Contortion Is Not Burnout: Racialized Relational Starvation and Professional Death in Ethnic Studies Work

Abstract

This presentation offers a term for a harm that Ethnic Studies practitioners experience constantly and lack precise language for. It argues that the imprecision is itself a barrier to defense. Burnout is a convenient diagnostic category. It implies depletion from overwork, prescribes rest and strong boundaries, and locates the site of intervention in the self rather than the structure. This presentation argues that burnout functions as an institutional alibi. It recodes structural and relational injury as personal misalignment, and in doing so stabilizes the institution. Drawing on Foucault, the presentation shows how wellness discourse extends disciplinary power: workers become responsible for optimizing their own resilience within environments that remain unchanged. Burnout presumes excess. But what if the harm is not overextension but deprivation? Feminist ethics of care holds that care is a relational practice requiring response-ability. Without reciprocity, care becomes extraction. The presentation develops racialized relational starvation to name the chronic absence of reciprocal recognition, sponsorship, and institutional buffering in environments that nonetheless demand sustained care labor and loyalty. Asymmetry itself is not the injury. Fields are never flat. The distinction is between fluid asymmetry, where those holding institutional capital absorb risk and redistribute strain, and calcified asymmetry, where circulation stops and protection flows predictably in one direction. Stagnation is the greater harm, not simply hierarchy. Under these conditions, Ethnic Studies practitioners adapt through contortion: institutionally induced self-surveillance and anticipatory compliance, routinely misrecognized as professionalism and praised as diplomacy, composure, and reasonableness. The praise confirms the adaptation and leaves the conditions untouched. Sustained, contortion produces professional death, the cumulative erosion of ethical agency, epistemic confidence, relational participation, and pedagogical integrity, without formal departure. Those living it are the walking dead, structurally embedded, outwardly functioning, internally disengaged from the institution’s moral claims. Their continued presence lets the institution read survival as health. This is spirit murder in professional form, in the sense theorized by Love. It is not spectacle, but sediment, laid down through repetition. The presentation closes with a refusal of premature closure. It offers no reforms. To move quickly to prescription would rehabilitate the institution before the harm has been accounted for, converting accumulated injury into a problem of implementation. Where harm has been normalized and rendered ethically unintelligible, naming is not a step toward intervention. It is intervention. This is what a loving defense requires: the willingness to stay with what is happening long enough to name it precisely, and to refuse the comfort of solutions offered too soon. The presentation will be a twenty-minute talk with slides, moving through misnaming, starvation, contortion, and professional death, with the final minutes reserved for discussion. The vocabulary is offered as analytical scaffolding, and is only useful if others can test it against their own conditions and experiences.