philosophizing in this way. That dehumanized me. And these people have been speaking from the subaltern and, you know, rat like radicalizing our thinking, but we're not hearing about that In most places. So if you're not seeking that knowledge out yourself or getting a PhD, it's hard to come by and I mean it's becoming more of the cultural lexicon now, but in 2012 People weren't talking about bell hooks, like in the streets.

Tara Pixley: 28:48

They were talking about other ring and like that.

Tara Pixley: 28:51

All the stuff that is now like in the, the social uber, is like. That was not you know. So I'm really excited that more people are having more access to this knowledge and information. For me it was a revelation and just being able to pursue so many different projects and understanding like that there are these resources that will Pay you to do your ideas, and those ideas can help the world and they can change. You know like I can do things that affect change now through my job as a professor. That will change the lives of people like my mother, who I Couldn't have imagined. You know that I would have been able to do that years ago. So there's so many wonderful things that came from getting my doctorate.

Ijeoma Kola: 29:42

I Love. I love that we ended on the positive note, because whoo the struggle. I I love how you framed your Perspective and experience, the fact that you had that work experience and in a field that is, from what I've heard, quite challenging, and so being able to have Experienced pushback from other people in journalism, preparity for the pushback in academia. I'm curious because I'm just trying to, I'm trying to put myself in your shoes. I'm curious, after seeing the very ugly side of academia, especially faculty and academia lack of support, intentional efforts to push you out. Why, then, continue on in academia and become a professor? Why not Carry out your research as an independent scholar or continue photojournalism? Work outs like why still play not play the academic game, but yeah, why still Continuing a career in academia, knowing how messy it can be and really experiencing the ugliest side of it?

Tara Pixley: 30:49

Well, if there's somewhere that someone really doesn't want me to be, that means I absolutely must be there so the fact, you know, and this is something that I I really struggle with, because I'm always telling my my like women of color and like Queer and trans folks of color Colleagues, they're like I just can't deal with this. I'm a quit. I'm like please Don't quit, we need you, we need you in journalism, we need you in academia, we need you in the classroom, we need you fighting the good fight and I'm like. I do feel that deeply. I also feel like you have to take care of yourself, right? So if something is threatening your, your life and livelihood, like your ability to have joy, then you have to make different choices.

Tara Pixley: 31:32

But I derive joy from Succeeding where others try to make me feel so you know, even though it is like it's not a good feeling to work with people who don't Respect you and who are actively trying to move against you. Let me be clear that is the entire world. I'm a black, queer woman. Yeah, the entire world is trying to move against me. So, yeah, at some point I have to say well, this thing I'm not gonna let you know, I'm not gonna go. If, if you're trying to push me out, the one thing you can be certain of is that I will not be leaving of my own Bullition, because I'm not gonna give you what you wanted the easy way like, no, you're gonna stay here in within this jungle with me.

Tara Pixley: 32:22

So you know, for me quitting wasn't really an option. I considered transferring. I was like, maybe I'll go to a different university where they'll treat me better.

Tara Pixley: 32:30

But I had too many other good things, um, yeah, you know, and then I was like I became a union organizer. I was like working with the grad student Organization and that's like that is what I do. When someone is trying to push me Out or, like you know, I feel like this isn't a welcoming space, I just dig in deeper, like, okay, well, what are the structures that make this unwelcoming for people like me? What are the position? You know, what are the pain points that I can get a position of power to help Myself and others like me and whoever comes after me.

Tara Pixley: 33:05

And for me, that was like working in the graduate student organization. And I became a vice president of, like equity, university inclusion, to, to work on these issues across the university. Um, and then, you know, I started union organizing for grad students. So All of that helped me find my people, who were, you know, who did respect me, who valued me and made it possible for me to do this work. And and I was you know, I wasn't in academia to, to be like, deemed this really important and interesting scholar.

