Engaging – Page 11

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.

What is freedom?

For the past two months, I’ve been working hard on my book/series of accounts, Unofficial Student Transcript. I (think) I’ve finally finished its first form: an iBooks Author ebook. In the next day or two, I hope to publish it. Today, on this sunny day in Minneapolis (the calm before the storm; we’re supposed to get a 6+ inch snow storm tomorrow night and Monday. Yuck!), I’m taking a break with a book that I’ve been wanting to read for some time now: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. I wasn’t planning to blog about it. I just wanted to sit back and enjoy it. But, I couldn’t resist making a note of a passage on freedom that I might want to return to someday.

[Misha is speaking] Sholem was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in mind. But that’s not freedom! Than’s control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad and or appear foolish. To not recognize that difference is a pretty big thing.

It’s like with improv, Misha said. True improv is about surprising yourself—but most people won’t improvise truthfully. They’re afraid. What they do is pull from their bag of tricks. They take what they already know how to do and apply it to the present situation. But that’s cheating! And cheating’s bad for an artist. It’s bad in life—but it’s really bad in art (19).

a troublemaker in training

Last night, Rosie was reading her weekly story homework to me. It was all about little Jessica. Jessica loves to play soccer but her older twin brothers, Jason and Jamal, don’t think much of her playing because she is a girl. Throughout the short (about 20 pages) story, Jamal’s catch phrase is “she’s pretty good, for a girl.”

In the story, Jessica ends up scoring the winning goal in her brothers’ championship game when she fills in for a sick player. Sounds great, right? The message seems to be: see, girls can be great at soccer too! One problem: In the very last line of this story, after everyone else has congratulated Jessica for her skillful playing, Jamal utters his catch phrase: “Yeah. She’s pretty good…for a girl.”

When I saw this line, at the end of the page, I assumed that there were a few more sentences on the next page. Surely, there was more to the story; Jamal and his sexism weren’t going to get the last word, were they? But, no. That was the end. So, Rosie and I decided to add one more line to the story: “No, Jamal!,” all of his teammates exclaimed. “She’s a great soccer player period!”

Here’s what I wrote on Rosie’s reading sheet about her reading this week:

“Rosie did a great job reading. We both decided to add onto the end of the story by having all of Jamal’s teammates call out his sexism.”

Ha! Rosie was pretty proud of that. This morning at school, I overheard her telling her music teacher about it. Yep, she’s a troublemaker in training.

note: This isn’t the first time I’ve been inspired to write about my kid’s reading assignments in first grade. Back in 2010, I wrote about a book FWA read, We Care.

Judith Butler on debate and academic freedom

Since I’m busy working on my intellectual history project right now, I don’t have time to critically reflect on Judith Butler’s recent remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement). But, I wanted to link to it and mention a few passages (bold emphasis is mine) that seem noteworthy and consistent with themes in her work that I’ve been teaching, researching and writing about for years.

on academic freedom and the importance of democratic debate

“The principle of academic freedom is designed to make sure that powers outside the university, including government and corporations, are not able to control the curriculum or intervene in extra-mural speech. It not only bars such interventions, but it also protects those platforms in which we might be able to reflect together on the most difficult problems. You can judge for yourself whether or not my reasons for lending my support to this movement are good ones. That is, after all, what academic debate is about. It is also what democratic debate is about, which suggests that open debate about difficult topics functions as a meeting point between democracy and the academy. Instead of asking right away whether we are for or against this movement, perhaps we can pause just long enough to find out what exactly this is, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and why it is so difficult to speak about this.”

on exercising critical thinking/judgment

“But I would like briefly to continue with the question, what precisely are we doing here this evening? I presume that you came to hear what there is to be said, and so to test your preconceptions against what some people have to say, to see whether your objections can be met and your questions answered. In other words, you come here to exercise critical judgment, and if the arguments you hear are not convincing, you will be able to cite them, to develop your opposing view and to communicate that as you wish. In this way, your being here this evening confirms your right to form and communicate an autonomous judgment, to demonstrate why you think something is true or not, and you should be free to do this without coercion and fear. These are your rights of free expression, but they are, perhaps even more importantly, your rights to education, which involves the freedom to hear, to read and to consider any number of viewpoints as part of an ongoing public deliberation on this issue. Your presence here, even your support for the event, does not assume agreement among us. There is no unanimity of opinion here; indeed, achieving unanimity is not the goal.”

not pro or anti but we

“One could be for the BDS movement as the only credible non-violent mode of resisting the injustices committed by the state of Israel without falling into the football lingo of being “pro” Palestine and “anti” Israel. This language is reductive, if not embarrassing. One might reasonably and passionately be concerned for all the inhabitants of that land, and simply maintain that the future for any peaceful, democratic solution for that region will become thinkable through the dismantling of the occupation, through enacting the equal rights of Palestinian minorities and finding just and plausible ways for the rights of refugees to be honored. If one holds out for these three aims in political life, then one is not simply living within the logic of the “pro” and the “anti”, but trying to fathom the conditions for a “we”, a plural existence grounded in equality.”

re-imaging justice

“What does one do with one’s words but reach for a place beyond war, ask for a new constellation of political life in which the relations of colonial subjugation are brought to a halt. My wager, my hope, is that everyone’s chance to live with greater freedom from fear and aggression will be increased as those conditions of justice, freedom, and equality are realized. We can or, rather, must start with how we speak, and how we listen, with the right to education, and to dwell critically, fractiously, and freely in political discourse together. Perhaps the word “justice” will assume new meanings as we speak it, such that we can venture that what will be just for the Jews will also be just for the Palestinians, and for all the other people living there, since justice, when just, fails to discriminate, and we savor that failure.”