How to set up a project website: first questions

January 26, 2018January 26, 2018 Lily Cho2 Comments

Lately, every time I attempt to post here, it seems that there is a new torrent feminist griefs and grievances that pulls us out into a giant ocean of tears and anger. It’s been another week of allegations, accusations, and awfulness. And some stuff hit closer to the H&E home than usual and we learned that, sometimes, the way to deal with bullies is to ignore them into obsolescence. It’s all been really hard and I know we are still feeling all of it.

But, still, there’s work to do and we rock at this work thing when we need to. So here’s a small starting point for thinking about setting up a website for your research project.

When I started working on my current Big Project, it occurred to me that I should have a website for it, but I had no idea how to set one up. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do, and how to do it, and I’m still figuring a lot of it out on the fly. Over the next few months, I’m going to post about this process and talk to other folks who have done this too.

I launched my project website about a month ago and it has been so lovely to see some of the work moving out into the world. It’s called Mass Capture. Check it out, if you’re so inclined. It’s cool and beautiful and I’m really proud of it.

Thinking back on the process, there were a bunch of starting questions that I needed to work through but it took me longer than it should have to even know to ask those questions.

In the end, for me, this was the most important one: how do I want the information on the site to be different than what will be in my book?

cool

Ok, I am betraying my humanities-oriented sensibilities here. The Big End Thing of your research project might not be a book but, in my field, it is still generally that most staid academic object: the single-author monograph, peer-reviewed, and published by a university press or equivalent. So, yes, for me, there is a book, and I am writing as fast as I can. I knew that I had a lot to say, and that not all of it should be said in the book. It took a while to figure out how to separate material that would work best for the book and material that would be best for the site. Of course, there will be some overlap but it has been interesting to see how clear the division between those two things became once I started to really think about what I wanted to say and how to say it.

To get to this first question, I would say that it helped me to think about how some material just works better online. That includes things like maps, interactive elements where I knew I would want to embed a lot of links, and writing that wouldn’t fit in a peer-reviewed academic book like interviews with members of my research team. You will likely have a different list. The key was realizing that I could and should disaggregate the stuff for the book from the stuff for the site. And, as the postscript at the end of the post reminds us, the stuff for the site could be the place where I could design my project so that it could be really public from the ground up.

I also wished I had talked to more people who had already set up project websites about their experiences. So, over the next few months, I’m going to interview other people who have done this and share those conversations with you. To start us off, here are some thoughts from Sharon Sliwinski whose gorgeous project website, the Museum of Dreams, has been a source of huge inspiration for me.

Here’s what Sharon say:

Q: What’s your favourite thing about having a project website?

A: The ideas travel! One of my favourite features about website analytics is the information about geography. The Museum of Dreams has been viewed by people in Brazil and Bolivia, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines. It’s also interesting where it hasn’t gone — no hits in China for instance. Of course I realize that website “clicks” doesn’t necessarily mean that the ideas are being meaningfully engaged, but then Stuart Hall taught us that’s true of any form of communication. I’m in a Faculty of Information and Media Studies, so we think hard about the medium, about the relationship between form and content. Websites are a familiar form. Billions of people engage them daily. Scholarly journal articles have a rather more specialized role in the dissemination of ideas in the 21st century. (She says with just a hint of sarcasm.)

Q: How did you work out how to distinguish your project website from your other publications? Was it important for you to do that?

A: The animating idea of the project is itself is fairly unique (I’m tempted to say “odd”), so distinguishing it from other publications wasn’t much an issue. The initial idea for the Museum of Dreams was to create a place to house the various dream reports I found in the historical record. Dreams are rather difficult things to find through the usual search methods, but then when you start looking for them, they’re everywhere. I had way more research “data,” so to speak, than I could manage in traditional scholarly form. Dreams don’t exactly lend themselves to academic scholarship. (I got a lot of eye-rolling in the early days of this project—political scientists were particularly dubious.) At first the idea was simply to build a searchable database. I looked at a lot of museum websites to get a sense of how they handle representing their collections online. Then I borrowed from museum websites I love. The International Center of Photography has a great site. Google’s Cultural Institute is also an inspiration.

