1/ I'm retweeting this because it resonates with thoughts I’ve been having over the past few days about how class and social privilege play out in academia. And especially the way in which that privilege influences not only social and cultural capital one has at their disposal...
2/...but more important than that – their intellectual confidence. I just submitted my first monograph yesterday. I am 44. It took, depending on how you count, between 7 and 14 years for me to complete this book. People publish books all the time. Many colleagues, especially in..
3/...my own discipline of political science, have put out monographs far sooner in their careers than I have, and were far younger when they did it than I am. In fact, most of the people I know started their careers sooner than I did. Some became full professors by 40.
4/ Good for them. #AcademicTwitter From that angle, finishing my book isn’t much to write home about. But given my own social background, and the path I took to get here, my heart is full, regardless of what happens in the review process. Here’s why.
5/ Not only do I not come from a family of academics (as Daniela Witten does), but I do not even come from a middle-class family (if you think that doesn’t matter, well...). Both my grandmothers were functionally illiterate. My parents have a high school diploma. My old man was..
6/...basically a high-school drop-out. On top of that, when I was a teenager, the country in which I lived, Yugoslavia, descended into war and broke up. I lived in a frontline town, meaning that, between the ages of 15 and 17 I lost months of schooling to various emergencies.
7/ And that doesn’t even count the fact that I was a minority in my own hometown and had to learn how to lay low, that I experienced loss of identity (my own bit of #Yugosplaining, h/t @srdjanvucetic ), and that I visited bomb shelters more times than I care to remember.
8/ I haven’t been diagnosed with PTSD, but I figure knowing how it feels for a high caliber projectile to hit your building, or what a rocket looks like when if flies over you in broad daylight, is not particularly good for one’s psychological well-being. As if that was not...
9/...enough, at the age of 17, I emigrated to Canada. Which, of course, provided me with opportunities thanks to which I ended up in the position in which I find myself now. But emigrating/immigrating was, next to the loss of identity (with which it was frankly interlinked)...
10/...the most tormenting experience of my life. I needed to learn how to be a whole other person before I even figured how to BE a person in the first place. All I had to help me do this was my ability, limited as it was, to read the situations around me. No advice from...
11/...parents, no mentors, nobody to lead by example, no useful social networks. In other words – no social capital and very limited cultural capital. That is what I took with me into the PhD program. What I understood many years later was that the product of my social...
12/...background and this path was a chronic lack of confidence in own ideas. I don’t mean the inability to analyze academic material or anything of the sort. I mean the confidence to come up with an innovative idea, to stake out one’s own intellectual ground and to not...
13/...believe, but KNOW that it matters. That is the attitude that I saw in my 22 year old students when I, at the age of 32, took them to the Balkans for a field trip. They were more together at their age than I was at mine. And that is the attitude that Daniela Witten...
14/...describes in that thread in her calling out of her prof at the age of 20 (!). For me, getting over that chronic lack of confidence took years, time that many of my colleagues who either came from middle class backgrounds, or were not immigrants (and no, being an American...
15/...in Canada, or Canadian in the UK doesn’t count, sorry), or, for the really lucky ones, both, did not need. It also took an inordinate amount of extra work, ill-advised choices, dead ends, waste of effort and time, and scary leaps into the unknown to make up for that lack..
16/...confidence. All at very high personal cost: time lost in building a family for one, and time lost building material security. So yeah, given where and what I come from, the fact that I wrote my first monograph at 44, after 8 years in the profession, IS an achievement...
17/...one of which I am very, very proud. (I’m also proud of it because of the ideas it contains, but I’ll leave that for another time). Which brings me to the end and advice to my academic colleagues. If you are a doctoral supervisor for somebody like the kid I was, know that...
18/...you are not just their academic mentor. They need you for far more than just feedback on their doctoral thesis. The most important thing you can do for them is bring out their intellectual confidence. The lack of that confidence is a cage around their ability and talent.
19/ If it’s not lifted, they may never fulfil their promise, or take too long, and at too great a cost. Think about the best way in which you can do that. Fin.
