We’re Here: A Welcome and a Welcome Back

Every September, for the past ten years, we’ve been blogging here.

That’s right. Ten years of a feminist academic blog.

We’ve experienced enormous personal change. We’re not the same we who began this blog a decade ago. We’ve been many regular writers and many more guest writers. We’ve been precariously employed, unemployed, and in different stages of tenure track careers. We’ve left faculty positions for administrative ones. We’ve left academia entirely, and not always (or often) on our own terms. We have had children. We have lost loved ones. We have written, often in personal and vulnerable-making ways about out struggles, hopes, and concerns. We have raged. We have protested. We have despaired. We have hoped. We have written articles, and we have written posts about not writing. We have made mistakes. We have begun again, resolved to keep learning. We have held each other up. We have hoped, feared, and worked for and with students.

And now, this September, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, amid climate crisis, amid the intersecting pandemics of racism and hate, we are here again. And we will try to write and think and rage and hope and cry and worry and research and teach here with you.

Ten yeas ago “slow academe” was an idea linked both to sustainable slow food movements, and resisting the neoliberal imperative to produce. Now, here, in all the places and particularities that make up our divergent and necessary lives, “slow academe” might be a place to return our thinking. We’re here, and we hope you’ll meet us here from time to time, too.

For surely we need one another now as much as ever.