Picking up the Pieces

by wcarruthers

I’m sitting on the top floor of the SOAS library in Bloomsbury, reading a book from the 60s about foreign aid programmes in Nepal. It’s bliss (and such a good building), but also slightly unfamiliar. The last couple of weeks are really the first time I’ve done any sort of sustained research since 2022, and any sort of lengthy academic writing since the second half of 2021, when I submitted the final version of my book manuscript (published in late 2022; academic book production runs on long timescales). It’s all familiar, but also almost uncanny: I’m reading the book to help me work on a file I’d had photocopied at the National Archives of India in April 2019, a time-lag which seems scarcely credible.

A lot has happened in the last five years. Amongst other things, we’ve had two children (one now four and three-quarters, the other just turned one). And there was, if you hadn’t noticed, a global pandemic. As well as necessitating time parenting which—with a bare-minimum paternity leave policy—I hadn’t anticipated (I enjoyed it, of course, and liked being able to stay at home), the pandemic turned the research and travel plans I’d made for my really very generous Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship on their head. I consequently spent a lot of the early pandemic tidying up a book draft (luckily, I’d finished the majority of the writing just as lockdown hit the UK in March 2020, although one or two points proved difficult to check). Simultaneously, I wondered what else it was I was meant to be doing.

And then there was the job situation. Leverhulme and UEA, my then employer, gave me a one-year extension due to the pandemic, which was about the best anyone could hope for, I think. I’d always wondered if my fellowship there might turn into something permanent, but then UEA went badly into the red. In September 2022—after eight years of postdocs, a few job interviews, a book about to be published, and our second child due the following April—I hit the end of the line, as many do. I did some freelance writing, tied up outstanding commitments (conferences already paid for), and wondered what to do next. I turned 40 in October 2022; it didn’t feel great, although we were OK financially for a while.

I of course kept applying for academic jobs that looked like the proverbial good fit (it’s hard to break a compulsion). I had another couple of interviews (nothing doing). I then applied for ‘one last academic job’—and got it. So here I am at Essex, in a school and department that is, genuinely, a good fit. It’s an odd feeling. The survivor’s guilt—and, let’s be clear, there is survivor’s guilt in this ‘job market’—disappears relatively soon, because you have to do the day-to-day job so quickly and because preparing modules, lectures, and seminars is demanding. On the plus side, I’ve become a lot less concerned about public speaking, because there’s now no time to worry about it. Sometimes, too, the students really do remind you that the job is worth doing. The imposter syndrome disappears. Academia really is just a job, albeit one where I only now have breathing space to write something like this piece again. It’s surprising to be able to string a sentence together still sometimes.

The elephant in the room is that I now seem to be one of the lucky ones in what is an increasingly terrible environment for UK higher education. Even as I feel like I’m picking up the pieces, others are having to pick them up in far worse ways. And ‘the humanities’ (whatever that actually is) feels like it’s falling to bits. It’s not pretty, or nice, or feel-good: maybe the expected change in government will alter things, although I have my doubts. I also wonder about how to articulate the value of what it is that I ultimately think we do in the midst of all of this professional turbulence: what is research and writing—and teaching research and writing—for? Resurrecting this blog is one way to think about those questions. Is it what other people think we do, even? Writing about this job and my research is one way of fumbling towards an answer. So here I am.