[csaa-forum] FW: Ivory Ceiling

[Phil Barker]

I have being trying to avoid engaging with these exchanges because I
only worked in the Academy under very short term contracts some years
ago - but desire being what it is/does... 

First, the way the debate was framed at the beginning of these exchanges
is interesting. Defining academic work as 'conceptually rigorous (&)
theoretically engaged' already responds to an 'Academy' that imagines,
and has constructed itself in a particular way: as the intellectual
inside - where the real intellectual engagement is?  But is it? 

In any case those of us who may not belong to 'it' perhaps should not
allow our only response to be that of experiencing ourselves as 'on the
outside': unable to theorize intelligently, or with any kind of validity
because we are here and not there - on the inside.  Indeed this is the
dangerous, sometimes seductive and debilitating trap that the
inside/outside dichotomy lays before us. 

For me the important questions are: where's the next pay cheque going to
come from?  And, how is it possible to do - let's just say -
'intellectual' work, no matter where the day to day of our lives takes
us.  

To the first the pay cheque can come from anywhere as other respondents
have already suggested.  At present I work in Marketing and
Communications.  If I choose I can take 12-18 months every 4 or 5 years
to write full-time.  I have had two books published in this way - one
with Harvester Wheatsheaf (1993), one with Edinburgh University Press
(1998).  So it can be done and the work - whatever its relation to the
Academy is - goes on. 

As to the issue of intellectual isolation, that surely is more difficult
but not impossible to overcome given today's technologies.  

What is most critical at the outset is to reject the position that the
Academy is the only location where - rigorous and theoretically engaged
work or indeed - just thoughtful intellectual work takes place?  

Of course this is also true of the outside - which is probably why there
is sometimes a certain difficult pleasure to be found in writing from/to
the in-between.  

Phil Barker
 
 
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