I wrote a few weeks back about a major blowup that happened in the historical costuming community, when a prominent member outed herself as a bigot. This is only one of many recent events that seem to be constantly shaking this subculture, likely as its membership grows and changes, and as it responds more to and reflects more the social issues that are on everyone’s lips these days. As Bo Burnham has observed, the outcome of all this pain and consternation is more content. Lots and lots of videos about racism, whitewashing, colonialism, and of course the global system of capitalism. Those videos all essentially express the same message: history, especially European and North American history, is not as white as we have been told, and we need to reflect that more, even in play.
Read MoreThe loneliness of creative work
A few months late to the party, I finally watched Bo Burnham’s Inside. And then I watched it again. And then I listened to the soundtrack on repeat for several weeks.
Read MoreStrolling and Wandering
Right before I took my oral qualifying exams, I called my adviser in a panic. I had failed my German and Latin exams almost ten times each, and time was running out to pass them before I would have to push back my oral exam date. My adviser talked me down. “Take a walk” he said “when was the last time you went to the park?”
Read MorePerformative outrage and its discontents
Hey, have you heard of this thing called cancel culture?
Read MoreJudeo-Christian
It was perhaps not surprising just after the 2016 election to discover that a portion of president-elect trump’s base espoused ideologies of white supremacy. What was surprising to those who were paying attention but perhaps less familiar, was that trump also garnered significant support from Orthodox Jews, particularly Zionists, both in the US and Israel. While there are many reasons, both historical and expedient, that these particular Jewish groups chose to throw their support behind trump, it’s the coincidence that one of the most historically maligned groups would agree on their choice for political representation as the people who have fought both in the past and present for their extermination and removal from power. What is the connection between Zionist Orthodox Jews and white supremacists?
Read MoreHistorical vs Traditional
It might sound like I’m making a value judgment here, that traditional is better than historical. Really, I’m arguing for an awareness of context. There are some traditions that don’t exist anymore. There are some things that really are gone. But it’s not as much as you think. Participating in history, appreciating history, shouldn’t come with a disregard for the present. My point is that before you label something as historical, limited to the past, you should investigate whether it actually still exists in some form in the present.
How important is word choice?
We’re in a semantic age, when battles are fought over the words we use to refer to people or experiences, and lines are drawn through vocabulary. In a non-political arena, I’m having a similar fight over the specific words historians use. How important are these distinctions, really?
Read MoreAsk yourself: What are you afraid of?
I started writing this one almost two years ago, but put it in the digital drawer because I thought it was kind of obvious. But as more people in my life have come up against the same problems with paralyzing anxiety or decision fatigue, I’m realizing this is actually worth saying.
Read MoreRevising
The words “revise and resubmit” carry with them a particular emotional response in academia: a unique combination of hopeful self-satisfaction, anxiety, and existential dread. Its a trite truism that we all need to learn to accept criticism. Academia turns accepting criticism into an art, that also happens to be part of our daily workload. Revise and resubmit is one of three possible responses when submitting an article for publication in a journal. Rather than outright accept or reject, revise and resubmit means that the core concept is good, but the readers had comments. “The readers had comments” could be written on the tombstone of every academic. Your peers, colleagues in your field, found some things worth changing. It could be that you failed to site a relevant study, or you used a word in a way that didn’t sit well with someone. The overall gestalt is “I liked it, but not as much as you wanted me to.” And the feeling that comes with that is being damned with faint praise.
Revising is perhaps the most essential part of my writing process. Something about how my brain works means that I need many drafts to get the point of my argument across without distracting my reader with something else. I wrote recently that it’s been my tone or my word choice that stops people from understanding me. It can also be the order in which I introduce evidence (apparently I think in concentric circles instead of lines), and as a result I have had editing processes that involved flipping the order of the entire paper.
But revising is still exhausting. Internalizing criticism is exhausting. Doing the same work repeatedly is exhausting.
Today, I had an epiphany about a piece of writing that I have been working on for a decade. In 2010, I wrote a paragraph-long aside in a junior seminar, which became a standalone MA seminar paper in 2013, which became a journal article in 2015. And since 2015 I have tried and failed to get this paper published. The criticisms of it have been varied, but all true. At the same time, I presented this work at a conference in 2016, and it’s up on my Academia.edu page, where the praise for it has been loud and consistent – this is a valid piece of scholarship that would be a useful addition to the field. So, every once in a while, I come back to this paper and revise it yet again, and submit it yet again. I have never been granted a revise and resubmit, just rejection after rejection, but the overall impact of the conflicting responses to it has been revise and resubmit. “I like it, but not as much as you wanted me to.”
My epiphany was a totally different framing to this piece. Instead of launching into the historiographical fray, trying to make my contribution in a debate that is already very full, I should be viewing things from above. What am I actually adding that is new – is what I asked myself. I’m suggesting a different methodological approach to the question. Whereas that methodological approach was a secondary point before (making the whole piece very complicated), I’m making it the main argument now. I can still use a lot of the work I’ve already done, but reframing the piece is actually an easier approach than trying to fix the problems that existed before. The reason this was novel for me was that I suddenly connected what I had been trying to do in this article with what I’ve been working on for my dissertation. I hadn’t thought about it that way before because I wrote this article long before I articulated the methodological argument of my dissertation.
Maybe this version of the article won’t get it accepted to a journal either. But it’s an interesting process to go back and fix what I was trying to say. There’s certainly a limit to revising, and there’s no point in revising something that is totally in the past. But here I have another chance to make this article work while it’s still relevant, and the process of doing that is potentially helpful for other things I’m working on too. That level of self-criticism, that internalization of the feedback I’ve gotten, also feels important, like maybe one day I can not only anticipate the criticism, but head it off entirely.
On Expertise
My mom has a bit of a problem with experts. If you asked her, my mom would tell you that the problem with experts is that they don’t have to justify their opinions on the basis that they have implicitly earned that trust, and, in the reverse, other people who are not experts have not. She argues that people who are not experts should be trusted to form and express opinions on a subject, and moreover that experts should be challenged to support their opinions better. I can’t say that I fully disagree. And yet when it comes to the concept of an expert and, by extension, expertise, I’m torn. On the one hand, experts should not have a monopoly on informed opinions. On the other, expertise is not just knowing the facts, but about understanding the context, methods, and unarticulated information surrounding those facts that contribute to interpreting them. This push and pull between formal expertise and informal knowledge is something I’m constantly struggling with as a junior academic.
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