While I should be washing the dishes, let me pause to issue a call for the creation of Dallas Studies. Here’s what I mean. 1/

Folks are so thirsty for a robust history of Dallas that there is an account tweeting The Accommodation sentence by sentence that has over 700 followers. 2/

Since it’s out of print, people winkingly pass around PDFs of it; this comes up from time to time in Q+A’s at panels and whatnot and...that’s fine. I get it. It’s a landmark book. 3/

But this winking black market for an open-access Accommodation is indicative of a desire for The Real Story about Dallas.

The author’s made news a bit lately and I’ve idly thought that someone should write a new, definitive take on Dallas and race.

But that’s mistaken. 4/

I think we should make the Accommodation obsolete. 5/

I think we should make the desire itself, the desire for The Real Story about Dallas, into something else entirely.

We are tricking ourselves into wanting a narrator. It’s going to mess us up. 6/

We need a new aesthetics of this desire for The Real Story. There is a rich, complex world to excavate here. @DallasTRHT is doing great work in the narrative change portion of their program to tell us about this. 6/

But @JerryLEADS and @msberbiage’s work there and through @TheIFInstitute is as much calling for a new agenda for discovery as anything. They are attempting to *unsettle* our understandings, and leave us unsettled. 7/

It would be good to be unsettled. To see, constantly, that Dallas is more than a strip mall where a ranch used to be and also, incidentally, where Kennedy died. 8/

It is also its music, as @taylorcrumpton has been arguing; its storytellers, as @willevans and @clydevalentin and @EvaArreguin show us; its traditions of liberation from Craft to Ragsdale to @saintcedes and @smokuria; its poets from Rage Trench to @EdykaChilome 9/

The neighborhoods, my god; Fish Trap and Deep Ellum and Short North and Joppa and Tenth Street and La Bajada; the educators from @michaelsorrell to @mr_toynes to @ByronKSanders 10/

The urban trail riders and open air markets; the botanicas and palm readers; the Cathedral Shrine of Guadalupe and the difference between Mill Creek, Turtle Creek, Cedar Creek. The death of Black Dallas and the rise of Uptown. 11/

The waves of policy recrimination and housing market convulsion in West Dallas. The introduction of choice as a core innovation principle in a school district in one of the most segregated cities in the country. The ebb and flow of philanthropic power. 12/

FDR visiting to help dedicate the Lee statue. The endless boondoggle of Trinity River planning. Toxic zoning and infill development and —

There are dozens and dozens of seams, stories, conflicts. Of struggles to trace. The schemes! The projects! The hustles! The violence! 13/

What’s not to love? Plenty, I suppose. But there is so much to *learn.*

And ultimately I think all of us who are sustained by the life of this city, especially those of us with the great fortune to be educators, have a duty. 14/

A duty to confront critically the realities on which we and our neighbors depend. How are our disciplinary tools, our organizational structures, bent towards this end? Towards knowing where it is we are from? 15/

More pointedly: what ways are our disciplinary tools and organizational structures actively deployed *against* the thriving of our neighbors? 16/

It has always been thus, but in the days to come I think having good answers to these questions is critical. The stakes are impossibly high. We have students and a public who have stories to tell and puzzles to solve on which their lives depend. 17/

We can walk with them into the multiple, conflicting histories of this place — we can trace the financial mycelium that make its powers, its malfunctions, its engineered exploitations, its vernacular gods and fugitive economies, its special cultures of play. 18/

We can meet our moment by treating our city as an interdisciplinary object of study; a site of inquiry. Like a meteorite; like a lost city. It needs explanation. It needs arguments. It needs interpreters, in the plural. 19/

We are busy stripping the altars and we should be. We don’t need a new plaque, a new, static study of An Issue to tell us Who We Really Are. We need an eruption. A new tilt to the earth. We need an unruly anti-genre. We need Dallas Studies. 20/

We need grey lit and weird digital projects; new datasets and convening that creates something more than lines on a CV; we need a path for unruly ideas about the past, the present, the future. We need Dallas Studies. 21/

We need apocalyptic literature and we need a new archive and we need to know what’s in the soil by lane plating. We need Dallas Studies. 22/

We need Shingle Mountain gone and we need every kid to have an answer to the question of how they could have solved that better than us. We need to surface our shames. We need Dallas Studies. 23/

So that’s the idea. If you’ve got a #DallasStudies pitch reach out and we’ll see if we can find a home for your project within the Urban Research Initiative at the College.

Anyway: we need Dallas Studies because that’s the least our neighbors deserve. 24/24