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 hoping for. In this two part series, Karen and Kel discuss twelve strategies for confronting disappointment in a healthy and productive way, on the theme of: Face the Facts, Feel Your Feelings
When Karen gave the advice, “stop acting like a grad student,” she was working from a model grad student in her mind who, it turns out when she gave it a bit more thought, was a white male. In today’s episode, Karen and Kel dig into that normative model, and talk about all the ways that the advice on how a job seeker “needs to act” needs to be complicated to account for people who come from different subject positions and are viewed through different racist lenses. Advice about “thinking your department is out to get you” for example, needs to reflect that for many grad students of color, the department really is out to get you. ...
Karen insisted that we watch The Chair, and insisted we devote a podcast episode to it. So here it is. At this point in time there are no more “hot” takes to be had, so in this episode we offer our tepid takes. Even so, there is a lot to say. Karen and Kel talk the many painful accuracies of the show: the terror of senior faculty in the face of threats to their power; the overt and covert racism directed at Yaz, the sole Black faculty member; the puritanical dress code and terrible hair; cost-cutting as the department Chair’s #1 job; the Dean’s relentless gaslighting; liability avoidance as the university mission. We note in particular Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s point that Yaz is the only character with no interiority – she is rendered as a plot device and never shown, in contrast to all the other main characters, outside a narrow work setting. We have quibbles, inevitably: this Chair could not have been as naive as she was written; no tenured white male professor ever loses his job over racism; and it’s honestly doubtful this Chair would have thrown away her position for a man, least of all this man. Also: are we to believe Yaz turns down Yale to stay at Pembroke? Puleeze. But overall: wow. And suffice to say, as a former Chair of a humanities department, Karen came out of the series fairly traumatized. ...
Karen and Kel talk to Professor Erin Cech (Sociology, U of Michigan), the author of the forthcoming book, The Problem with Passion (U California Press, 2021), about why our national obsession with “following your passion” actually intensifies inequality. Erin explains how passion leads to “choice-washing,” in which unequal outcomes are justified by claiming they were freely chosen, even while those without privilege and resources struggle to get access to “passion”-driven work. She shows how the passion principle came hand in hand with the erosion of worker rights–if there is no more stable work, we may as well do “what we love” and do only the work that “fulfills us” and “expresses our deepest self.” The passion principle permeates academia, of course, and fuels all manner of exploitation, especially around the issue of adjuncting. If you’re “passionate” about your subject, surely that will carry you through any trials and tribulations… and if you object, then surely you just aren’t passionate enough? And so adjuncts are told/tell themselves that if they’re still in academia, they’re still fulfilling their passion and therefore well-compensated… no matter how little they’re paid and how much they’re exploited. Which, as Erin Cech notes, launches a vicious circle, as overwork forecloses the time needed to critique the passion economy and find meaningful alternatives. [Become a subscribing member for just $3.99 a month and get access to our subscriber only goodies like free webinar recordings, AMAs, the ...
