Mental Health and the Academy

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the psychic/emotional/spiritual effects and affects of working in the academy. I’m hoping to write more about my experiences soon. I might even turn it into a digital story. For now, I wanted to document a few of the things that I’m reading as I think through how unhealthy being an academic can be (for some people, but not all?).

1. An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison (book)

2. On Quitting by Keguro Macharia (article)

3. Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich (book)

One of the hardest things I’ve had to realize in the last few years was that being an academic was unhealthy for me and for my mental well-being. Academic approaches to engaging and endlessly critiquing ideas and theories, combined with the relentless pressure to produce and the constant reminder that you will never be good or smart enough at thinking, teaching, researching was turning me into an unhappy and anxious person who felt disconnected from the people I cared about most (including myself).

What do you do when you realize that the thing you thought you loved and wanted to devote your professional life to is bad for you? When I confronted, and really took seriously, this question a few years ago, I decided to stop being an academic and to explore other ways (beside/s Academic) for being an intellectual and engaged thinker/learner/teacher/scholar.

 

no snobs allowed

[sung to the tune of “No Dogs Allowed“]

Frequently, I send myself links to articles that I’d like to read more closely. I have the best intentions of reading them. But, oftentimes, they languish in my inbox, with the subject heading, “link from twitter,” or on my safari reading list. When I finally get fed up with the growing mass of links, I give up and delete them. Or, if I’m feeling inspired, I spend some time reading them and crafting interesting connections between them. Since it seems like spring is finally coming to Minnesota (what a long, never-ending winter!), I’m inspired to clean out my links and spend a little time reflecting on them here today. The theme that connects them all: troubling elitism.

Source One

Academic writing: why no “me” in PhD? In this article, author Aslihan Agaogl laments how academic writing standards demand that academics stop using “I” in their articles, chapters, and dissertations. She writes: “by removing the first person point of view and the active voice from your writing, what you’re actually doing is removing yourself.” I agree. As I’ve written about in my book, Unofficial Student Transcripts, academic training, especially in graduate school, encouraged me to lose my voice and actively discouraged me from forging intimate connections with the ideas and theories I was encountering and using.

Agaogi’s big problem with the lack of “I” statements is that it makes academic writing too stuffy, boring and therefore inaccessible to most lay audiences. Academic writing is already alienating and esoteric enough, Agaogi argues. Academics need to infuse it with personality and “spice,” drawing readers in and enabling them to connect with the ideas. Again, I agree. But, I would have liked to see Agaogi pushing her argument just a little further to explore and trouble the underlying reasons why academics are supposed to remove themselves from their work, like: to perpetuate the myth that academic work is objective and that the ideas/”facts” generated by scholars are able to transcend particular perspectives, biases and political motivations.

In thinking about this article in the context of “no snobs allowed,” another reason academics aren’t supposed to use “I” is because it’s too informal; it makes your (one’s) writing seem less serious or rigorous. Academics believe themselves to be serious and formal and doing “important work” that can’t be done anywhere else. Agaogi echoes this in her essay when she writes:

Academia is supposed to be the place where knowledge is created; a place where people come to make an original contribution to the existing literature.

When I was in the academy I took myself pretty seriously. Even as I acknowledged and tried to honor the fact that lots of important ideas, theories, knowledge were developed outside of the academy, I believed that the academy was where real knowledge was produced. It’s taken me several years to become un-disciplined in those habits and beliefs. 

To maintain their status and sense of worth as exalted expert smarty-pants, some (not all) academics feel compelled to sound serious and stuffy. Using “I” and writing less formally and with the acknowledgment that they are a person not just a giant brain with big ideas, is risky and difficult. It requires recognizing that academic ideas, while important, are not necessarily better than non-academic ideas and that Academics, while highly trained, with well developed critical thinking skills, aren’t by definition better (as in more serious, significant, thoughtful) than non-Academics.

