This post’s featured image is by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash
Scholars who listen: Celebrating input, not just output
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks grading end-of-term essays, while simultaneously scrambling to pull together syllabi and reading lists for my two new courses.* Over the Christmas break, however, I forced myself to slow down for a bit and read a few full books related to my research.
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.
There are no Heroes, only Movements
I am worried about the cultural memory that will be lost after this pandemic season comes to a close.
All the painful and long-overdue self-reflection and self-scrutiny we’ve done; all the observations about the limitations of technology after days filled with Zoom calls; all the visceral recognitions about how inter-connected our lives are, and how much we really need each other.
How long before we go back to our hyper-individualistic lives? How long before we become content to have a palatable Democrat back in the White House, meaning we no longer need to personally attend protests and fight for Black lives, indigenous sovereignty, refugees, and our abused planet?
Are we going to go back to waiting for someone else to step into a messianic role on our behalf? Are we going to keep reveling in movies that perpetuate this comfortable myth that change happens because of one or two remarkable and brave individuals who dare to make a difference? Are we really going to go back to our lives sustaining the hope that, even after the virus has demonstrated to us how interwoven our lives are, that nevertheless somehow my personal choices don’t matter on a ‘grand’ scale?
I really want to believe that we humans have learned a lasting lesson from the past months, but history tells me it could go either way.
And I’m afraid. I’m afraid that, just as people grew tired of being careful and precipitated a deadly second wave, so we will grow tired of fighting for what is right and just. Especially as the problems our planet is facing seem to keep compounding.
I’m afraid that we will forget that we are resilient. I am afraid we will forget all of our creativity from the days when we had nowhere to go. I’m afraid we will forget those quiet hours spent staring at a tabletop trying to rearrange monochromatic puzzle pieces into a sky.
I’m afraid that we are tired of being afraid. Tired of longing for more. And that for many of us, our lives are comfortable enough that we can closet ourselves in our white middle class insularity and ignore the daily havoc being wreaked upon the less fortunate that comprise most of Earth. That we can ignore the planetary fate that we will bequeath our children and our children’s children.
For many of us, the only way to make it through the pandemic was to switch into survival mode. But we can’t stay in survival mode. Nor should we try to reclaim some sense of normalcy. When this is all finally over, we need a brief season to rest but as we rest, we must remember, and we must find ways to materialise what we learned from the pandemic so that we carry it with us collectively into the coming days, months, and years. We need to preserve these cultural memories so that we pass them down to future generations.
Once we have regained some strength, we must help each other up and build upon this new foundation of cultural memory towards a new sustainable and compassionate way of living. Here is where I should say something about loving each other and fighting together for justice, but humanity seems far from that. For now, all I ask, all I hope for, is that we focus on not forgetting and live daily in light of what we have learned.
Because there are no heroes, there are only movements.
Cover image by Mick De Paola on Unsplash