Comfortable in college having uncomfortable conversations about inequality and gender, Shilyh Warren wanted to emulate the activists who went out and made a difference in the world dismantling systems. Once she got out in the world, she realized how hard that was and that there might be other ways. Find out how casting a critical eye and reflecting deeply can manifest in different kinds of activism.
Guest Shilyh Warren was comfortable in college having uncomfortable conversations about inequality and gender and felt herself to be a bit of a ramble-rouser. She wasn’t exactly sure what her path would be like but she wanted to emulate the activists who went out and made a difference in the world dismantling systems. Her first job after college was doing political organizing, where she realized how hard that work was and the pace of change didn’t meet her expectations. After investigating a few more options, she decided to join a boyfriend’s dream to travel and work in South America. A twist in that story that made her take a look at what her own dreams held, led her to a few different kinds of adventure. Ultimately the cultural pieces that she was learning on the road intersected with the life of the mind she’d loved cultivating in the classroom.
In this episode, find out from Shilyh out how casting a critical eye and reflecting deeply can manifest in different kinds of activism…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Shilyh Warren is currently at the University of Texas, Dallas where she is Associate Professor of Visual and Performing Arts & Film Studies as well as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. Her research takes up debates in film history, feminist theory, documentary studies, and film theory. She and her writing, including her award-winning piece "Revolution is Another Climax," can be found @shelikeswhat on Twitter (if that's still a thing.)
For another story centered on finding an outlet for gender-related activism in the arts and the academy, listen to ourepisode with Erika Meitner.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Shilyh Warren: Building coalitions, sustaining the energy required for change creating community across difference. You know, these are very challenging issues and they are not well paid and they're not well compensated, and people give their, you know, blood, sweat and tears to them. And I loved it, but I think I was too easily frustrated. Maybe I'm just impatient.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Uncomfortable in college having uncomfortable conversations about inequality and gender, Shilyh Warren wanted to emulate the activists who went out and made a difference in the world dismantling systems. Once she got out in the world, she realized how hard that was and that there might be other ways. Find out how casting a critical eye and reflecting deeply can manifest in different kinds of activism on today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
I am here today with Shilyh Warren and we are going to talk about interesting stories and what we see around us and maybe even inside us. So thanks so much for being here, Shilyh.
SW: I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
LJR: So I start these interviews the same way with two questions, and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
SW: I knew you were gonna ask those questions, so I have been trying to think about it and it is hard. It is hard to really kind of tap into who I was as an undergraduate. I think I was very much in formation as a person, and so I was probably a lot of different people, you know, in those four years, in that period. But I know I came in pretty naive and unaware of what awaited me. So I came from a public high school in Florida. I was not tapped into kind of elite networks of boarding schools or the northeast or anything, but I was in immediately so jazzed about the kinds of people I was meeting. So I think I was someone who was very, very excited, very much trying to find my place in somewhere where I felt like a lot of people knew how to belong and I wasn't quite sure how to belong.
And I think like, you know, one does, you know, finding one's people through those years I ended up being someone who kind of worked, I think, on the margins a little bit. And I was very interested in creating kind of inclusive spaces. But also, you know, I saw myself as a little bit of a rabble rouser, I think more than I feel like I am today. But I saw myself as a little bit of somebody who was interested in shaking things up and getting people to have hard conversations and in a little bit defying the status quo. But in retrospect, I think that had a lot to do, you know, with actually trying to belong, right? Ironically, right. I was a women's studies major and I was very much interested in feminist issues and I tried to align with people who were also interested in those kinds of hard conversations around gender and campus as you know, you know, ongoing conversations in our world, but certainly also at that time.
So I think, yeah, I mean, I think I was a lot of things. I was a lot of things, but I was more than anything, I think a really committed feminist and I became someone who was very interested in pursuing academia and was really intellectually like so, was so curious and so excited about what I was doing in the classroom actually, and with the faculty that I met.
LJR: So really it was the life of the mind, the ideas, the grappling with society and changes and wanting to incite change or just watch change either way. Did that mean you were going straight into graduate school right after college and you knew that?
SW: I don't think I knew that at that time. I do think there were a couple of classes and a couple of faculty members who said to me, you know, you have the potential to do this. Have you thought about this? Like, have you thought about going to graduate school? And I think I was like, I think that's enough school for now. You know, at the time I wasn't in a hurry to do it. No. So I wasn't sure. I think, I don't know if I knew what I wanted to do when I left, honestly. I think I was a little bit lost. I sort, you know, again, I was like, maybe I'll go…You know, one day somebody said like, I’m going to law school and I was like, oh, that sounds like a pretty good path. You know, that seems worthwhile. Maybe I'll try that. I did not even get anywhere near that, but I ended up, right after graduation, I did end up doing more political work.
