I don’t know about you, but many of the events over the last few months have left me thinking about feeling solitary. Not loneliness, per se, but a sense of separateness, of needing to take time to think and process while feeling a little isolated in the process. I am talking about disparate events—stories like Emma Healey’s piece in Hairpin, of course the on going revelations of Jian Ghomeshi’s actions and the complicity (is that what we call and open secret in this case?) of so many, but also the Dalhousie Dentistry “Gentlemen’s Club,” not to mention the ways in which the administration has missed an incredible opportunity to take a swift and proactive stand on misogyny and gendered violence on this campus and across the city. I don’t want to rehearse these events, even though I feel compelled to write about the one unfolding on my own campus right now. What I want to think through are the ways in which events like these open up space for solidarity. Events such as these are also isolating. They create the need for reflection, self-care, and, if you’re anything like me, they elicit an almost inarticulable need for solitude.
And yet.
And yet, these events alsoelicit an urgent sense that I need to act. Now! Five minutes ago! All the time! These kinds of events also remind me of the need for solidarity, organization, and collective action. That word needalso reminds me that so often the collective action and solidarity require grassroots and ground-up work. People need to be rallied, priorities need to be identified and articulated, and actions need to be delegated. This kind of work is hard and only possible with a dedicated group of people. Those people are out there, certainly, but they are usually over extended. Take a moment and jot down the names of people you wanted to talk with when you heard about the Ghomeshi scandal. Or, jot down the names of people and organizations you think of when you want to address job scarcity and precarity in academia. How many do you come up with? Why do you gravitate to those names? And how many of the names appear on both lists?
Strangely, I found myself thinking about solitariness and solidarity this past weekend. I was at the MLA in Vancouver where I was representing ACCUTE as their Contract Academic Faculty member on the executive. The paper I gave was entitled “Making ‘Solidarity’ Real: Campus Labour Movements and the Precarious Worker,” which, with some theorizing and discussion of the Canadian context versus the American one, was a narrativization of my own experience of being on strike while precariously employed. The panel was about contingent labour and campus labour movements; I was the only Canadian. Indeed, 80% of the audience was American. So, while everyone in the room was concerned with the same issues, the means for addressing them were radically different. We spent the bulk of the question and answer session trying to hammer out the possibilities of cross-border collaboration on issues of precarity. Practiacally speaking, there aren’t very many.
It was an empowering panel, most especially because it was the first time I have publicly presented on my own experiences. My experience on the panel also reminded me of the sometimes-tense poles of solitariness. On the one hand, I need solitude to process. On the other hand, solitude can be incredibly isolating. It can, I think, at times compound the issues that evoke the feeling in the first place.
My question for you, readers, is this: how do you balance the need for solitary reflection with your own need for urgent and sustainable solidarity? Really?
Hook & Eye 