A Blog? A Sabbatical?

Hello dear reader,

Welcome (back?) to blogging. 

I'd like to claim that I never left, but I haven't made any such long-form, public address since about 2014. It's too bad; I think there's real value in being able to shape and share thoughts that exceed the character limit of your contemporary content sharing platform of choice, and do so in a way that preserves the writer's context and intentions across time. 

The old Internet was a kinder, more generous place. All its tools are still here, even if they're buried under glossier, dopamine-microdosing forms of giving and receiving attention. So, here's to picking them up again, and seeing what happens.

Of course, it helps to have a project. Here's mine: I'm on sabbatical this semester, spending half a year on the road, jumping from country to country, fellowship to fellowship. This brings me away from well worn habits and friendships, most of my teaching responsibilities, and my beloved cats. In turn, I get the pleasure of reinventing habits, befriending new colleagues and street cats, spending sustained and unhurried time on reading and research. I want to record what that's like as it happens, both for the benefit of distant family interested in keeping up with my life, as well as for myself when I'm back in the churn of the school year, wondering where all the time went.

For those of you who aren't embedded in the university, sabbaticals for us have a very particular meaning. They're more than just a vague descriptor of time off for self-improvement; they are a job benefit, defined in our collective agreements. They mean that you get paid time just for your research. You earn them after a set amount of service, most usually in 4-5 year intervals. Not coincidentally, at Trent ours arrive right after you get tenure. You could think of it as a reward for crossing that particular finish line, or perhaps an opportunity to catch your breath after running for that long. Alternatively, I've joked that it's a bit of a case of academic rumspringa. The golden handcuffs are on, you're likely to be rooted to the same institution for the rest of your life, so you might as well go have a little adventure, sew your intellectual wild oats, and then come back and commit to the routines of your home university.

Taking the longer view, sabbaticals also point back to the academy's medieval roots. In the Old Times, when you ran a little monastic-adjacent pen of scholars, the only way to get to the bottom of what was happening in the university three towns over was to send a guy, on an extended exchange, to go figure that out first-hand. If all went well, your guy would come back with a belly full of new ideas to share and praises about your university adequately sung in turn. Mobility, knowledge exchange, and the passing of time were a bundled deal, and so the sabbatical cohered as a genre of time and activity in which to achieve those tasks.[1]

Initially, this was not a very enviable job. Travel was often a dangerous and uncomfortable thing, and the hospitality of the receiving institution might not be terribly plush. If you were the chief academic in charge, you'd probably send a lackey rather than hit the road yourself. Yet, with the rise of settler colonialism, and the imperial project of universities therein, networks of exchange between the edge and the heart of empires solidified and smoothed, and it became increasingly desirable for professors on the periphery to do a tour of life in the center. This meant that time abroad became increasingly desirable, status-accruing, and rivalrous. Some people got to go. Others had to stay behind and pick up the slack.[2]

The post-WWII world order scrambled formal colonial relationships, but the imagined and real benefits of international exchanges remained. Commercial aviation disconnected travel from time to a new degree, making large international conferences available to more scholars and (I'm convinced) probably shuffling ideas around at a speed that made it much harder for distinct geographic schools of thought to cohere. Still, there are always going to be universities with more resources than others, or an interesting constellation of colleagues and equipment your university lacks, and certainly there will be reputational benefits to accrue in visiting them.

This is of course a mildly cynical accounting of things. There are plenty of intrinsically rewarding and intellectually upright reasons to visit another university on exchange. It's also the case that many academics don't travel at all during their sabbatical, preferring to stay home and work earnestly on their manuscripts (or other pleasures) during their time away from the usual rhythms of teaching and service jobs. It's still the case, though, that the most ambitious careers will include a long list of visiting fellowships and exchanges. These scholars are 'high fliers' in both senses.

My perspective here is definitely coloured by the forthcoming book I've helped develop, analyzing the way power and carbon emissions concurrently cohere in the modern academy. That's a story in large part about jet fuel, global networks, and the production of both 'academic rock stars' and 'helicopter research'. Our hope is, that in decarbonizing the academy (and necessarily displacing the central role of the airplane therein), we'll be able to shape it into a kinder place, with less status games, shallow exchanges, and their associated carbon emissions.

Inflected by this work, and trying earnestly to prefigure a little of my own politics, I've spent the first five years as a professor staying pretty grounded, taking only about one flight for work a year. This is, compared to my peers, quite low. As a result, I've missed a lot of those international conferences and opportunities to blow through random cities, giving 90 minute talks in exchange for 7+ hours of travel. I've stayed pretty close to Peterborough and the limited bus and rail network that runs through eastern Canada and the United States. There's plenty of interesting people in that orbit, but I am aware that I'm giving something up by not living the life of a frequent flyer.

The sabbatical, by contrast, is an occasion for a different, slower kind of travel and some remedial networking. I'm spending my annual flight on a transatlantic trip, after which I'll be moving across Europe over the course of four months by train. The first three will be in Germany, and the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum. After that, I'll be on Stockholm, Sweden sponsored by the Digital Futures initiative via KTH. I hope to spend a lot of weekends riding the rails, getting coffee with the host of interesting Internet contacts and all the scholars frequenting my bibliographies who happen to live on the continent. I have a set of research projects lined up thinking through the rise and fall of 'green data capitalism'--which is to say, the patchy efforts by the tech sector to support climate action in self-serving ways---that I think will benefit from interlocutors based on a very different policy and energy landscape than the one I'm familiar with in North America. But also, and perhaps most honestly, I'm genuinely excited to socialize with these otherwise distant voices.

After Stockholm, I'm headed to the USA to give a paper at a workshop in Boston. This will conclude the more structured part of the sabbatical and bring me back to the continent, but it certainly doesn't run out the sabbatical clock. I'm thinking of setting up one of those 'self-funded writing residencies' (which is to say, renting a cottage and dividing my time there between working on a manuscript and more purposefully chilling out). I will, after all, be by the sea. More specifically, to my dorky delight, I will be a short bus ride away from New Bedford and Nantucket, and thus the shores that begin Moby Dick, one of my all-time favourite books. I hear there's a whaling museum with a delightful scrimshaw collection. This has absolutely nothing to do with any of my scholarly projects, and I am resistant to making it so! 

(From there I might swing by Atlantic Canada, and maybe take VIA's Ocean line back to Toronto? The simple rationale: gotta get one last train ride in there, if at all possible.)

For now though, I'm tucked away in Bochum, with a fistful of postcards I need to write after an initial week of being a tourist in Berlin. I hope to keep y'all informed as adventure continues, and I hope to knock the rust off of my longer-form, more casual writing voice.

A practical note to you to close out: if you're a real keener, you can subscribe to this blog via RSS. This is the same technology that, device and platform agnostic, delivers the bulk of podcasts. RSS is one of the Good Protocols. If you don't already have an RSS reader downloaded (RIP Google Reader) you might enjoy Feeder. It's free, doesn't come with ads, and doesn't sell your data. You can also set it up to give you updates from other websites you enjoy. Remember websites? Ah, nostalgia...

[1] This sketch is cribbed from The Traveling Scientist's Itinerary by Johan Gärdebo and Kristoffer Soldal. Thanks for bringing your zine to the Anthropocene campus in Philadelphia, Johan! It proved really influential in guiding my musings on low-carbon scholarship over the years...

[2] More on this in Tamson Pietsch's book Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850-1939. My thanks to Max Liboiron for tweeting their read through it amid their critical university studies research.