Q: What surprised you about this process?

A: It’s a lot more work than it seems. If all goes well, a website is intuitive and easy to use, but also compelling. But there’s a lot more behind-the-scenes work to information management and website design than I expected. My project also turned into something much more collaborative than I first planned. We have a growing roster of collaborators who produce entries for the “collections.” Working with artists has been a special pleasure. I learned so much, for instance, from the way the Canadian dancer and choreographer Cai Glover transformed on of Walter Benjamin’s dreams into a dance piece. He really shifted my thinking about the nature of dream-work—as the labour of turning experience into a new form. These kinds of unexpected dialogues have been immensely enriching.

Collaboration has its challenges, too. At the moment a small group of my colleagues and I are designing a workshop that will bring the Museum of Dreams to a migrant community in Geneva. This opportunity came about as a result of the website. It’s been a struggle to figure out how to make this project “relevant” to people in serious states of social and political precarity, but it’s also been generative. I didn’t quite realize that having a project website meant making a long term, open-ended commitment to translating one’s scholarly ideas into something that is useful to the public. But I take comfort from the fact that Sigmund Freud worked hard at this as well — he constantly strove to make his ideas understandable to a broad public. He failed a lot. Failure is part of it.

Q: Is there anything you would do differently if you were to do it again?

A: I think I would have talked to web designers sooner in the process. I thought I could do it on my own in the beginning. There’s an inbuilt narcissism to the scholarly profession which can get in the way sometimes. I’m still learning how to shed the armour of being a professor, the subject-who-is-presumed-to-know, as Jacques Lacan would say. More humility is an on-going life goal!

p.s. It occurs to me that I didn’t say anything about access — obviously SSHRC and other agencies have a mandate to make their funded research more publicly accessible through “knowledge mobilization” initiatives. But as you well know, there are profound barriers to accessing scholarly work with most of the academic journals being behind paywalls. So the access question also played a huge part in my thinking about the Museum of Dreams. How to build a research project that is designed for the public from the get-go?

Thank you Sharon!

Finally, if you have project website stories, please get in touch!

academy · backlash · equity · going public · guest post · in the news · media · politics · public engagement · righteous feminist anger · risky writing · Uncategorized

Whose free speech are we talking about?

December 6, 2017December 6, 2017 aimeemorrison

Today we have a guest post, from Eileen Mary Holowka, who also finds that she has to say something about the Lindsay Shepherd rolling nightmare. It just keeps going: the Chronicle of Higher Education is now covering this (poorly) and that National Post (ridiculously) gave Shepherd the helm of an editorial.

In case you are not caught up, on Friday November 10^th, the National Post published an article that criticized Wilfrid Laurier University for their response to complaints made about a first year communications course.

Since then, a number of similar articles have been released, arguing that the university is censoring “free speech” and that the teaching assistant of the course, Lindsay Shepherd, was mistreated. Most recently, the Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer has chimed in to say that, if elected Prime Minister, he would “ensure that public universities or colleges that do not foster a culture of free speech and inquiry on campus will not receive federal funding” (Huffington Post).

But whose free speech is he talking about?

Almost all of the articles published since November 10^th have done approximately the same thing: they present quotes without full context, accuse Wilfrid Laurier (as a whole institution) of being anti-free speech, fail to mention the rights of trans individuals, and continue to splatter a certain U of T professor’s name across Canadian media headlines yet again.

It was not until November 24^th that anything was published about how the recent events might impact trans and non-binary people. Abigail Curlew’s piece published on Vice questioned the neutrality questions the neutrality of “free speech” and argues that “[t]rans folks have been historically marginalized by academics who have been embroiled in debates concerning the authenticity of [their] existence.”

There are, of course, many complicated issues at play within this whole ‘controversy’, including our universities’ often poor training for TAs who themselves may have only recently left undergrad as well as the limits of institutional protocols around complaints. But the issue that calls out to me the loudest is the one that has been left almost completely untouched by the majority of Canadian news platforms. That is, the lives and experiences of trans and non-binary people whose bodies are being “debated” without thought.

