A day at uni
My partner and I took a train to our uni, Roskilde university, to work from the office and to attend a talk offered by a fellow human, an author whose work I handled a while ago as an associate editor of Environmental Values. I try to work from home as much as possible because home is the space where I feel creative and inspired. But it's also humbling to be with fellow humans and in different spaces.
I put on my everyday uniform, old sandals, tied my hair with a muslin cloth (it was still wet), packed my bag, and we went to the station.
There were not too many people in the room where the talk took place, so the organiser asked everyone to introduce themselves. After many years in academia, as a student, a PhD student, a lecturer, a postdoc and a researcher, I've done dozens of such introductions. My name is xyz, my research focuses on this and that. Currently I'm doing such-and-such. Somehow it always feel like reducing myself to what I am doing professionally. In recent years I started highlighting it more that I am also a practitioner of extreme minimalism and an autoethnographer (hoping to normalise this method in economics and within business schools). It's wonderful and inspiring to hear when fellow humans in academia present themselves as more-than-academics. As mothers, artists, activists. When they emphasise the fact that they are humans. I jokingly presented myself as a housewife. It's of course a loaded term (there are so many nuances regarding women's positions in society that I will not dive into in my entry), but even when I was living completely by myself, I saw myself, in a playful way, partly as that. I was doing normal, human, everyday activities (cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, looking after my home), that indeed disproportionately fall on the shoulders of women in our society. They were my moments of self-care, grounding, humbling, focusing on doing, simply living rather than thinking. I did it for myself and to express gratitude to the few objects I lived with. Somehow it felt liberating to say that I was a housewife within an academic space where everyone else is a PhD student, a professor, or somewhere in between within the academic hierarchy. I was just a fellow human. For some moments, I abstracted myself from my role as a researcher, as associate editor, an author of books and articles. I was anonymous. Not a target for inauthentic networking. I was wondering how fellow humans feel within academic spaces. How someone coming from a very different life path would feel. Why is academic language so ugly and pretentious?
The speaker knew me and came over to talk for a bit. I asked them how they feel within academia in the country where they are based. They said something that has been on my mind for many hours: that academia is the same everywhere. Temporary positions, pressure to publish, networking, exploitation. We talked about slow academia, but we didn't know how to bring it about. We agree that it should be a collective action, but it's challenging to make it a collective action when many fellow humans reproduce existing toxic structures rather than actively transform them.
There was something in their talk that caught my attention in particular: how we internalise productivism. Oftentimes we say that capitalism wants it, but capitalism is not a person. It doesn't actively want anything. I often say to my fellow humans that there is no capitalism police, it's not illegal to consume less or to be kind, be in the world with care and manifest cooperative spirit. But we often feel useless when we are not doing something, where doing refers to productive, professional, paid activities. I feel that many humans do not know how to rest and do nothing. Earlier in my life I felt guilty for sleeping an extra hour, sitting in the sun, even reading something just for pleasure. How strange it is that it felt easier to do research than to just sit and breathe.