Forget the Odds, Imagine a New Future
Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Atlas Odinshoot playfully reminded folks like me on the academic job market and people just finishing their dissertations that the “odds are never in our favor.” While I enjoy the popular culture analogy that Odinshoot offers, I am tired of creative cynicism and yearn for more wild imagination in our collective lives.
Yes, the job market for tenure-track academic positions is bleak, but more than a difficult job market, we face a failure of imagination—a failure to imagine and create a world where we can work and contribute the skills and knowledge gained through our research and teaching to broad public benefit. More tragic than academic restructuring is a failure of imagination, particularly for humanities PhD graduates. The humanities train people to value and cultivate imagination—and imagination is crucial to the future economic and civil environment of the United States.
Let me explain. The economy is changing—and will continue to change throughout our working lives. I grew up in Michigan. For my parent’s generation, with basic math and science aptitude and hard work, you could get a job at General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler, work for thirty years, then retire on a full pension with health and dental benefits. For some, this life was idyllic. By the time I was a teenager in the 1980s, however, automotive jobs were disappearing. When I graduated from high school in 1987, I knew that my peers and I would have to forge a new way of working in the world—and it probably would not involve working at one place for thirty years. So the fantasy of a tenure track job that provides a life of stability is like the fantasy of working at GM for thirty years—it is a fantasy that I dismissed twenty-five years ago—and so did major parts of the US economy.
What I learned as a young woman in Michigan, as a University of Michigan graduate in 1990 (during another bad recession), is that educated workers need to create their own opportunities in ways unimagined by our parents, by our mentors, by those who have walked before us. By saying this, I do not want to deny the structural problems in academia or in the current US economy. These structural problems affect all of us; efforts to address structural issues collectively are crucial and deserve our time and attention.
In addition, we must also imagine new work possibilities for ourselves, for our colleagues and friends, and for all people around us. Rather than likening our mentors to Haymitch, what if we looked to other scholars who have taken non-traditional paths? I think about John D’Emilio. In addition to his groundbreaking work in the history of sexuality, Professor D’Emilio worked for a few years at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force starting the Policy Institute, a vital organization that worked to create important linkages between academic research and gay and lesbian activism. He navigated a career trajectory that served his intellectual interests and the broader LGBT communities in important and meaningful ways. What if we imagined careers that linked worlds of academia and activism in both word and deed?
New wild imaginings about work and how people can find and create work in the world that is both remunerative and contributory is important to academia as well. Most jobs in academia focus on teaching and mentoring undergraduate students. These students face the same world we do, but, at least initially, they have less education and less experience. Part of our job as teachers and mentors is to help them imagine and find their place in the world.
In the past few months, I have had the extraordinary pleasure of being in contact with a handful of recent graduates of the University of Maryland with undergraduate degrees in the humanities, many in Women’s Studies. One young woman came to meet with me in December. She worried about work, how to pay her student loans. She was uncertain about the future. Scared. Doubtful of her own skills and abilities. I told her she had to imagine and create the feminist world she wanted to live in. She was skeptical (and here, I am being kind to myself.)
The other day, she emailed me and said that she has a job interview for a swell editorial fellowship at Lilith Magazine. I hope she gets it, but even if she does not, I know she will be successful. She is imagining a place for herself in the world where she is a creator and maker of meaning; she is imagining work that is feminist and supports her values and beliefs. What if we engaged in wild imaginings with our undergraduate students as a strategy to find and create jobs we want and, in the process, create new spaces in the world for scholars?
One way to create new imaginaries is spatial disruptions; we can step outside ourselves. This month, I joined the board of directors of The DC Center for the LGBT Community. I believe in community service and am thrilled to give the time to The DC Center. Arguably, I should be spending time on my book manuscript and polishing off articles, but it is not an either/or proposition. I am doing those projects and dedicating a few hours a month to The DC Center. This work reminds me of the importance of community and of the challenges that other people face.
Last year The DC Center helped fifteen people who were applying for asylum in the United States after fleeing anti-gay governments in other locations. I do not know the details of all of these cases, and I know the critiques of this work: it constructs the United States as an ideal location for LGBT people and as a benevolent force in the world. I am uneasy with these facts, but, at the board orientation, hearing briefly about people seeking asylum, I realized that my own sense of precarity in the world, as my year as a visiting assistant professor winds down and the tunnel of my own job search constricts, is modest. At The DC Center, people take action to make our local community better; volunteers struggle with their own precarious standing, their own concerns and anxieties, but they act to change our imperfect, broken, unfair, and hurtful world. It makes me ask, what work do I need to be doing now, urgently, and possibly against logic?
Maybe this utopian dream is less useful than dystopian parallels and sharp cultural criticism, but I want to imagine and create worlds where people work for fair wages. I want to imagine and create worlds where people contribute value to our society and, in doing so, inspire others to do the same. This, for me, is the imaginary of the humanities. A world of wild possibilities is where I wish to dwell.
Filed under: scholarship Tagged: Chronicle of Higher Education, DC Center, humanities, imagination, jobs, work