Shepherd’s argument that anything can be brought up for debate in a classroom without bias is simply not true. There are always power imbalances at play in the classroom and it is frightening to see how quickly the Canadian media jumped to defend Shepherd’s “free speech” while subsequently dismissing the voices of trans and non-binary individuals.

As we have seen in the recent discourse of the alt-right, free speech privileges whiteness. It privileges the people who already have the power to say whatever they want without the risk of losing their jobs. Free speech is not so easily afforded to the already marginalized, the trans and non-binary, or the people at the back of the classroom who do not know how to speak up. At least, not in the same way it can be claimed by the Petersons of the world, the Shepherds, the CBC, or the Globe and Mail.

This is nothing new either. These same defences of free speech have come up in response to Charlottesville and ACLU, Milo Yiannopoulos and Berkeley, and of course Jordan Peterson and McMaster. There is much more work that needs to be done to question the way free speech is being talked about in the news and we cannot let ourselves blindly join the hype. Instead, we need to look for the stories that are not being told.

Unlike popular belief, making a classroom a safe space does not require censorship or “handholding.” (Or, as Christie Blatchford argued, “Thought Policing.”) But it does require an understanding of our entanglements and responsibilities. A safe classroom means that even more ideas can be talked about in critical ways without the risk of losing students’ voices. A safe classroom means “staying with the trouble,” with an understanding that this “trouble” does not need to be exclusionary and, in fact, is troubled more so in its attempt to account for all responsibilities, all affects, and all voices.

Due to confidentiality, the complainant(s) who originally reported Shepherd are left unheard. While it is important that they are protected, they need not be erased entirely from the narrative.

Despite what the news has been telling us, Shepherd is not the victim we need to worry about. The free speech of Shepherd and Peterson is safe, is being broadcast loud and clear.

What we must now consider are whose voices we are losing in all the noise?

Eileen Mary Holowka is a writer, editor, researcher, academic, programmer, musician, and sometimes video editor who lives in Montreal, Canada. She is currently doing my MA at Concordia University in English and Creative Writing where she is working on an interactive narrative ‘game’ about the act of narrating sexual trauma on and offline. Her research interests include trauma theory, feminist studies, queer theory, and media studies, but she is currently focusing on self-imaging, Instagram, online affective labour, and the intersections of trauma and media.

advice · gradschool · guest post · ideas for change · public engagement · selfcare

Guest Post: The Perks of Saying Yes in Grad School

February 7, 2017April 19, 2017 bjohnstone1

A few months ago, a mentor offered me the chance to speak with three established scholars about Bob Dylan’s recently awarded Nobel Prize in Literature at a small gathering in New York. Instantly, my stomach began to turn. Beyond basic pop culture exposure (hello, “Soy Bomb”), I didn’t know much about Dylan. I don’t study the great American songbook, lyric poetry, or contemporary artists. There was too much room for error and there were too many gaps in my knowledge. It felt like a no in my bones.

Instead, I said yes. After stalling for a few days, I came clean about my reservations with my mentor and asked for his guidance to make the right decision. He told me that in his experience there are two types of academics, “the ones who say, ‘I don’t know, I don’t think I can do that…’ and the ones who say, ‘Sure, why not, let’s give it a try.’ I have many friends who are the former, but the ones who are most successful are the latter.” After that email, I had no choice but to put my nerves on hold.

My initial anxieties were just that. During the talk, it became clear that the audience members, many of whom were scholars, weren’t Dylan experts (just like me). These were members of The New York Society for General Semantics, people who get together over wine and cheese every so often to discuss and learn more about the contingency and formation of meaning, symbols, and knowledge. Dylan fans, seasoned academic professionals, and a smattering of undergraduate and graduate students filled around 25-30 seats. I invited my father, who dutifully sat in the front row. I realized that my role was to give this diverse group something to riff off of—throw out some new notes that might harmonize with their own memories and knowledge of Dylan and literature.