Source Two

30 Things to Tell A Book Snob

Since I really dislike when people are snobby about what they read, watch, eat or listen to, I was happy to read this author’s various suggestions for telling snobs to fuck step off.

Here are a few of my favorites:

10. You don’t have to be serious about something to be serious about something.
17. Freedom is a process of knocking down walls. Tyranny is a process of building them.
22. Never make someone feel bad for not having read or not read something. Books are there to heal, not hurt.

the trouble with happiness

For a few years now, I’ve been thinking about (and writing and teaching about) happiness and it’s limits…as a concept, goal and demand placed on most of us to smile (or die). Much of this work is connected to my interest in queer ethics and my extreme dislike of self-help literature. One of these days, I will do a larger project that engages critically and creatively with the limits of happiness and its connections to the U.S. self-help industry. Soon, I hope. For now, I wanted to bring it up again because I recently started watching a documentary on instant Netflix: The Happy Movie.

I haven’t watched much of this film yet (maybe 10 minutes?), but I’m already troubled by the filmmaker’s failure to provide a substantial definition of happiness. The film opens with a series of people on the street claiming that they “just want to be happy.” But, what does that mean? Whose definitions of happiness get counted? And whose don’t? How is happiness directed towards particular (and limited) goals, like making lots of money or having a successful career (or, like one person interviewed on the street suggests, achieving “the American Dream”). I’m not against happiness (I like feeling happy), but I’m extremely skeptical of happiness studies and how scientists’ efforts to measure happiness are generating a whole industry of products and experts that can help you “turn happiness into money” through seven easy steps (FYI: Marci Shimoff, a leading happiness expert, did the voice-over for this documentary).

Before writing more about this documentary, I want to watch it. And, when I do, I want to think about it beside a few critical engagements with happiness that I’ve encountered in the past few years:

Sara Ahmed: The Promise of Happiness
Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright Sided
Jeanette Winterson: Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?

In addition to these critical assessments of being happy and the happiness industry, I’m also thinking about a song that my son recently sang with his fourth grade class: Happiness. It’s from “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” I remember singing it in fourth grade too (when I lived in Salem, Virginia). I had forgotten about this song until I found out that FWA would be singing it. “Happiness is…2 kinds of ice cream….”

Two New Digital Stories

Here are two new digital stories that I’ve created in the last week: Driving and Gardener. Wow, as I look at those titles, I’m struck by how boring (utilitarian) they sound. Oh well, for some reason (maybe as a form of resistance to my academic training, where elaborate, multi-clause titles are the norm?), I like pithy, almost generic, titles.

Driving is inspired by footage I shot on my recent trip, with FWA, RJP and STA, to Utah and Arizona. It’s primarily a reflection on family vacations and how my understandings (and experiences) of them have changed since I was a kid.

Gardener was shaped around 1992 footage of my mom giving a tour of her amazing Iowa garden. I decided to create it now because I’m fed up with winter (yes, here in Minneapolis it’s still snowing…today…right now…until tomorrow) and needed to think about spring and gardens and things that are warm and green.

I like posting these on my trouble blog because I’m trying to practice my own forms of making and staying in trouble through digital storytelling. What do you think?

Transmedia, New Media or What?

Lately, I’ve been doing some thinking and researching about the next step for my Unofficial Student Transcripts project. While phase one was an iBook, I’m imagining phase two as something more creative and accessible and that draws upon my increased interest in online/interactive media.

I want to create a new media project that allows me to engage in my storytelling/account-giving across media: video footage, digital stories, written text (prose + poetry/ blog posts + journal entries/ new + archival material), interactive online games (for wordpress and/or iPad?), sound clips, images + text (problematizers) and more.

So far, the following sources are informing my project:

ADVICE 5 Tips for Transmedia Storytelling
THEORY Transmedia 202: Further Reflections
EXAMPLES The Waiting Room, Pine Point, Flawed, (Re)Framing Mexico