Research is My Dirty Little Secret

In a time of sweeping budget cuts and anti-intellectualism, one of the parts of my job that is first on the chopping block is this amorphous thing we academics call "research."

I don't know about you, but my institution is squeezing more and more out of everybody, the most precarious lecturers most of all. 

"Work creep" is everywhere--for example: we got rid of our college's website manager, and now our personnel manager will be doing all that website work.  The part of her personnel work that is getting displaced is the travel stuff.  Our departments have to figure out how to internalize that labor.  This is happening everywhere.  Meanwhile, administrative bloat is a thing: those flow charts of who reports to whom are mind-bogglingly complicated, and seem to change every year.  

For one unit of advising time, I'll be asked to advise not 45 students, but 70, for example, in the next budget cut.

I'll teach the same amount of classes, but head count will go up 25%.

Lecturers will lose classes.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. 

In this context, committees are convened to strategize how to survive these budget cuts, creating "urgent" service work.  Much more work is spread among fewer people.  Though I'm glad to have a secure job that renders me one of those people who stays in work, I fear for the increased precarity of those who do not.  And I am sad about what it's doing to academia in a cultural moment when intellectual "elites" are losing status in the public sphere by the minute.

Because beside lecturers' job security, what gets cut? What is the unnecessary "fat" in our work lives?  

Research.  

If it's not directly serving students-- and in administrative mumbo-jumbo that means, is it using student unit hours (head-count) as part of instruction?  Are you making your teaching/research obligations so efficient that you can literally do one by doing the other?  Are you leveraging your research to translate directly to tangible, measurable, immediate forms of student success?  Does your research have immediate impact on the classroom?  If not, good luck finding the space in this squeezed budget landscape to indulge yourself in the luxury that is thinking, writing, thinking, writing.

Superfluous to the obligations of student retention and over other imperatives of higher education (oh, for example, producing meaningful knowledge), research can only get done on the side-- it's definitely become my dirty little secret.  

Some of my colleagues are champions of me taking time to pursue my love of research.  They "take the hit" for me by stepping up to committees and making their service work count "double" for their programs and mine.  They compensate for my bureaucratic negligence, all the while enabling the slow creep of bureaucratic entanglements (assess more, report more, figure out more software interfaces, represent your program here and there and there... you know the drill).  I owe those colleagues many, many margaritas.  

But others, less sympathetic about the squeeze that my attention to research might entail for their workload, may find it a sign that I have too much time on my hands-- I'm not serving students enough and not on enough committees-- if I am discovered in the act of carving out time and space to write and think.  You're producing research?  It's like some kind of infidelity to the care of family I am supposed to be doing.  

How would this culture change?  Do we really need a better budget to make people think research is valuable to what we're doing at a liberal arts, teaching institution?  I don't think so.  I think there's something much worse going on here that we need to reckon with: the value of intellectual work in this historical moment, the neoliberalization of higher education, and the linking of educational outcomes entirely to whether or not students get jobs when they graduate.  I would like to have my battles on those grounds-- cultivating really compelling cases for the value of intellectual work in the world-- and not in the hallways of my campus or in the land of nasty work emails.  

Whither Hope? A Bibliography

I have been teaching and researching about the various types of emotions in the category of "hope"--from "hokey hope" to "critical hope"-- and put together a small list of readings I love.  Please send me your favorite readings, films, podcasts!

Not listed here are readings that argue for the value of "ugly feelings" like despair. In my teaching and research, I want to think a lot more about the value of feelings that most Americans avoid in favor of our ostensible birthright emotion-- "happiness." Books like Ngai's Ugly Feelings and Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness would be on that list, so if you have other good ones, let me know too.

And, for how students respond to these readings, check out my environmental studies senior capstone blog, "Critical Hope."

Bibliography

Andrade-Duncan, Jeff.  “Growing Roses in Concrete.” (video here, article here).