Tara Pixley: 33:43

I came into academia because I wanted to teach the next generation of Journalists and I wanted journalism education to be more accessible and open to women and people of color, so that didn't change. Like you know, whether I ever write a book that is that everyone loves, or you know, I'm not interested in that kind of seeking Scholarly gratification. I'm interested in being in the classroom and affecting change at a level that will Trickle into other aspects of of American social life. So they weren't gonna stop me from doing that. For what? Yeah, they don't have that power.

Ijeoma Kola: 34:18

Yes, yes, yes, yes, I had a feeling that you would have a really motivational answer, so I'm really glad that I that I asked that question. Um, I love how you said if, if someone doesn't want me somewhere, that is a sign that I need to be there. I feel like that's really really, really great advice for folks. I have a question about your career as a visual journalist and storyteller how do you go about crafting narratives that reflect the experiences of marginalized folks such as black, lgbtq plus and diaspora communities? Um?

Tara Pixley: 34:53

Well, I, I hope that I do reflect those experiences. I think that's always a process and I'm always questioning myself, you know, like do I? Is this the story I should be telling? Do I belong here? Like, is there someone else who could do a better job at this, or could do a more intimate job, because it's not really connected to a community? But ultimately I asked myself, like, how would I want my family to be portrayed? What do I want people to know about the immigrant experience, about what it means to be black in the us, about what it means to be Afro-cruel but I'm not sure if I'm going to be Afro-cruel or queer. Like what? What do I value about these spaces? And that's what I want to photograph.

Tara Pixley: 35:37

You know, this is why I focus on joy, community, family, like love those are the things that I think make, make compelling images and Tell true stories, accurate stories of who people are and when you, when you see images of people Loving each other and working together and then you find out what they are going through and they're managing to do this, like that is a totally different relationship To those people and those images and what they deserve. And what I need, like what I am called on as a, a viewing audience member, as a public, as like part of their shared citizenry. That is a different relationship to what I Think I need to do for my fellow human being. Then, just seeing someone in the in the moment of the worst day of their life, you know that's like oh no, this terrible thing has happened to them. I have no frame of reference for that terrible thing. How terrible but.

Tara Pixley: 36:39

If it's like, oh look, they're living a beautiful, joyous life, just like I live, or my friends live, or I want to live, and they're doing that despite all of this other shit. Well, hell, like, let's get in these streets. Like so I think you know, that's my, my personal take on that. It's not that I think that we should never have images of struggle, like we do need to unveil the horrors of this world that we visit upon each other as humans, but we also need to make space for joy and for you know, what are we even fighting for? Like, if everything is terrible, that we can all just die right, but no, there is something we're fighting for love and our children and those moments of happiness. So like we have to see that.

Tara Pixley: 37:24

If we don't see that and we're not taking the time to acknowledge that Everyone can and should have access to that, then are we really telling the story of the world?

Tara Pixley: 37:34

Are we telling anything true? So that's what I think about when I'm, when I'm doing this work, and I try to show images that I haven't Seen before, seen a lot of, or try to make images that I haven't seen a lot of, and I'm happy to say that that's getting harder and harder because we have such an influx of, well, it's getting harder and harder to to, kind of like, make images I haven't seen before, because so many people are doing this wonderful work of, you know, reframing the visual lexicon of around people of color, around people from colonized nations, around women, around queer and trans folks, so Around people with disabilities, like all of these different communities are being shown now in their, you know, beautiful Entity, their complexity, the nuance, and so I'm, I'm happy that you know, I just sometimes I'm like Alright, like I don't even know if I need to tell this story, like eight other people are doing it.

Ijeoma Kola: 38:39

That's great.

Tara Pixley: 38:40

Yeah, something else I need to tell you.

Ijeoma Kola: 38:42

I love that the field, you feel like the field is already moving in the direction that your goal of educating the future generation of journalists it's like it's already coming to life. You are having to do less of the work because there are more and more people who are telling the stories that You're interested in capturing and telling those stories of joy, those stories of optimism, those stories of resilience that you're a hundred percent right. They're so rarely shown and so, but like without them, like what is there to be fighting for? Like why are we struggling? So I, I really like that perspective, especially as someone who, you know, in the past couple of months has started to feel pretty like pessimistic about life.

