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Apparently unpopular opinion: the best thing I ever did in graduate school was begin writing for public audiences and not seeing peer-reviewed and paywalled academic journals as the only space where urgent conversations happen.
This becomes especially clear with scholars claiming to do social justice work but then entirely divorcing their work from those communities they claim to speak for. Writing to and for those publics should be central. They are not your tenure material.
And quite frankly, if we are handwringing over the “crisis in the humanities,” and public scholars are writing in ways that are making clear why our work is valuable and urgent, doubling down on the profession’s norms is gatekeeping that costs all of us.
Forever quoting this line from @devoneylooser in her recent Profession piece about public scholarship: we need to talk across, not down.
Of course a troll comes into my DMs with “well, let me know when you get an actual job.”
