Blogging while Sessional: Self-Censorship or Bust

Abstract

When I think about blogging, my disciplinary training shows through, and I reach for genre in order to divine the rules. What is the genre of academic blogging as I see it? best illustration I can think of is Aimee Morrison's post on Hook and Eye titled The Personal is the Professional. In it, Morrison talks about the challenges of strictly delineating the two, especially in those moments when life proverbially happens. In its conclusion, Morrison rhetorically asks: What might happen if I bring a little bit of my personal life into my work, asserting my competence and my challenges all at once? Maybe incorporating the personal into the professional in this way might be a feminist act: I am a fully-fleshed-out human being, just like anyone, and a pretty good professor, at the same time. Shit happens, even to female professors, and so long as the challenge isn't fatal, I have the will and the capacity to get on with the shoveling. Maybe to get ahead [as] a woman, I might no longer have to pretend I'm not a real person. Hm. In a way, Morrison is pre-empting the conversation around women having it all, (1) while also offering an illustration of what academic blogging is all about, especially for Hook and Eye. It is about taking (carefully curated) tidbits of one's life, whether personal or academic, and inscribing them into the other. In her post, Morrison explodes the pre-supposed dialectic of the personal and the professional for academics' lives and in this way leads into the whole conversation of what you love (2) which controversially presumes personal affect imbricated with professional activity. However, the proposition here points to the need for academia to accept and even to enable the various personal aspects of womanhood, motherhood included, as a means of inclusion. What's the saying? It takes a village? In this way, academic blogging offers an avenue of thoughtful exploration in a genre that is less constricted and disciplined than peer-reviewed academic writing. It is so very seductive to think of blogging as enabling a discursive freedom otherwise unavailable to academics in the public sphere. Its reality, however, belies this idealism. We need look no further than the multitude of posts on Hook and Eye labeled from the Non-Tenured Stream, a category which could collect the majority of regular writers on Hook and Eye these days. operative euphemism in this case is curation or, more bluntly, self-censorship. If we did a search on this label here, or in other academic blogs, especially written by women who are precariously employed, we encounter countless variations on the topic of self-censorship, its necessity, the struggles it generates, the crises it gives rise to. Trapped between the desire to be outspoken, to exercise one's carefully honed critical skills on topics that are close to one's heart on the one hand, and the reality of precarious employment on the other, leads to many cryptic posts, which leave the blogger and her audience feeling like somewhat of a failure. Why a failure? Because maybe we're not that valuable scholars when we don't really have the guts to blow the whistle, to step up and expose the inequalities of academia, when our own meagre livelihoods are on the line. We suggest, we wink, we nudge, but we never spell things out like we do in our scholarly writings, in which we over-analyze our texts to death, if our first-year students are to be believed. That is the opposite of freedom, I think. In fact, it works to reinforce the precarity of our positions, by taking away one of the defining traits of being a scholar: academic freedom. In the absence of academic freedom, how academic is the precariat, anyway? Erin Wunker's many posts labeled from the Non-Tenured Stream illustrate the theme of self-censorship in poignant ways. Wunker first talks about it in a post that comes immediately on the heels of Morrison's, titled Being Frank Feels Risky: Notes from the Non-tenured Stream In it, Wunker talks of her reluctance to admit the exhaustion of a 3/3 academic load, garnished with research grants applications, and topped with the insidiousness of job insecurity that never leaves a sessional. …