Dylan’s win, and his initial silence after the announcement, had created definitive buzz, especially since he is the first American songwriter to take the prize (which includes $900,000). The New York Times said that the selection “redefin[ed] the boundaries of literature,” while others sounded off angrily on Twitter. There was plenty of debate already circulating for music lovers and literary scholars alike, so, to prepare for the evening, I reflected on the questions provided on the event flyer and decided which one’s I could speak to confidently.

I started with “What is the literary value of Dylan’s lyrics?” and drew on my knowledge of the history of literary criticism to give an overview of different ways that artists and critics have determined what makes poetry worthwhile. After a few weeks of listening to Dylan during my commute, I picked out what I felt were his most compelling and challenging lines. To answer the question “What is the meaning and significance of the Nobel Prize?” I thought back to conversations in my survey courses regarding the politics of canonization and reviewed trends in the Nobel’s literature award, briefly scanning past selections. I came up with some reasons why I thought Dylan deserved it, but also reflected on the fact that most of my generation would be more familiar with the Beatles rather than Dylan’s songbook.

I was honest with myself about my limited knowledge, which pushed me to uncover interesting research finds and make connections between Dylan and all of the things I do know about literature and literary criticism. Being honest with my audience about my “outsider” perspective made the environment more welcoming and inclusive. No one batted an eye when I flubbed the title of Dylan’s ode to Johanna or read from a prepared cheat sheet of lyrics. They didn’t care if all the notes were right, only that there was talk about music filling the room. I kept my preparation time under control, and in the end, I had fun. That night reinvigorated my enthusiasm and appreciation for what I do every day, largely because so many people appreciated my willingness to join in a conversation with them. I also have a wider net of contacts in a supportive intellectual community that I can reach out to.

Saying yes when it seemed easier to say no reminded me that the life of the mind is not just about finding a niche, but also building communities of learning. The more I insulate myself from opportunities because they don’t align specifically with my research, the farther away I’ll be from the most rewarding part of my chosen career. These realizations extend to my approach to the job market as well. When search committees request an immense repertoire of specialties, it’s easy to assume that my lack of expertise in one or more areas will disqualify me from consideration. (Generally, men are more likely to apply for these kinds of job listings, whereas women tend to balk, not wanting to appear unprepared.) As a hiring committee chair at a small liberal arts college recently shared with me, committees know that candidates can’t always tick all the boxes: they want to see that you’re willing to extend yourself and your research interests to fit their needs. They want to know that you’re willing to say, “Sure, why not, let’s give it a try.”

Graduate students (and particularly women) have been taught a repertoire of maxims to live by so that they can navigate a long and often arduous road to degree: Practice self-care; you can’t always say yes; know your limits. From completing a dissertation, to teaching our students, to braving the job market, and caring for our friends and families, we are also taking on additional tasks that can complicate an already overburdened schedule, often without compensation or the promise of professional rewards attached. We are, for example, writing recommendation letters, volunteering for committees and organizations, attending students’ games and concerts, dropping by department functions, applying to grants and conferences, and trying (repeatedly) to get published. If dissertation writing is the healthy regimen we are supposed to be sticking to, graduate school is an all-you-can-eat buffet of distraction. Learning to say no is important, and it can save you hours, semesters, and even years of putting your research on the back burner.

In the past, I wouldn’t think twice about saying no to things that didn’t align with my current research project or specialization. It turns out that impostor syndrome is an effective way to free up our schedules, but doubting our own potential can also keep us from opportunities that stand to benefit and invigorate us more than the things we end up saying yes to with ease.

For the sake of my sanity, my dissertation, and my students, I will, of course, continue to say no. But for the sake of my outlook on academia and my career, I have a new perspective on when and why to say yes.