Boggs, Grace Lee, with Scott Kurashige. The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Bristow, Tom, Thom van Dooren, Cameron Muir. “Hope in a Time of Crisis: Environmental Humanities and Histories of Emotions.” Histories of Emotions: From Medieval Europe to Contemporary Australia.  Blog post (November 6, 2015). Accessed 9 January 2017. https://historiesofemotion.com/2015/11/06/hope-in-a-time-of-crisis-environmental-humanities-and-histories-of-emotions/

Brown, Adrienne Maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico: AK Press, 2017.

Freire, Paulo. “Opening Words.” Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Gore, Al. “The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate.” Rolling Stone Magazine. Online June 18, 2014.  http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-turning-point-new-hope-for-the-climate-20140618

---. “The Case for Optimism on Climate Change.” TED.com. Accessed May 10, 2016.

Hawken, Paul. The Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming. New York: Viking, 2007.

Houser, Heather. “How Does it Feel?” Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Jensen, Derrick. “Beyond Hope.”  Orion Magazine Online.  https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope/

Kirksey, Eben. Emergent Ecologies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

Loeb, Paul Rogat. ed. The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Macy, Joanna and Chris Johnstone. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy. Novato: New World Library, 2012.  

Roberts, David. “Is There Hope on Climate Change?”  The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times. Edited by Paul Rogat Loeb. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. New York: Viking, 2009.  

--- “Acts of Hope: Challenging Empire on the World Stage.” TomDispatch.com. Website. Accessed June 11, 2016.

Walker, Alice. “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse.” The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times. Edited by Paul Rogat Loeb. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Weston, Anthony.  Mobilizing the Green Imagination: An Exuberant Manifesto. New Society Publishers, 2012.

Critical Norths and Disability Studies & the Environmental Humanities are out!

Years of waiting are over!  I'm so excited to see these in print, finally. Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory (U. Alaska P) was co-edited with Kevin Maier, and seeks to challenge dominant myths and narratives about the "North," and includes essays by scholars from different disciplines.  The book is divided into three parts: The Vanishing North?, Thinking with Northern Animals, and Notions of North and Nation.

Co-edited with Jay Sibara, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities (U. Nebraska P) and with a forward by Stacy Alaimo, this book seeks to be a reader that brings together these fields.  It's divided in two sections to make it useful for course adoption. The first is comprised of foundational essays that reflect the launch of this intersection; this section honors that early work, such as Mel Chen's "Lead's Racial Matters", Eli Clare's essay on "cure", and my essay "Risking Bodies in the Wild."   The second part of the book is comprised of new essays.

Latinx Environmentalisms: A Project with Priscilla Ybarra, Sarah Wald, and David Vazquez

I'm honored to be collaborating with Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Sarah Wald, and David Vazquez on an edited book, Latinx Literary Environmentalisms: Justice, Place, and the Decolonial, currently under review.  Sarah Wald and David Vazquez brought me and Priscilla to University of Oregon to workshop on the book, and give the talks for which this image was the promotional flyer. Another highlight was breakfast with grad students in the UO English Literature and Environment program, and Environmental Sciences, Studies, and Policy program, which were my programs when I was there getting my PhD.

"The Affective Arc of Environmental Studies Undergraduate Curricula"

The following is an abstract of my chapter in Jenn Ladino and Kyle Bladow's forthcoming Affective Ecocriticisms:

“The task is not to shrink ourselves into a corner, to dissolve ourselves into ‘no impact,’ but rather to find another, new, even spectacular way […] to co-inhabit this world” (Weston, xiv).

Told their whole lives to “leave no impact” on the planet, or worse, to “save the planet, kill yourself,” undergraduate Environmental Studies (ES) students today are seduced into a kind of green, self-erasing nihilism. During their baccalaureate studies, ES students go from being idealistic and optimistic to despairing and apathetic when they learn how unjust the world is, and how entrenched our environmental crises are.  Their courses do not help them imagine recourse to their complicity in social and environmental injustices across the globe. They are certain that anything they could individually do would never be enough to address the vast scale of problems.  And more, they become pessimistic about the ability of existing institutions and systems to act in anything but the interests of capitalist growth. ES students often leave college not the well-trained, problem-solving leaders that ES programs promise on their websites, but deflated, aimless, self-loathing, ashamed, angry, and apathetic.  

