Thread by @empathywarrior

I woke up this morning trying to think through my feelings of envy around PhD admissions and TT job announcements, and I realized that it's much less about wishing I could do another PhD or have a TT job as it's about how academia has no space for independent scholars.

Or very little, anyway. I'm thinking about the restrictions on summer theory schools and intensives, about fellowships that are about wanting faculty with existing affiliations to spend time at another institution, and it's just like...it doesn't have to be this way?

So yeah, when you have a stale PhD but want to keep learning, pivoting fields, and trying to make time to get writing done, I don't think the envy around people newly-admitted to PhD programs or getting TT jobs is entirely unreasonable. (I think.)

And yes, I could put more of my time and energy into my scholarly writing and research, but I'm trying to manage my health without extended health benefits, and trying to scrounge together jobs and re-train somehow because I still need to pay my bills.

I was VERY fortunate to have a fellowship at SFU last year, and the reason it was so great is because it wasn't limited to people who already had an academic affiliation. It wasn't even limited to academics, full stop! We need more of these programs. Desperately.

How it feels to be an "independent scholar":

A GIF from the movie Mean Girls: a white person in a light blue hoodie and sunglasses stands in the middle of a group of students in a highschool gymnasium, saying "She doesn't even go here!"

I also don't feel...independent, because I know that I am deeply interdependent and intertwined in networks of thinking and doing and being that inform both my scholarly work and how I, as a person, move through the world.

More than anything, "independent scholar" for me names a kind of loss (perhaps mine, or the institution's), and an abandonment (again, both mine, deliberately, against the inhabitability of academia, but also the institution's abandonment, even when I was in academia proper.)

And I keep thinking about how the term-to-term precarity of adjunct labour keeps so many teetering on the edge of that loss and abandonment, at least as it pertains to the affiliation and the meagre benefits that affiliation provides.

I also keep thinking about the expansive communities of practice I feel a part of, and that Twitter and online events have facilitated. Because I do feel a deep sense of belonging that being formally embedded in the academy as a grad student and postdoc didn't permit or imagine.

I feel able to attend events and think alongside others, as we take joy in each others' virtual company, as we Tweet out snippets of talks, and I feel seen, even though I'm not producing anything right now. That I'm welcome because I'm just being present with the work.

I glimpse possibilities of what the work could be, and where we could do it, and how we can support people in doing it. And I also see what is, which is precarity, and people being pushed out, and people being pushed out as the condition of them staying inside, and it's so hard.

It's not that I want or need another PhD, it's that I want the time and generosity to learn anew without "expertise" being at stake. It's not that I want or need a TT job, it's that I know that scholarly work doesn't exist outside of the demands of capitalism on my body, my time.