Posted on by leahjunck

On academic detachment and relational research

A few months ago, I started a postdoctoral position at the University of Cape Town. Becoming part of an environment of active and supportive(!) scholarly exchange made me realise how much I had conditioned myself to work independently so far in my still rather pubescent academic life. While that is not a bad thing per se, I firmly believe that research is inherently relational. It is a form of knowledge production that requires a stimulus beyond stoically practicing data collection and writing in the ways we have learnt to be academically sound.

I have technically been working ‘from home’ for quite some years now. Doing my Masters by dissertation meant that I was only on campus for departmental seminars and irregular meetings with my thesis supervisor. This was after I had done a six-week qualitative research project on refugees in Cape Town and practices of dreaming for my Honours degree, which had given me an appetite for more in-depth research. I missed being part of academic life during my Masters but was really excited to conduct my first long-term ethnographic fieldwork. It allowed me the time and space to immerse myself in a topic for much longer – this time doing research on suburban neighbourhood surveillance groups. I would get a degree for spending my time observing, interviewing and writing – I was thrilled! And it really was a great experience at the time, even if not without ups and downs. I established my routines and enjoyed being able to do so without being impeded by class schedules and other academic obligations.

After embracing my degree certificate for my work, which, thankfully, had not felt torturously laborious for the most part, I worked for a health research organisation for three years remotely. Even though the topics I got to research interested me, my junior status and the fact that the project I was hired to work on did not materialise had me working on bits and pieces of other peoples’ projects. There was therefore no substantial, stimulating exchange with colleagues beyond brief Skype updates. When the situation did not change and funding became even more limited, I pursued my PhD on Tinder dating – another opportunity to spend A LOT of time talking to people about a topic that fascinates me.

I have always embraced a sense of independence. As a younger girl, I envisioned myself growing into a journalist when older, travelling around the world, covering all kinds of exciting topics. The anthropologist I grew to embody instead has roamed the world much less than I would have liked – mostly for funding reasons. I have, however, still managed to go out and explore the very themes I felt strongly about. It has taken a moment, but I feel like I’m getting closer to positioning myself in academia and thinking of myself as a ‘digital anthropologist’ – whatever that may actually mean. Especially through writing many an application in search for a postdoc, summarising my interests concisely over and over helped with that.

Having my first ‘proper’ (as in, fully paid) position pursuing my own research interests and now being part of a lively even if still remotely operating academic environment makes me feel the last years of academic detachment. Particularly so after the past 1.5 years of COVID-19-enforced remoteness. I am hungry for fieldwork and even more hungry for exchanging ideas with other scholars. Scholars, that is, who harbour a collaborative rather than a competitive sentiment – something that is not to be taken for granted.

I got a strong sense of what a collaborative spirit can do when attending my first hybrid workshop on UCT campus the other day. The big screen was not working and the five of us who were present in person were all still looking at our respective computer screens with our facial expressions hidden behind masks. And still, it was a very different feeling from following the same meeting from my kitchen table. The workshop went on for more than three hours, but I felt enlivened by the mere physical proximity of colleagues with whom I could exchange thoughts on our projects located within the same research cluster. It may have been the combination of the ability to share our progress and insecurities within this space, working on a similar research topic and having been deprived of unmediated support for a long time that made for this animating effect.

For me, the takeaway from these experiences is to, yes, embrace the autonomy research allows me when it comes to going to a certain field and approaching a topic in an exploratory manner – even though this autonomy in always also impeded by funding, institutional expectations and the pressures to fit moulds in academia. And the way things have panned out for me also cautions me to value not just my relations to the people I work with when conducting research but also academic environments that offer me space to develop frameworks to think with. Even if it is sometimes hard to admit, at the end of the day, none of it can be done alone.

Posted on by leahjunck · 2 Comments

Post-submission question marks

Question mark made of puzzle pieces | A big question mark ma… | Flickr

A few months ago, and upon submitting my PhD thesis in anthropology, I started hunting for jobs. More accurately, I took a breather before I actually sat down in front of my laptop again with that intention. Letting go of my thesis before taking that step had been an entire process in itself. It meant breaking up with an entire period of being engulfed in writing, living and breathing my subject.

Finding work is not an easy task in these times, as anyone might be able to imagine. Even without Corona – how does one figure out what to do after their postgraduate degree? What am I actually qualified to do and what is it that I want to do? I found myself staring at my screen that was, for the first time in months, not cluttered with open taps and documents, and watched the cursor hovering over an open Google page. It quickly became clear that it was crucial to finally grapple with these questions in order to figure out which platforms would be useful. One may think that I had had plenty of time to figure this out. I’m in my early 30s and have studied in my field for quite some time now. There is often the assumption that starting a postdoc is a decision to commit to academia – for better or worse, until… but does it have to be? – I asked myself. Especially at this juncture, I was harbouring ambiguous feelings about academia, its brand of competitiveness and politics of knowledge production. If ever the was a time to question the assumption of academia and I being an item, it was now. I also had to ponder whether I would be staying on in South Africa. I have been here for 10 years, but am still on a study visa, which makes it difficult to find work. And if I decided to go elsewhere, where would that be, and would my partner be able to find work there?

So what might I do outside of academia? This is by no means an obvious question to answer. Throughout my studies, I remember being repeatedly told that you can do ‘pretty much anything’ with an anthropology degree. This means that anthropologists could be desirable in all kinds of projects that involve a qualitative evaluation of human behaviour in a certain context. But what exactly are these and how do I find them? My previous work in research had sort of just ‘happened’ after replying to an email circulated at the department. Admittedly, I felt a little lost and left alone, especially given the lockdown situation and with campus and its career facilities not being physically accessible. And for an email, my questions seemed too broad and yet too discipline-specific to be directed that way.

After a lot of unfocused googling for keywords like ‘anthropology jobs’ and ‘researcher’, I gravitated towards looking at postdoc positions. At least they would answer the ‘where’ question for me. Also, I love doing extended fieldwork and enjoy analysing and writing. So it could not be that wrong of a choice, I mused. Besides, how sure is anyone ever about what they really want? There seem to be many and, at the same time, very few choices online. Or few that are a good fit and that may be an actual possibility with ongoing global immobilities. Currently, I am still in the process of combing the internet with this somewhat narrower approach but am much more enthusiastic about it. I will keep you in the loop about how it goes.