Ijeoma Kola: 39:24

I Think it's such a great reminder that we need to see Joy, we need to see us living happily Together in community with one another, because that's what really keeps us going and drives us forward. So thanks so much for doing the work and for inspiring others to do the work as well. So two short questions. We ask all of our guests to reflect a little bit about their own doctoral journey and then give some advice. So first question is what is one thing that you would do differently, if any, if you had to do your doctoral journey all over again?

Tara Pixley: 39:58

I would go to a university that offered me a better package financial package Because you know I mentioned, I went to the university that wanted me. I wish that I had been in a position to continue applying and also just I Didn't know. I mean, I wrote like my, my materials, my application channels are so embarrassing because I didn't know what I was supposed to be writing to.

Tara Pixley: 40:26

I didn't. I didn't have an advisor that was like this is what this is. So I was just kind of following the prompts and trying to make sense of it. So I know that you know I could have gotten into Different schools that maybe the program sort of had more aligned with what I'm very happy with what I ended up Doing, because UCSB had their communication department, had such a great like intellectually interdisciplinary and and methodologically interdisciplinary space, so and that was very, you know, formative and beneficial for me, whereas I would have gone to like another, like a more journalism focused, the university might not have gotten, or Program rather might not have gotten as much out of it.

Tara Pixley: 41:13

So I think, be open to a A different experience than you might have thought you needed, but also like get that money like be really realistic about what you need to survive, because we my first couple years of grad school as a TA, I was making $18,000 raising two children in Southern California. So I had to take out a ton of student loans just for us to live. I Didn't have to pay, you know, call it. Everything was like that was paid for which, and that was the first time I had had health insurance as an adult. Like that was really incredible because I couldn't afford it as a journalist and there are so many things that were financially beneficial.

Tara Pixley: 41:56

But making 18k, like being under the poverty line, like so much of academia is predicated on this idea that you have some kind of generational wealth or that you have like a partner who is making money and I don't you know, I don't think that they, you know the powers that you even realize that that is like what it's structured on, even at this point, as we've been doing so much pushback against Academia's ivory tower. So if you can be honest with yourself about your financial situation and be really adamant like this is what I need to survive, I think that's really important, while also maintaining, you know, having some space for it to be like you're not gonna make a salary, right, it's not gonna, it's not gonna be the same as like you're still gonna struggle a little bit.

Tara Pixley: 42:46

It's not not for you to like make money, but yeah make sure you can live. You know, like that's what. That's what I would say Don't be so like don't, don't feel so, beholden to that piece of paper that says congratulations, you've been, you know you're in our program, like if they're not offering you what you need to live, then they're not offering you anything worth you considering.

Ijeoma Kola: 43:08

Mmm. Yeah, so that was a reflection on your journey combined with a piece of advice. So thank you so much, dr Pixley, for joining us on the cohort sisters podcast. First, terry, your story how you got to and through your doctoral degree despite, despite a lot of odds Against you, despite people trying to actively push you out, but I am so excited to hear that you not only persevered but you're continuing to do the work of training the next generation of journalism scholars by transforming journalism education. We will include in the show notes places for folks to see all of your amazing work. I was like on your website such beautiful photo journalism that you do. So I'm really excited for other people to see your work. And congratulations again on the new role and safe travels. I guess in two years, when One year.

Tara Pixley: 43:59

I've already done my my first year, and now my son is finishing his senior year, so we go one more year and then I'm coming to Philly.

Ijeoma Kola: 44:05

Nice, nice, nice. Well, thanks again for joining us today. Thank you so much.

Tara Pixley: 44:11

I really appreciate all the work that you do telling the story, telling our stories and bringing that to a wider audience. So thank you so much for your labor and your brilliance and your time Absolutely.

Ijeoma Kola: 44:55

You.