So I thought I was gonna do more activist work, probably is what I would say. I thought probably I was looking for a path in activism or policy or politics, I think. [LJR: Yeah.] But I didn't go in that.
LJR: Yeah, so were those first issues, like were you drawn to the political through the idea of being political and being that rabble rouser? Or was it issue based, like I'm gonna do some gender work, or how, how did that path like spark for you?
SW: Yeah, it was definitely issue based. I definitely wanted to do feminist work and I wanted I think I just had a lot of feminist heroes. I really, you know, women who had changed the world and had, you know, and I studied the Women's Liberation Movement in the seventies and the women of color activism and postcolonial feminists that came after. And I just thought I, that was the, you know, the kinds of people I wanted to grow up to be actually. You know, people who really did change lives and policies for the better. But in the end, yeah, but in the end, I think I became a person who studies those things more than actually enacts them or incites them, so to speak. Right?
LJR: Yeah. And, but things were inciting and exciting in your life, in those early years that put you on a different kind of path or trajectory. Tell us about those.
SW: So, right when I graduated, I went out to California to work on a political campaign. And I think maybe that was it. Because I found that, on the ground, activism is really hard. Building coalitions, sustaining the energy required for change creating community across difference. You know, these are very challenging issues and they are not well paid and they're not well compensated, and people give their, you know, blood, sweat and tears to them. And I loved it. But I think I was too easily frustrated. Maybe I didn't quite have the constitution to like patiently work through problems. I'm very kind of task oriented and I want things to happen quickly. Maybe I'm just impatient. I want things to happen very quickly. And when you're doing that kind of political work, I mean, you're knocking on doors, you're trying to call up, you know, staff in legislative offices, you know, that kind of work is, and working with people who are generally disagree with you. And I think that was maybe I have so much respect, you know, for people who are on the ground doing that kind of work every day and getting people on board with hard ideas. But I think for me it was too slow in some way. I mean, it's gonna sound weird, you know, that I moved to then to academia, which in which is like a snail’s pace and nothing changes But at that time I think I was, I, I was kind of impatient for change that I felt like was, there were too many obstacles.
LJR: Right. Well, because you couldn't see how that thing that you were doing was leading to the, the bigger picture.
SW: Yeah. I think, I think maybe, yeah, maybe I didn't stick with that long enough maybe to see how those incremental changes built over time, you know?
LJR: That's right. That's right. But other changes were happening for you.
SW: Yes.
LJR: You met people that changed where you even were even going, right?
SW: True, yes. So I spent some time out west in San Francisco for a while and then I decided most of my friends from Dartmouth were moving to New York City. And I guess I missed them and I felt like that was a good place to try to build a life. And so, yeah, within the first year or so after graduation, I moved to New York and I ended up meeting someone we didn't go to college with. I met my boyfriend at the time. And that is really where my path took a very unexpected direction. I was working on Madison Avenue, an advertising agency, hating my life and everything that I was working on. I was, you know, trying to help people work on ad campaigns for airline seats, and I just thought, every day, I was like, what am I doing here except being able to live in New York and hang out with friends. But I met somebody and his big dream was to travel South America, and I'm a Spanish speaker, my mother's Colombian. I've spent time in South America and hadn't really tapped into it for a long time, and I thought, well, I speak Spanish. Like I could do that. Maybe I'll try that.
LJR: Which you did.
SW: Which I did. And so right away ended up in Argentina and I lived in Buenos Air. We did together. I lived in Buenos Air for a year and because of Dartmouth I ended up getting a grant to do an internship with a women's political organization. And I did that as well. So I did an internship and I taught English. And the internship was with activists. It was women who had started their work during the, you know, the dirty wars in Argentina, during the dictatorship. And they were a group of, you know, somewhat older women, you know, to me at the time they were, you know, in their fifties and sixties. They had raised children throughout the dictatorship and their goal was to get more women into political office. And so I interned with that group of women in that organization and had a really incredible experience learning from, you know, a different generation of activists in a different political situation, different political climate than the, you know, than I had been tapped into here in the U.S.
LJR: Yeah. And I can imagine, regardless of whether you tapped into them, you would've had an amazing experience there. But do you think the draw for you to look for that opportunity came as a bit of a reaction to, Hmm, here I am, like this very strong feminist and I'm following some man's dream to the South?
SW: Okay, well there's a twist to the story that I…but since you asked…actually it was his dream and he sort of planted it and I was like, that's great. I mean, why don't I have that dream? That sounds like a great dream. Maybe I should try that. I got myself an internship. I got myself a grant. I got it all set up, and then a few months before we were supposed to leave, he broke up with me. And I had at that point the question for myself, which was: Am I gonna do this still or not? And I did. And I got on a plane and I left and I moved to Argentina actually on my own. [LJR: Ah!] Yeah. And I got it all set up. I was having an amazing time. And it was only at that point that a few months later he came down and joined me. But…
LJR: Oh, see there. He had to follow. I love it. A perfect feminist story.
