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to requite and/or return is the non-traditional dissertation of j. nyla ink mcneill, a community-rooted researcher, multidisciplinary artist, and psychologist by training. Departing from the forms and formats expected of them in academia, this work charts their journey from “publish or perish” to going rogue—leaning into community, art, and self-determined study as a path toward becoming.

When the COVID-19 lockdowns began, j. nyla chose to stay home and attend to a DIY PhD through the School for the Ecocene. What followed was a deeply personal and political process of gathering ten years’ worth of poetry, prose, and fieldnotes—works in and about relationship: with land, lineage, illness, community, institutions, and the self. to requite and/or return offers not a single argument, but a constellation of invitations to feel, remember, and imagine otherwise.

Emerging from over a decade of youth organizing, trans justice work, and participatory research, j. nyla reflects on the ruptures and reckonings that moved them away from a conventional PhD path. From early writing as a teenager to pointed critiques of the research fields they once hoped to reform, this collection documents their evolution as both a thinker and a feeler.