This chapter argues that greater attention to the affective experiences of ES students within ES curricula is crucial to developing the generation of environmental leaders so many programs claim to be training. But it is not only a matter of meeting our outcomes; it is an pedagogical concern: it is unethical to expect students to devote themselves to saving the planet, but then fail to prepare them affectively and psychically for this challenge, as if the intellectual projects of our syllabi and curriculum design are separate from students’ embodied lives. Those who study ES programs understand that a poorly-organized ES experience creates an “urgency + despair = apathy” scenario (Maniates), but less scholarship is devoted to articulating the alternatives, and even less acknowledges the centrality of students’ emotional responses to their coursework to generating or failing to generate the next generation of thinkers and leaders.

I examine the affective experiences of undergraduate Environmental Studies (ES) majors, with the aim of offering insights about environmental affect for the development of undergraduate ES programs and curricula. ES syllabi often end with a hopeful turn, in order to avoid leaving students completely nihilistic and paralyzed by despair.  But I want to offer a deeper critique of this classic “arc of hope” narrative.  Building on Heather Houser’s critique of the positive affects of hope and optimism in Ecosickness, Sara Ahmed’s various critiques of happiness, and the growing literature on hope in the environmental movement (Solnit, McKibben, Weston, and Bristow et al, for example) and in critical pedagogy (hooks, Duncan-Andrade, Freire, Fiskio, and West, for example), I will argue that we undermine the potential of these future planet-savers by suggesting that hope alone will adequately prepare them for the turbulent waters ahead. This literature also insists that making material relevant to and respectful of students’ whole selves, not just their minds or desire to obtain employment upon graduating, is necessary for retaining underrepresented students.  Thus, I also want to argue, ES curricula need to be more attentive to students’ affective lives if they want to not only attract underrepresented students, but to help them to thrive in college.

To these ends, I will argue that ES curricula must trouble students’ assumptions about happiness, provide them tools to critically analyze the effects of environmental narratives on their energies, challenge their views of what “counts” as social change, and deconstruct their attachments to binaries like theory/action and objectivity/subjectivity, hard/soft skill, and problem-solving/academic. These skills are needed in order to avoid slipping into paralysis, for destabilizing existing power relations, and for creating the affective conditions for sustaining mind and body in the face of crisis.  As the very “conversation around hope within environmental discourse is itself anguished,” leading to either naiveté or techno-optimism, as Houser argues (219), I suggest a variety of these more complex strategies, which achieve two goals I will explore in this essay: they acknowledge that ES syllabi and curricula are environmental narratives and should therefore be analyzed as a discourse of “ecosickness”, and, most importantly, they help “set into motion the messy emotions that can […] direct our energies toward planetary threats” and action (Houser, 223). When ES students graduate, as much as they need to know the details of environmental problems and the uneven benefits and burdens of their solutions, they need the affective disposition and the imaginations to intervene as engaged citizens. 

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader. Edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

---. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Duncan-Andrade, Jeff. “Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete.” Harvard Educational Review 79:2 (Summer 2009).

Fiskio, Janet. “Building Paradise in the Classroom.” Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities. Edited by Stephen Siperstein, Stephanie Lemenager, and Shane Hall. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2016. (manuscript provided by author).

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope.  New York: Routledge, 2003.

Houser, Heather. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Maniates, Michael. “Teaching for Turbulence.” State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? The Worldwatch Institute, 2014. Website.

McKibben, Bill. Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth. Milkweed, 2007.

Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Nation Books, 2005.

--- A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Penguin, 2010.

Bristow, Tom, Thom van Dooren, and Cameron Muir. “Hope in a Time of Crisis: Environmental Humanities and Histories of Emotions.” Histories of Emotions. Website. Accessed February 1, 2016.

West, Cornel. The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption. Beacon Press, 1999.

Weston, Anthony.  Mobilizing the Green Imagination: An Exuberant Manifesto. New Society Publishers, 2012.