I’m writing these notes from a position of unstable privilege. I’m officially a junior lecturer, and I have the luxury of a work contract that gives me several years of predictability. I know how rare that is in the academy and I’m grateful for it. At the same time, this contract will expire in mid/late 2022, and if I don’t secure a suitable post before then, my family and I will have to leave our home in this country and it is uncertain where we would go. Returning as an unemployed academic to the radically regressive United States does not seem ideal, and I’d like to avoid that. The stakes are high for us, is what I’m saying.

I see this mixture of precarity and privilege mirrored in my working day as well. And since I am so inspired by Cindy Katz and Michele Lancione and the ways in which we can think from the minor in order to make sense of broader processes, here is my brief micropolitical exploration about one aspect of making a living as an academic.

Writing is the thing. Rather, producing a written work that ticks all the appropriate boxes – that’s the goal. Our jobs as academics can be so amorphous that it’s often hard to understand what we mean by “success”. So there exist endless shortcuts to help you slice and dice a person and their work. A thousand different metrics by which to measure a person and determine – or rather approximate – their worth. Scads of websites that you must be on and maintain. Reports and measurements and frameworks.

Ultimately this is about whether or not to give someone the resources (funds, time, space) they need to live and work. And probably the most important of these metrics is writing. Publish articles in highly ranked international journals. Make contributions to theoretical debates. Bring in unique empirical findings. Build a name for yourself, a profile, make yourself recognizable from afar. This is the game.

Of course there is teaching too, but I’ve discovered this weird, almost secret thing about teaching: people say they value it but surprisingly few seem to want to do it. I’m a little different, I guess. I love teaching, unabashedly. I love the energy and the production and the resonance with students when you get it right. It takes time and isn’t easy, but I love it. Always have.

I think the problem here is that it’s not as easy to measure (or pretend to measure) quality of teaching. Much simpler to check for an article (“Published in the International Journal of XYZ? Great!”) and make a judgment that way. In contrast, there aren’t many translatable ways to valorize teaching, so there exist fewer incentives, and there you have it.

So I spend a lot of my day writing (and thinking about writing, and worrying that I should be writing), because if I want to secure a stable job, I need comprehensible, measurable achievements. That’s the way the game is played.

Which brings me back to my positionality as junior lecturer. At the moment, I am advisor to a few masters students. And I simultaneously have some articles out for review with those prestigious international journals that we all covet. And one day, recently, I had the opportunity to experience the academic process from below and from above.

Department regulations mandate a limit on how much time you’re allowed to spend advising students. This is done for equality purposes, because some of us are more available than others. As part of this process, we can read some draft chapters of the masters thesis in order to help guide towards successful completion. Making sure they learn to make a contribution, engage with debates, and all the same stuff that I have to do in my articles.

This is hard, I tell my students. Make no mistake. It is far from a simple task, identifying a gap in the extant literature, and then working to fill that gap with your own work. I’ve had a lot of different jobs before, some of them quite hard. For example, I’ve washed pots and pans in a large industrial kitchen. That’s not an easy job. It’s simple and it’s clear but it’s not easy. The advantage of dishwashing is that you know when you’ve done a good job or a bad job. In my experience, academic writing is the opposite of this. It can be hard to know if you’re doing well or not.

So one of the most useful things I can do, I think, is use my capacity as advisor and teacher to help students through these challenges.

The draft this masters student sent was a real problem. It read more like a historical overview than an academic investigation. It did not engage substantively with theory. It did not make a coherent contribution or advance an argument. And I had to find the right way to communicate this to the student.

I needed to be clear, so they understood the severity of the situation. With only six weeks left before submission deadline, that’s a lot of work to do. But I also want to be encouraging. It is a vulnerable feeling, sharing your work and letting it be judged. Especially for more junior scholars! I want to encourage but not coddle, and at the same time convey the seriousness of the work to be done. How to find the right words?

As I was working on this, I got an email containing reviews from one of the prestigious international journals that I’m hoping will publish my work. The article that I submitted for review was a departure for me, outside of my usual realm of expertise. It was a vulnerable experience for me, trying to publish outside of the areas I know best. And the reviews I received were critical but fair. Major revisions needed. A disappointment, because who doesn’t want to be celebrated for writing something brilliant and not needing revisions? But it’s not unexpected. This is the job, after all. And this review system makes the work better. It’s hard, it hurts sometimes, but the end result is better.

But I found something notable as I was read through the comments in detail, preparing to dive back into my own text and improve it. It occurred to me how carefully each of the three reviewers had treated my text. Even when I fell short – when I failed to make appropriate engagements with theory in order to advance a coherent argument, just like my masters student – I got the sense that the reviewers had spent time searching for the words to set me straight but to do so without destroying or overly discouraging me.

So this is my position now. Finding the words to be clear and honest but also supportive to those who are coming behind… while those who have gone before are doing the same for me.

This is not an easy road, and I have no real idea where I’m going to end up. But I think it’s a beautiful journey all the same.