———-
Callie Gallo is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at Fordham University. She worked in broadcast television for a number of years, and is much happier now just watching TV from the comfort of her couch. Her research focuses on new technologies and gender in nineteenth-century American literature, more specifically looking at how people talk about bodies at work in modern industries and economies. She is thinking about taking up karaoke again as a means of coping with the state of the universe and loves a good DIY project.

advice · femimenace · public engagement

Speaking While Female

March 30, 2016April 19, 2017 aimeemorrison3 Comments

Did you hear me on the radio this past weekend? My blog post about the Srigley Manoeuvre sort of took off, which is how I wound up taping with CBC Radio 1’s The 180 the very day I wrote it.

As soon as the episode aired, I received this email:

I’m only a little bit offended.

Let’s unpack this.

I have been speaking in public for a long time. Here I am (yeah that’s me in the green shirt with the heavily gelled bangs and the taupe lipstick) having just won a public speaking competition in grade 11:

Why did we wear these clothes?

I used to win these thing a lot. So did my esteemed runner up, on my immediate left, who you might recognize as former Halifax NDP MP Megan Leslie. She turned out to be a pretty good public speaker too, who also gets friendly advice on self-presentation from random people in her email. This despite the fact that we’ve literally been honing our skills at this since at least 1990, at the Kirkland Lake branch (87!) of the Royal Canadian Legion, as you can clearly see here!

I do a lot of radio and TV, actually, and I’ve spent some time working on my radio voice. I am speaking this way on purpose. Generally, the vibe I aim for is smart-chat-at-a-miraculously-quiet-Starbucks. Here is the technique:

sit up tall with free belly movement so I can take deep breaths and my vocal cords aren’t pinched and my voice has room to resonate in my body.
keep my face pretty damn close to the microphone: it sounds like I’m talking about a café table distance apart from a listener, so I can speak at a conversational volume.
drop the pitch of my voice to sound warmer, and to give me more room to shift my pitch up without squeaking; this always entails vocal fry.
occasionally and deliberately smile while talking, particularly when saying hello to the host and then again when saying goodbye.
selectively uptalk because I am trying to pull people along with me, and uptalk asks them to pay attention. It also softens the lecture quality of some of my paragraphs of speech.
insert, yes, little markers like “right” and “you know” because I am trying to sound like I am interested in securing the assent of the listener.

My daughter and I were in the car when this particular segment aired and she said “Moooooommmmm, your voice sounds so preetttttttyyyy.” Because I don’t sound like that in real life; I’m more nasal, flat, and sarcastic, generally. Radio voice is performance.

Uptalk, vocal fry, AND duckface! A bridge too far!

Less on purpose are the “um” and “like” noises that creep in, and I know exactly why they happen: it’s because I’m conscious I’m being taped and when you stop talking you seem like you are freezing up so the little micro-um buys me time to figure out how to finish what I’m saying. The “um” feels like massive and precious thought-completing time when I’m saying it, and it just slides right by when you are listening. Radio hosts never say “um” in this way because they are actually mostly reading from scripts; their skill is to sound like they’re not, but I’ve sat in a booth with Anna Maria Tremonti for The Current and she is reading from a (heavily marked up and personalized) script.

Still. Me, I say “right” too much. My voice is annoying and I should try to fix it so that people will listen to me. I am not the first woman to hear that. Listen to NPR talk about it! Listen to This American Life talk about it! Read all these articles about what is wrong with how women talk and why they should stop … basically … talking at all. At least until they rid their speech and writing of all its female problems using an app that automates the tone policing!

I think we’re still just not ready to accept women as experts and as authorities and as entitled to occupy some portion of the national attention on some version of the national stage.

Know why I think this kind of critique generally is not really about the intrinsically annoying quality of the female voice in question? Because I did a content analysis on my own segment. It turns out “right” is among my least pronounced vocal tics. Here’s what I found:

“um”: 25 times
uptalk: 21 times
“well”, “like”, “you know”: combined 13 times
“right?”: 13 times
repeated a word or phrase to fix the utterance: 6 times

Remember the moral panic about uptalk? I’m not hearing anything about my pronounced uptalk. Because I do it melded into the rest of my speech and so many people now do it that it just sounds natural now. Remember the plague of “like” and “you know” and “well”? Well, like, I guess that’s not a thing anymore, you know? I guess “Right?” is most wrong because it’s a youth pattern of speech, and a regional pattern of speech, and maybe not many Professors of Expertise in the field of Seriousness use it in their interviews.

