Graduates Rise @ Academic Event


From Dr. Cyn Corrigible, Songstress for Graduates Rise.

Graduates Rise has been selected to perform our record Math is Hard! at the Working Class Studies Association (WCSA) academic conference in Bloomington, Indiana! This year’s WCSA conference is titled Class Struggle: Race, Gender, and Revolution and occurs on the campus of Indiana University Bloomington during May 31 – June 3, 2017. Graduates Rise is slated to perform on June 2, 2017 at 5:15 pm in the Wright Auditorium Building. Our record Math is Hard! presents several of the top philosophical struggles occurring within the academy by sharing aspects of my personal experiences as a low income student with disabilities in a doctoral program and discusses issues including academic bullying, the financialization of education, research ethics, and informed consent. 

We need your support for this performance!

Sponsorship levels:
If you donate $5 or more and provide your email address, you will receive a special thank you message from Dr. Cyn Corrigible.

If you donate $25 or more and provide your email address, you will receive a digital download for Graduates Rise's new single Pussygrabber .

If you donate $50 or more and provide your email address, you will receive a digital download of Graduates Rise's debut album Math is Hard!. 

If you donate $75 or more and provide your email address, you will receive digital downloads for both Math is Hard! and Pussygrabber.  

If you donate $100 or more and provide your email address, you will receive both digital downloads from above; and if you also provide your mailing address, you will receive in the mail a signed copy of Foibles & Favors, a poetry zine by Dr. Cyn Corrigible.


What the funds will support:
The amount of support requested totals $1650 and includes direct expenses for Cyn to attend the conference and also expenses to support the band’s performance. These include the required conference registration ($165), required WCSA membership fees ($50), costs for the band to attend the awards banquet ($175), lodging in the dorms for Cyn and the band provided by Indiana University ($520), labor expenses for band members ($400), fuel expenses ($260), and associated fees ($80).


Background Information from Cyn:
I am a first generation college student that has persisted through poverty and recently earned my doctoral degree from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Social Work in May of 2016. I grew up quite poor and despite living in Music City, Nashville, Tennessee, the notion of creating any sort of art never really entered my mind. I was much too busy working, helping to manage my siblings, or performing well in school so that I could get a scholarship to college. I come from an abusive home and the need to get away from this setting took precedent over any other goal. I saw education as my only way out and creating art for nothing seemed silly at the time. As I grew up and gained control over my own life and circumstances, I did begin to write poetry in 2005. I was spending a lot of time around artists and musicians and they often took inspiration from my ideas. One day my dear friend and talented musician Tristen Gaspadarek yelled at me that I was a writer and that I would never be happy until I wrote something down and to just do it already. I wrote my first poem that night and the flow has not stopped since. In 2007, another close friend Carey Ott turned one of my poems into a song which inspired me to think about writing my poems to be read or sung aloud. At this point, I had no intention of ever being a singer but did hope that maybe I would be able to write a hit song for someone else to sing one day. 

I began writing the lyrics which are on Math is Hard! in 2011, midway through the first semester of my doctoral program. I had come to rely on writing poems as therapy by this point and greatly needed an outlet to manage the frustrations of being in a program that was stifling while also being too poor to be able to change schools. I was all-in by necessity and songwriting helped me to get through. While there are many wonderful people at VCU and I did ultimately get what I needed there, it was not without issue. The majority of the problems I faced had to do with my vulnerability as a low income student who was also managing the onset of a severely limiting disability resulting from a physical trauma. The shortest version possible of the most devastating experience with VCU was that I got held up being forced to do an unnecessary ethics review by an incompetent Director (who is no longer in that position of power) and had to stay a student for a year longer than I expected to, which bankrupted me. Beyond this statement, the lyrics on Math is Hard! for the songs Whistleblower and Quit Lit give the most succinct account of what happened to me that is available at this time. I am working on a book that goes into deeper detail about my experiences that also offers tips for vulnerable students to protect themselves and suggests ways we can change the system.

Of course, I have already overcome greater struggles than anything VCU could have thrown at me and I did finish my dissertation. It is titled Supporting Teen Leaders: Validation of the I Drive Smart Survey and serves the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, Tennessee Highway Safety Office. This was a community-engaged project that developed an evaluation tool for their statewide network of teen leaders to use to assess change in driving behavior intentions among their peers. The survey is grounded in Theory of Planned Behavior and designed to be used by teen leaders as part of a data triangulation that links their short term outputs with long term outcomes in regards to reductions in teen crashes over time. Teens use web tools to create annual strategic plans of interventions to promote highway safety as organized through www.ReduceTNCrashes.org. In supporting them to evaluate their work, we developed the I Drive Smart Survey, a county-level teen crash tracker, and a cell phone app that supports teens to conduct seatbelt use observation studies safely and with fidelity. Over 200 Tennessee schools are currently participating in the program and it has been recognized for excellence at the state and national levels.

