Workplace politics

These past two weeks have been particularly stressful for me as a paper deadline and Ph.D. applications deadlines near. So all I have to offer is a re-posting from my cultural studies class blog:

Please forgive me for the second-person voice –

I certainly agree that academic jobs/lifestyles seem to offer a lot more opportunities for many types of political activity than most job because, even if the "hours" are longer, academic demands tend to be much more flexible. After working for several years in jobs where I had to be a specific place at specific times for 40 + hr/wk, I revel in the luxery having less than 12 hours a week where I have to be a specific place at a specific time. Also, academic employment seems to offer much more flexibility in how you can appropriate your time. The time you spend researching for an intellectual project could also be part of a political project.

That said, much to my surprise, I've found myself less politically involved since I came back to grad school than while I was working. Obviously I don't mean to suggest my own pattern mirrors everyone else's. But I think a big factor that makes political involvement much more likely or less likely is whether your community is politicized, i.e. whether the people around you are involved in political projects. Not only does a general political culture help motivate people to participate in political activities, making it social and fun, but it's a lot easier to find interesting ways to get involved when you know others who are working on specific projects. It is indeed difficult to walk into to an organization cold, and say you want to work with them and find yourself doing something more interesting than canvassing, making fundraising calls, etc. Even in the case where you can go to an organization and propose a specific way to work with them, your ability to find the inspiration to make such a proposal is correlated (I think) with the degree to which your everyday life allows you some intimate knowledge of the organization or issue. When you hear your friends or coworkers talking about the cool stuff they are working on, you’re more likely to think of some way your own skills and interests might contribute to those projects.

This is all meant to bring me up to a point to say that at certain times university campuses are places where political activity thrives and other times they are not. I can only imagine that during certain times in the 60’s it would be, culturally, very difficult to identify as a Marxist scholar or critic of patriarchy, let’s say, and not be involved in any of the related political activity surrounding you. At other times, it may be difficult to be such a scholar and feel any connection to or affinity with work that’s being done outside the academy.

Hopefully this kairos is not entirely fixed. Collectively we can make it a little easier to blend academic and “extra-academic” political work.

Mariposa

This morning in the Twin Cities is bright and crisp. There's a sweet damp scent in the air. It's probably the smell, more than the weather, that triggered a strong memory for me while I was walking to the 2nd Moon Coffee Shop. It was not a particular event, but rather an old routine and place that suddenly came to mind.

The last year I spent in Boston, I worked on Massachusetts Ave several blocks south of Central Square. Central Square was usually bustling when I got there during the peak of the morning rush, throngs of people exiting and entering the T, catching the bus or rushing from their apartment doors down Mass Ave by foot. But especially on cool fall or spring morning, there would be an aura of morning calm, a paradoxical stillness, to all this movement. It was the marriage of chaos and equanimity that you can observe in a shaken snow dome. Walking from the T station to my office, I would always pass a coffee shop called Mariposa and look in longingly at its denizens reading morning papers and conversing. It wasn't an addiction to coffee or a dread of work, but the idea of the pleasure to be had spending a morning in the world of journalism or books at a coffee shop that filled me with yearning. A few mornings I would be able to rouse myself from bed early enough to spend an hour or so at Mariposa before I had to be at work. I love sleep and I always love it most just as it is ending, so it was only on the most glorious mornings when I was willing to make the trade-off of sleep for coffee shopping. But when I did, the pleasure I had fantasized about on my rushed walks to work proved to be not just an illusion. As I wrote in my journal on those special mornings, I'd be able to see, temporally, the chaos of my anxieties in that beautiful morning light, fluttering with the graceful disorder of butterflies in an atrium.