Well. Guess what? I went into that interview in particular with a goal to speak smart but informal. To girl it up (uptalk) and be more current (“right?” and vocal fry) because I wanted to sound like the Anti-Srigley. Because Srigley, recall, looks like a clip-art, central casting professor, and he writes in the voice of a portentous old fart.

And I want no part of that. I’m no clip-art, central casting professor, and I’m going to write like someone who has a PhD and who watches TV and interacts with a wide variety of people and reads blogs and generally participates in the culture of my time and my place. I want to change that stereotype of professor: professors are ladies, and humans, and fun.

Aside from the occasional “helpful advice” on how to be less annoying, I think it’s working.

Right?

public engagement · women · women in the news

What is it going to take?

November 17, 2014April 19, 2017 erinewunker

A few weeks ago I had one of those rare experiences: I went to a conference in my area of studywhere I knew loads of people and each time there was a concurrent panel scheduled I was torn between the two panels. The conference was Avant Canada: Artists, Prophets, Revolutionaries, and it was part of Brock University’s annual Two Days of Canada conference series now run by the inimitable Gregory Betts. There were panels reigmaining the avant-garde in Canada, reframing what and how we might envision the work of the avant-garde, and the ways in which the often-narrow category of the avant-garde can be productively re-read through history. There were creative performances, invigorating roundtables—the most epic of which boasted six speakers on the topics of dub poetry and Indigenous avant-gardes and lasted nearly three hours—and Lee Maracle (Lee Maracle!!) gave a stunning hour-long plenary talk entitled “Two Days of Canada, 53, 785 days of colonialism” using no speaking notes. The conference was followed by a day-long symposium on the generous and innovative writer bpNichol(you know, concrete poet, sound poet, and a key person behind the childhood-shaping show Fraggle Rock). The atmosphere was warm, the presentations were thoughtful and thought-provoking, and there was dancing. Readers, even the food was good.

My experience of this conference was really positive. I had excellent conversations and learned much. My thinking was challenged. So the title of this post, and indeed the thinking that follows, is an attempt to provoke generative discussion that honours the work that was possible because of this conference. My intent—indeed, my aim—is not to nag, but to think through what is and is not possible in the current conference model, no matter how innovative and generative it may be.

I gave two presentations at this conference, and the second was on a roundtable entitled “The Feminist Future Garde of Canada.” This panel, organized by my friend and colleague Tanis MacDonald, came about last year in the midst of the David Gilmour debacle. Remember him? And then, though we couldn’t necessarily have predicted it, our panel presented in the weeks following the public revelation of Jian Ghomeshi’s long history of abusive behavior and the less publicized but equally important revelation of abuses of mentorship relationships in CanLit circles. As my friend and CWILA critic-in-residence Shannon Webb-Campbell kept saying, everywhere a trigger.

Five women spoke—Tanis, a.rawlings, Carmen Derkesn, Shannon Maguire, and myself. The room was full of people, and the room was also full of what Sara Ahmed might call sweaty concepts. For Ahmed, a “sweaty concept” implies that “conceptual work is understood as different from describing a situation.” She explains:

I am thinking here of a situation as a situation that comes to demand a response, a situation is often announced as what we have (“we have a situation here”) as well as what we are in. Concepts in my view tend to be reified as what scholars somehow come up with (the concept as rather like an apple that hits you on the head, sparking revelation from a position of exteriority) as something we use to explain by bringing it in. For me, concepts are ways of understanding worlds that are in the worlds we are in. (Feminist Killjoy)

In other words, sweaty concepts make us physically feel the thinking we are doing, and the colliding experiences that people are living.