Due to a disabling medical condition (ironically brought on by a teen driver who ran a stop sign and caused a car crash), I have been unable to work full time since 2014 and at the point when the ethics review hold-up was happening, I was unable to work at all. Selling off the majority of my possessions in December of 2014, I completed my degree while homeless. While I am on the market and will surely be hired somewhere that can provide me appropriate disability accommodations soon, I am actually still homeless to this day and doing part time consulting around my health issues in order to make it work. While I do not have any parental support, I am quite blessed in the social capital department and I have been very well taken care of by my sister, nieces, and friends. With their generous support, I have been able to manage my social networks to coordinate house sitting, couch surfing, or some other arrangement so that almost every night I have had somewhere safe and warm to sleep.

I also have a great deal of psychological capital in the form of hope and faith. The universe did not let me down and ultimately got me to where I needed to be so that Math is Hard! could happen. Another recording artist friend of mine, Grey Jacks was helping to provide me with housing and food one day. Seeing the lyrics I had been writing, he instantly recognized the importance of this material being heard. I do not play any instruments yet and had no idea how the words I was writing would ever become music, but he offered to compose the songs from my conceptualized melodies. He and Tristen quickly helped me learn to sing (good enough for punk at least) and I practiced every day for months. We teamed up with Russell Lacy at Virginia Moonwalker in Richmond, Virginia to make the album and while my band was busy upstairs recording the music, I was downstairs typing up my dissertation report. Math is Hard! was released as a digital recording on May 4, 2016, the same day I defended my dissertation. The record is available for sale via bandcamp, CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon, and for free streaming through Soundcloud. 

In the few short months since its release, Math is Hard! has been played on independent radio stations including Time is Tight on WRIR 97.3 FM out of Richmond, Virginia and Grrrl Power Hour on Lucky Star Radio out of New York, New York. The track Slave Body was also picked up to be included in Riot Grill Production’s Severe Impact: The Brock Allen Turner Mixtape out of Los Angeles, California. This was a compilation from Riot Grrrl bands from around the world who recorded material in response to the Stanford Rape Case to help survivors heal through music and to raise funds for the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN ). I have performed live shows at Comet Ping Pong in Washington, DC; The Reverb Collective in Baltimore, Maryland; and both Strange Matter and Gallery 5 in Richmond, Virginia. We also performed songs protest-style using megaphones outside of the venue where my graduation was held just after my class walked across the stage.

I have recently returned to Nashville, Tennessee where there are more job opportunities and I have the support I need to help me restabilize after being wiped out by the PhD process. While in Nashville, I also teamed up with Phantom Farmer  and Brian Stone to create Pussygrabber at The Stone Farm. This is a sex positive song that presents consent culture the riot grrrl way. None shall comply with the Pussygrabber! All shall bow to the pussy power! 

Creating Math is Hard! has brought me life and truly reflects the experiences of a low income student in a doctoral program who is sick to death of paying so much to not be properly respected by the academy.

I look forward to performing this album at the WCSA conference this June with your support.


About the Working Class Studies Assoication:
The WCSA formed in 2003 and continues to grow its organization as a group of academics who focus on the needs of working class people and first-generation college students. They have created goals that seek to understand academic identity for working class graduates and are committed to activism and the range of community-based and public activities that can contribute to social change, including the arts. They regularly feature academics and artists who have created products that seek to understand and explain working class life including their biannual conference, the WCSA’s own academic journal, and their multiple awards recognizing creativity and excellent scholarly work including the Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing, the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism, and the Russo & Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay for Academic or General Audiences.

About the WCSA conference:
The full program of events for the conference includes an array of informational sessions, networking meetups, film screenings, and of course a musical performance by Graduates Rise. Some information areas focused on during the conference will include multiple conceptualizations of what “working class” and “class struggle” mean, examples and best practices for working class solidarity, deindustrialization and its impact on work decline, women in the workplace, and discussion on how to create a revolution to improve higher education. If interested, you may also register to attend this conference yourself. 

Thanks for your time and support!