SW: So it…there is a good twist. Yeah. There's a good twist. Yeah. And we've been together ever since. So he's my husband now. He's a great person. He's been supportive of my career throughout all our years together.
LJR: Great. So you stayed there roughly five years?
SW: Oh, I stayed down there. I stayed, we stayed in Argentina one year and then we traveled. So we saved up a bunch of money and then we traveled over land from Buenos Aires all the way up to Bogota, Columbia, where I have family. So we spent six months on the road, really just kind of, what are we doing today? Where are we going? Where are we camping? What are we eating? Who are we gonna meet? It was an incredible time, and all along the way people kept saying, it's so good you're doing this now. You know, someday you'll have kids and you'll have a job and you won't be able to travel like this. And I remember thinking at the time like, I'm what? You know, I could live like this forever. I don't know what, but I don't know about your life, but my life is never gonna be, you know, that compromised that I can't just get on a bus and Okay obviously that, you know, they were right. They were right. I was wrong. It's wonderful that we did it when we did it, and I'm so glad we did. So we traveled all through South America and then we regrouped. We went back to New York, made some more money, and then traveled again. We moved to Madrid in Spain. Lived in Spain for a year, Kind of replicated some of those….Without that, then I lost track of the internships and a little bit, just did the traveling and teaching English. Then moved to Morocco and did it again for another year, and at that point it was traveling sort of in that part of the world where I reconnected with the Dartmouth professor Marion Hirsch, who said, we've got this great master's program. Are you sure you don't wanna come back? You would be such a good fit for it. And I was actually really, at that point, desperate to come back to a more thriving intellectual environment. I was a little bit tired of teaching verbs and nouns, even though the cultural thing was amazing, living in Morocco was incredible. I'm so grateful that I'd had that time before 9-11 actually to live in Muslim country in North Africa. And have my own experience of what it's like to live among people who are so different and have different, you know, cultural, political and religious beliefs. But I really did wanna, I was, I was so, I don't know, hungry for something else that I took her up on the offer really quickly and applied and then actually ended up back at Dartmouth for a master's degree.
LJR: That's great. Which kind of tapped in again to the life of the mind and…but on top of all these other experiences and cultures and difference and all of that. [SW: True.] So did that inform what you were studying both in the Masters and then when you ultimately moved on to the PhD?
SW: It really did because I had, so I had lived on either side of this massive immigration problem in Europe, which is both in Spain and in Morocco. So I met people traveling, you know, both ways. So on the one hand, kind of the legacies of colonialism, on the other hand, the desperate kind of desire to migrate north from North Africa into Europe. And so that issue, right? And the way that it was being handled at the time really informed what I wanted to work on in my master's program. I was really a literary scholar. As an undergraduate, I was a feminist scholar, but mostly of literature. And when I went back to graduate school then, I didn't see that reflected in the literature yet. It was sort of too new a problem. And I saw it more in films and so then I kind of migrated over to cinema as an area of research and that really set my path. Today, I am a professor of film studies and most of my research is on the history of women and documentary.
LJR: Just a side note...
SW: Mm-hmm.
LJR: Do you have any archival documentary footage of those years on the road? This is pre iPhone, pre all of that, right?
SW: Yeah. It's so different. Yeah. I have a lot of photographs and actually we kept a journal. So we have a journal that we kept each night we would trade off who wrote in the journal to document our journey. [LJR: Oh.] And so and so we have, we have those things hidden away somewhere. I haven't gotten them out in a while. But that's a pretty special thing. Yeah. No, no moving images cuz we didn't, I don't think we even had a digital camera at the time, to be honest.
LJR: Yeah. And so then actually that leads into—are the documentary, you said that you couldn't find these stories [SW: Mm-hmm] at the time in the literature. This is rather new. I mean, we're…there may be documentary footage from years and years and years ago, but probably not a lot of women in them. [SW: Mm-hmm.] So you're looking at, of the now culture as it's almost as it's unfolding, right?
SW: Well, at the time, so I wasn't doing documentary in my master's program. I was doing fictional films. Of which there were a couple on this issue. So film set in Spain, film set in either north or even Sub-Saharan Africa about people migrating north and the reasons they do and the lives they encounter when they arrive. So I started there, but I guess eventually when I…You know, so that was my master's program here at Dartmouth and I got, I had a great experience. I'm so grateful for the comparative literature master's program that I did. And then I went on to do my PhD. And in my PhD program, I guess I reconnected then with my feminist studies work and that intersected with the film work and I ended up kinda squarely in the history of feminism as it relates to cinema and as it relates in particular to documentary. So the question I was really interested in my doctoral work was how was cinema crucial to the feminist activism of the 1970s. And what kinds of documentaries emerged? And in particular, like what kinds of stories can we now detect in the documentaries that tell us kind of a deeper, richer alternative vision of the seventies feminist movement than we get in, I think, contemporary explanations of what that movement was and what its politics were? So I'm, I was just curious kind of what story does the, what stories do the films tell and how does that compare with the more dominant versions of the seventies that we get in contemporary feminism? Does that make sense? That's a complicated explanation.
