The trouble with academia is, you set out to master a field but you end up demanding perfection of yourself, forgetting that perfection is not possible. Real mastery is not an outcome but a process, ie, embracing continual curiosity and being unafraid to confront what you don’t know to open the door to learning more. Karen and Kel talk about recovering this beginner’s curiosity by asking: Who is the inner/outer critic telling you you’re not good enough, and remembering that no external validation will make you achieve “perfection” -especially when the systems of validation are racist, sexist, classist, and exclusionary. As Toni Morrison says: the goal of racism is distraction. In the end, you can say this: I don’t have prove it to you I just have to deliver it.
Responding to a podcast member question, Karen and Kel talk about how to manage sensory overload in academic settings. We discuss how to extract...
Every winter, lots of folks have to confront the reality that they didn’t get the jobs (or grants or publication acceptances) that they’d been...
Karen and Kel talk about the 7 ways the academy resembles a cult and how that creates a debilitating culture of shame around productivity...