If your 2022 has been anything like mine, it has been full and challenging, with (I hope) some significant bright spots.
Since last December, I have had a passage rattling around in my head from Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s magnificent novel, This is How You Lose the Time War (2020). The novel is compelling and creative on its own. You should go read it! However, the part that has stuck with me is from the co-authors’ acknowledgements where El-Mohtar writes:
Finally, dear reader, we dedicated this one to you, and we mean it. Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.
Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We’re all still here. (p. 201)
So much of academic work is an exercise in writing and casting letters in bottles in articles and books to uncertain and unknown audiences. Significantly, this whole enterprise rests on too often invisible labor: the work of graduate assistants, non-tenure track instructors, and the tenure-track faculty service, not to mention all the additional housework, childcare, elder care, and community service that has to be done to make society continue from day to day. Much of this work, as we know, is done by women and by people of color, whose labor historically has been at the core of what makes society work while simultaneously marginalized and minimized by those in power.
Journals depend almost entirely on that invisible, often uncompensated labor. . . . [READ MORE]