On this panel there were frank first-person narratives of experiences of violence, of gender-based harassment and abuse, and of the quotidian aggressions that happen in a colonial, patriarchal, and yes, capitalist society that are easily dismissible by some as non-sense, and lived by others—those outside the circle of the same—as constant abrasion. I couldn’t look away as my co-panelists spoke. I had goose bumps. I started to sweat. My heart raced. I blushed. And during the discussion it was clear that to one degree or another most people in the room were also having visceral listening experiences.

So what, then, is my problem? It is this: outside of that room of sweaty thinking there was no collective sustained discussion of gender-based violence. Certainly, some of it happened in the breaks, in the hallways, and over meals, and certainly that matters. Certainly, this lack of sustained discussion is in part due to the nature of all conferences—even the very good ones, as this one most definitely was. There is a schedule, people have prepared. The panel ends and things move forward. That is how it is, and I understand. But the lack of sustained discussion—especially amongst a group of people who, to one degree or another—are in the same small circles of people working, caring, and thinking about the past, present, and future of Canadian literary culture worries me. What will it take to keep these discussions in the foreground?

Social media is exhausting, and I will admit I am relieved for a reprieve from the constant flood of Ghomeshi-news the various platforms I use. And yet.

And yet, there isconstant evidence of gender-based violence. And there is constant evidence of the ways in which it is ignored, erased, or swept under the rug. Take for example, Rehtaeh Parsons, whose name I can say because I am not a journalist. Take, for example, her father’s redacted victim statement. Or, for another example (which Lee Maracle dealt with in a holistic manner in her talk on the legacies of colonial violence) take the fact that while Tanya Tagaq performed alongside a scroll of names of more than 1,200 missing and murdered Aboriginal women she was taken to task for wearing seal fur.

Rape culture, gender-based violence, racially-based violence, and discrimination happen. Constantly. Are the events I flag here “equal”? No. They are events on a spectrum. My question is this: what is it going to take to talk about these issues in a sustained way, long after the two-week shelf life of being viral on the Internet? What?

If you’re in the Halifax area on November 25^thplease consider joining us at Safe Harbour which is a community gathering to talk about these issues. It is free and open to the public.

grad school · politics · public engagement · structural solutions

In Defence of Turgid Prose: A[nother] Response to Nicholas Kristof

February 25, 2014April 19, 2017 bjohnstone13 Comments

A couple times recently, I’ve had to answer the very difficult question of what kind of “impact” my dissertation project might have on the world. The first time I was faced with it when I was required to present a very embryonic piece of my proposal at a university colloquium: one of my co-panelists, from the philosophy department, asked me what relevance my dissertation on medieval dream visions has to the contemporary world. The second time I’ve had to answer it was last week, during a phone interview for a prestigious fellowship. Both times this question came from other people working within the academic sphere, and thus people who we might assume are on “our side”–but both times, I stuttered and faltered for much of a substantive answer. It’s a question that I would like to work out better for myself and become more fluent in addressing–and I can, I think. Indeed, we should want the work we invest so much time and energy in to have some sort of life-changing quality, if only in terms of the degree to which we perceive and continually re-perceive the world around us.

But that said, as most of us know, the term “impact” carries a lot of baggage in the context of the modern, corporatizing, increasingly neoliberal institution; academics in the United Kingdom have been plagued with this word “impact,” often meeting with funding refusals if the impact of the research project is gauged to be minimal or, worse, politically threatening. The New York Times‘s Nicholas Kristof’s inflammatory article from last week on why academics have become “irrelevant” and “marginalized” calls upon this very language of impact as part of its attack: “A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” Much of the problem, he claims, is based on academic publishing’s composition standards, which to him promote “turgid prose,” and one should also note his embedded snub at leftism in universities, and his defense of Republican-dominated economics. He cites a Harvard historian who, as an exception to his rule, writes for The New Yorker: academic institutions produce “a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose.”