LJR: Definitely. No, it does. It does. And I think that, I mean, it's both the historical lens into the way we look at an older time period is one thing, but then you also probably have lots of tools at your disposal, in your teaching, your writing the things you're thinking about, to look at how that kind of storytelling is playing out now in. Activist cinema or you know, media on TikTok even, whatever it is. How much of the newer media is informing the things that you think about now?
SW: I think that's a great question and I am probably not as…You know, I, because I think my interest is in the 1970s and in documentary, those are the trends I tend to still follow. But I suppose I could say this: In the seventies, when women were trying to change the world, right? For the betterment, I think, of all, not just women, but especially poor women, marginalized women, the issues were, you know, reproductive justice. The issues were equal pay, I mean Yes, exactly. To see your face. [LJR: Ahh.] Yeah. Precisely. Issues that are very much at the center of our concerns today. What's interesting is that the key in documentary has always been to talk to ordinary women. To hear their experiences and to realize that we, many of us share an experience of the world because we are women. Now, it's also true that there are extreme differences in our experiences, depending on our access to wealth and employment and the protection of our rights, et cetera. But all of those issues were being worked out in the 1970s and they continue to be worked out and in similar ways today. So if you look at women's activism online, I think, in a lot of different forms of media—reproductive rights is a great example right now—what do we hear? We hear stories about women, right? And either their lack of access to reproductive care or how it saved their lives. And those one-on-one stories kind of accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, and that is how we. I think get people to see, you know, the impact that politics has on our individual lives, and then also understand how we might change it, right. Collectively together, how we could work together to, you know, create the change we wanna see.
LJR: Right. Well, I have to reflect that this project of Roads Taken has really been that story, too. Not specifically to women. But kind of shining the light on ordinary, extraordinary people and showing our shared experience. So it is a quite effective tool. I know, you know.
SW: I totally agree.
LJR: Yeah. So Shilyh, when you think back to that woman who thought of herself as a rabble rouser and was trying to belong and ironically was looking in spaces of not belonging, and you told her, laid it out: This is where I've been. This is where, what I'm doing, this what I'm thinking. I would imagine she sees continuity there. What would her reactions be to that?
SW: My younger self? [LJR: Yeah.] To my…
LJR: To where you are now.
SW: That is a good question. I think I was a little bit hard at the time and judgmental. I think I would've said Mm, not radical enough. You know, I think, I actually do. I mean, I'm happy with where I ended up. But I do, you know, have a husband and two kids, and a station wagon and a stable job…A stable job. And you know, I tend to vote, you know, a blue ticket all the way down the line. I think I'm probably not as radical as I maybe hoped I would become.
LJR: Right, right. Well, I also think she might have missed some of the nuance in settling in and being really thoughtful and all the things that it seems as though you've been able to do both personally and professionally. So, thank you.
SW: I would've been hard on myself, I think, but it's true. Like, you know, I think at the time I wasn't, I don't think at the time I believed that you could do good work from the inside. You know, this kind of issue with political change? Is that I think as a young person, if you wanna, you have to just destroy things to change them, right? You have to dismantle them and start over. And now I learned that actually we need a lot of really good, committed, thoughtful people on the inside. Because institutions and organizations are very resistant to change that comes from the outside. But from the inside, you can, I've learned that it can be done.
LJR: Well, that is very insightful and she probably knew it all along too. She was looking to belong and all of those things. So, Shilyh, thank you so much for sharing this with us and taking us down this path, and we wish you well wherever the next one takes you.
SW: That's so nice of you. Thank you so much for listening to my story and asking such great questions.
LJR: That was Shilyh Warren, who's currently at the University of Texas, Dallas, where she is associate professor of Visual and Performing Arts and Film Studies, as well as Associate Dean of Graduate studies in the School of Arts, humanities and Technology. Her research takes up debates in film history, feminist theory, documentary studies and film theory. She and her writing, including her award-winning piece, “Revolution is another Climax,” can be found on Twitter, if that's still a thing @shelikeswhat.
We know what we like, and that's bringing great stories to you from our fabulous guests. Don't forget to follow or subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts and check out all the show notes and then in now photos and transcripts at RoadsTakenShow.com to keep you full of great content until the next episode with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, of Roads Taken.