I recently acquired a gorgeous vintage accent chair that also happens to be incredibly comfortable. In the morning, I turn it to face the windows, prop my heels on the window ledge and settle down to read with a strong cup of tea. I am both relaxed and alert. I savor each page while out of the corner of my eye I watch the blackbirds play in the trees along my street.  When I reach the end of a book, I feel a kinship to the author–the sort of intimacy that comes from the experience of just listening to somebody speak while not interrupting.

In reality, most of the time when scholars (and our students) read books like these, we are hunched over our computer or notebook. The book has been forcibly spread out flat with the necessary pages weighted down with elbows or our perennially full coffee mugs. I even have a nifty device to manage my texts on my behalf.

We read books and academic articles extractively, quickly skimming pages looking for sections or quotes that will support our own arguments. We teach our students to “read the abstract” and if the text looks “useful” then “read the introduction and conclusion but probably skip everything in between”.

Essentially, we mine these texts for data. Rather than listening and allowing the author to fully explain themselves, we interrupt and interject with our own ideas.

We do this because we find ourselves in an impossible situation where, in order to prove that we are “good scholars” (and maintain our jobs), we have to maintain a steady output of research. Most of our workweek is taken up with teaching responsibilities, so research has to be squeezed into whatever extra time remains. There’s just no time to put up your feet and take a leisurely stroll through another scholar’s hard work. (I paid dearly for those mornings with many extremely long and exhausting days of work the following weeks.)

One of the ironies of this situation is that this expectation of constant research output translates into an exponential amount of research being released into the world. In accordance with a modern industrial logic, this should be reason to celebrate. Look at all the knowledge production!

But when we turn the university into a “knowledge” factory, the product isn’t actually knowledge. I’m not sure what it is, to be honest. By this, I’m not suggesting that our books and articles are devoid of valuable insights into the world (otherwise I’d be undermining my own work), but I’m reminded of what Marx refers to as the fetishization of commodities. What he meant by this concept is that, in the industrial process our commodities (things) become abstracted and disconnected from the hands that produce them. These individuals who make the products are even abstracted and disconnected from each other–replaceable figures on an assembly line. The meaning of a product is instead derived from its participation in the socio-economic act of exchange.

In the case of research, the “creator” or author is not obscured in the process, but I draw this comparison because I find that our work is often abstracted from the conversation that actually created it. As a scholar, I am not the creator of knowledge. Rather, it is my job to participate in an ongoing conversation among fellow knowledge seekers in our collective pursuit of understanding our world better. And it is my job to teach young people how to enter into this conversation. This is what Jack Halberstam, in their introduction to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, suggests we should call study rather than knowledge production.

When we perceive knowledge as conversation rather than commodity or product, it changes how we engage it. In conversation, we speak but we also listen. In fact, the best conversationalists are usually also the best listeners.

So what if instead of just teaching my students how to speak, i.e. write a research paper, I also taught them how to listen? What might an end-of-term project look like in this scenario?

What if the academy rewarded me for research input, in addition to output? What if I was encouraged and supported in efforts to slow down and actually listen to my colleagues? What if I was funded to attend conferences even when I wasn’t presenting a paper? What if this was expected? What if the academic community gently discouraged “too much output” as indicative of “too much talking”, just as I ask my more chatty students to step back and allow their peers to speak?

It would require a massive shift in how the university currently thinks of its purpose in society, but that much we already knew was dearly needed.

*At the University of Groningen we run on a 4 block, 2 semester system in which each block is 7 weeks of teaching and 3 weeks of exams/resits. Our second block of the first semester finished early January after the Christmas break. We just finished Week 2 of block 3 of semester 2 (2a).

Featured image from Photo by Nothing Ahead from Pexels.