Kristoff’s editorial has produced a medley of variously excoriating, thoughtful, and defiant rebuttals–including Corey Robin‘s, which remarks upon Kristof’s complete disregard of the material conditions that prevent untenured scholars from fully engaging in the public sphere (“It’s the job market. It’s the rise of adjuncts. It’s neoliberalism”), and Laura Tanenbaum‘s, which manages to say almost as much as Robin does in 2% of the word count (The very form of her brief address, in intelligible and concise prose, launches a challenge to Kristof’s assumptions). The New Yorker also chimed in with the rather defeatest claim that it is not professors who are “marginalizing themselves,” as Kristof suggests, but “the system that produces and consumes academic knowledge is changing, and, in the process, making academic work more marginal.” Kristof’s comment that academics are “slow to cast pearls through Twitter and Facebook” has inspired its own string of disgruntled pearls in the form of the hashtag #engagedacademics. A month ago, I tried to plea for more engaged and reckless politics on Facebook. And additionally, Mr. Kristof, may I hold up for your scrutiny the existence of Hook & Eye (which, though powered by women writing within the academic institution, is certainly not confined to that institution in terms of readership or concerns, as I think each contributor has demonstrated at various points).

I have one more cry to add to the anti-Kristof chorus, in particular against his attack on what he deems turgid prose. Is academic writing so turgid? And if it sometimes attains a level of obscurity, is that always a bad thing? Of course, we all want to be heard and understood, and our prose should never be obscure for the sake of obscurity–only the worst kind of writers opt for flowery writing in order to doll up a weak argument. But sometimes, I submit, obscurity can serve a political purpose. Faced with a governing institution that demands we translate the value of our research into economic and marketable terms, it may be a political and ethical act to resist the urge to simplify and make our research legible to the vocabulary of merit and progress. This idea is not mine, of course–I’m drawing it from none other than Judith Butler in her excellent essay “Ordinary, Incredulous,” in the brand new book, The Humanities and Public Life, published by Fordham University Press (omg, an academic press engaged in the public sphere! Shocking!). As she defiantly puts it, “[i]f obscurity is sometimes the necessary corrective to what has become obvious, so be it” (33). Her essay addresses the problem of speaking out in favor of the humanities without falling into the very language of instrumentality that is used by its detractors:

Socially and politically, we are in a bind because the imperative to ‘save’ the humanities often propels us into states of urgency in which we imagine that the only future left to us will be one secured precisely through those metrics of value that are most in need of critical re-evaluation. Oddly, our very capacity for critically re-evaluating is what cannot be measured by the metrics by which the humanities are increasingly judged. This means that the resource we need to save the humanities is precisely one that has been abandoned by the metrics that promise to save the humanities if only we comply. (32-33)

This is the double bind: we want to prove to funding organizations and the government that the work of the humanities is valuable. But in order to do that, we need to fulfill their criteria for what constitutes value and what doesn’t–we need to speak the language that the neoliberal institution demands of us, and that language is often coded in instrumental terms of tangibility and productivity that are antithetical to the very nature of the humanities. What we do must have concrete use value that is recognizable to the broader world. But as Butler describes, much of the value of the humanities lies in their ability foster critical re-evaluation, to learn to read and reread the world and texts around us–to question and challenge the pervasive “climate of the obvious” (25) that assumes that profitable “impact” is something to be desired. So we resist “use value” and tangibility through our practices of reading and critiquing, and these critical capacities are antithetical, indeed actually dangerous, to the metrics that are offered to the humanities as saving resources. So, in short, if we want to save the humanities we have to abandon the humanities.

Butler asks, “[i]s instrumentality the only way we have of thinking about what it means to make a difference?” (29). She challenges us to think about the notion of impact in different ways, to redefine what it means to speak to the “public” and to reclaim the humanities as a valuable–I hesitate to say profitable–resource for society (and if anyone is a public intellectual, it’s J.B.!). Sometimes our careful and deliberate critical re-evaluations of society may result in prose that is viewed by some, like Kristof, as “turgid.” But through this putatively obscure (but actually just nuanced, evaluative, and sensitive) prose, we may learn to challenge and perhaps redefine the metrics of of the obvious that are forcing us, in this current difficult academic climate, to give an account of ourselves as academics working within the discipline of the humanities.