10 PS • 2019 ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Profession Spotlight: Building, Sustaining, and Supporting the REP Community Ultimately, MIGAP will contribute to developing what Sinclair-Chapman (2015) called a “diversity infrastructure.” Along with APSA’s Diversity and Inclusion Programs, this pro- ject broadens APSA’s diversity infrastructure by developing a pilot campus-visitation program; fostering informal mentor- ship relationships; preparing students for summer research opportunities (e.g., the Summer Research Opportunity Pro- grams, Leadership Alliance, and Institute for Recruitment of Teachers); helping them navigate graduate-school applica- tions; and fostering their participation in the APSA Minority Fellowship Program and Ralph Bunche Summer Institute. Fur- thermore, we seek to improve retention and graduation rates by fostering collaborative relationships across institutions of higher education and by mobilizing support for students and faculty in MSIs. These relationships are key components of a strategy for diversifying political science (Beckwith 2015; Mealy 2015; Sinclair-Chapman 2015). Collectively, these coa- litions will allow us to seize a particularly opportune moment for developing a holistic approach to diversifying political sci- ence. It comes at a time in which APSA status committees have sought to increase their collaborative work around pipeline, recruitment, and retention efforts (Mealy 2018). Although recruitment and retention of Latinx students has proven to be challenging, we argue that this is far from being an intractable problem. Rather, we can leverage what we already know about supporting students and faculty from underrepre- sented groups to design and implement programming that ena- bles their success. n REFERENCES American Political Science Association. 2011. “Political Science in the 21st Century.” Report of the Task Force on Political Science in the 21st Century. Washington, DC: American Political Science Association. Available at www. apsanet.org/portals/54/Files/Task%20Force%20Reports/TF_21st%20Century_ AllPgs_webres90.pdf. Bair, Carolyn R., and Jennifer G. Haworth. 1999. “Doctoral Student Attrition and Persistence: A Meta-Synthesis of Research.” Paper presented at the meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, San Antonio, TX, November 18–21. Beckwith, Karen. 2015. “State, Academy, Discipline: Regendering Political Science.” PS: Political Science & Politics 48 (3): 445–49. Cusworth, Sarah. 2001. “Orientation and Retention of Counseling PhD Students: A Qualitative Study.” Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, CA, August 24–28, 2001. Available at https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED458513.pdf. Hathaway, Russell S., Biren A. Nagda, and Sandra R. Gregerman. 2002. “The Rela- tionship of Undergraduate Research Participation to Graduate and Professional Education Pursuit: An Empirical Study.” Journal of College Student Development 43 (5): 614–31. Hu, Shouping, George D. Kuh, and Shaoqing Li. 2008. “The Effects of Engage- ment in Inquiry-Oriented Activities on Student Learning and Personal Development.” Innovative Higher Education 33 (2): 71–81. Mealy, Kimberly A. 2015. “Forging Inclusive Diversity Coalitions within Asso- ciations.” Paper for the 2015 National Science Foundation Workshop on Coalition Building to Advance Diverse Leadership and Address Discrimina- tion in Political Science and Law and Social Sciences, Arlington VA, January 7–9, 2015. Mealy, Kimberly A. 2018. “American Political Science Association Diversity and Inclusion Report.” Washington, DC: American Political Science Association. Available at www.apsanet.org/Portals/54/diversity%20and%20inclusion%20 prgms/DIV%20reports/Diversity%20Report%20Executive%20-%20Final%20 Draft%20-%20Web%20version.pdf?ver=2018-03-29-134427-467. Monforti, Jessica Lavariega, and Melissa R. Michelson. 2008. “Diagnosing the Leaky Pipeline: Continuing Barriers to the Retention of Latinas and Latinos in Political Science.” PS: Political Science & Politics 41 (1): 161–66. Pascarella, Ernest T., and Patrick T. Terenzini. 2005. How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons. Sinclair-Chapman, Valeria. 2015. “Leveraging Diversity in Political Science for Institutional and Disciplinary Change.” PS: Political Science & Politics 48 (3): 454–58. Turner, Caroline Sotello Viernes, and Judith Rann Thompson. 1993. “Socializing Women Doctoral Students: Minority and Majority Experiences.” Review of Higher Education 16 (3): 355–70. CONFERENCING IS NOT A LUXURY AND NEITHER IS THE SCHOLARLY LIFE OF OUR FUTURE COLLEAGUES Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, University of California, Irvine DOI: 10.1017/S1049096519001082 As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us… The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom. —Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not a Luxury (1984, 36, 38) This spotlight article uses Audre Lorde’s groundbreaking essay, Poetry Is Not a Luxury (1984), to consider a set of condi- tions not of my own making but that I survived. Therefore, the argument—funding first-generation, underrepresented minor- ity, undocumented, refugee, Middle Eastern and/or Islamic, Native/ First Nations, and African/Black & African Diaspora/ Caribbean students to attend academic conferences as soon and as often as possible—is better described as a testimony— with a poem in the middle—and not as an endorsement of best practices. The genre of best practices suggests somehow a problem solved and not an ongoing, deeply violent dialectic of power. It is the latter with which I am concerned so I leave best practices to readers whose good faith compels them to stand outside of their own individual interests. Moreover, I am concerned with offering testimonial evidence and spurring a forthright conversation about ethical practices and principled necessities. As a testimony that insists on refusing silencing, it is worth exploring this set of conditions of ongoing, deeply violent dialectics of power. These particular groups of students are being enthusiastically recruited to campuses that are not willing to commit to their success in higher education. Depart- ments must prioritize the funding of these particular groups of students with recruitment that supports them and their fac- ulty mentors attending regional and national conferences each year during their graduate training. Period. This article analyzes the types of commitments that faculty must make to guarantee that there are wraparound supports for these particular groups of students to flourish and to name the dialectic of power and violence that constitutes how research is conducted and how knowledge is produced in our discipline. Not all faculty are willing to commit to this type of anticapitalist poli- tics of economic redistribution; however, those faculty who know that hiring and wage discrimination contributes to destabilizing forms of social inequality that constitute economic violence and cross-generational genocide may recognize these acts as impor- tant to endorse and address. As LGBTQ+, transgender, gender non-binary, first-generation and underrepresented minority,