I can't get no (intellectual) satisfaction

I can't get no (intellectual) satisfaction

In this post: I write about the satisfaction beyond academia, and how to continue to embody the principles ad methods you honed in academia in the real world.
Next week: What does it mean to unite praxis with practice as a radical academic? I answer this question through Shuttleworth fellow Chris Hartgerink's plan to Liberate Science
Last week: I get real about the jobs I tried to get in my transition to alt-ac and Post-PhD. Let's talk about the jobs I tried to get, how little I was paid, ad what I learned from that experience.

With the loss of an academic career, that is, my singular and obsessive focus for eight years of my twenties, I was adrift. In job interview after job interview, I was told that I had too much experience, or that they were worried I’d get bored in the position. It boggled my mind. Why would a company not want a Ph.D., who had been drilled to take orders without questioning them, to work extraordinarily hard for very little, who could think quickly on their feet to problem solve? I was a bargain, I’d figured. I’d come in at an entry-level position, replete with an entry-level salary, and work my ass off. I didn’t know any other way. 

While I wrote in the last post, “On Leaving Academia and Failing (over and over)” about what came from all those job applications (nothing), I still managed to make ends meet. Steadily, I began to get copy editing and business writing gigs I appreciated the challenge of writing in a new way, but I still didn’t feel intellectually satisfied. I missed teaching and I missed writing, but most of all, I think, I missed having a sense of greater purpose.

You don’t go into academia, survive the hellish process of getting your PhD because you are content with simple things. And just because academia has no use for professors anymore, that doesn’t mean PhDs who have left academia aren’t still looking for intellectual fulfillment. At first, I found this in learning the ins and outs of copywriting and marketing lingo. I actually learned a lot about writing and the audience through this process that I now use in my own writing. But still, I was a purebred greyhound trained to run laps around a track; I did not take to this new life of intellectual leisure well. 

But, I was determined to re-write my life and who I was beyond academia. I knew the dangers of hanging on like a barnacle to higher education; that’s a path that leads to only more bitterness and, if you’re lucky, miserable pay for more intellectual exploitation. I was determined to not miss academia as it were (for those of you in a similar nostalgic haze, I cannot recommend Amy Gentry’s thriller novel Bad Habits enough for a nice shot in the arm of the reality of academia). 

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For me, that meant pursuing a career utilizing my only two marketable skills: writing and teaching. I now realize that beginning in graduate school, I had already begun to visualize how I would conduct my classes, what I would teach, and how I would teach it. From that first moment, I was committed to celebrating Black voices and art, and committed to postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak’s conception of uniting praxis with practice. Which is to say, in academia I had been dedicated to dismantling the white canon of history and art by arguing for the inclusion of contemporary female artists whose work dealt with legacies of colonialism, trauma, and activism. That was my praxis as it were, and my practice of living up to this idealism in the real world was through becoming a high school English teacher in an urban high school. 

So, I decided to throw my intellectual weight toward becoming the very best possible high school teacher I could be. I went from art history to high school teacher and realized that the intellectual problem that desperately needed some solutions was how to increase literacy and writing skills in sulky teens. This project had teeth to it, and what I embarked on ended up being far more difficult than reading postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (and if you’ve read here, you know exactly what I’m talking about). However, it was Spivak’s conception of uniting praxis and practice that led me down the road of a high school teacher in the first place. While I found this notion through Spivak, it is also one taken up by bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress. Hooks writes about the limiting designations many academics give “feminist theory,” noting that theory that can only be read by a handful of academics, effectively “undermines and subverts feminist movements” where there is a “gap between theory and practice.”  As hooks attest, 

“When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two-- that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other.” (61)

All of this to say, I think this is some solid advice, to think about how you can, as a scholar beyond the academe, continue to embody the principles and methods you honed in academia out here, in the real world, where we desperately need such intellectual rigor applied to real-world problems. Just sayin’

P.S. Apparently my blog has been listed as one of the Top 80 Activist Blogs on the web from Feedspot, which makes me feel quite fancy.

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For more about leaving academia, check out some related posts below!