Hail the Gatekeeper

Janus was the Roman god of transition. It's a strange thing to have a god for, at first glance. But anyone who's studied anthropology will recognize why he's needed. Any beginning or ending, any movement from one state to another, is fraught.

We've arrived at the annual moment where our culture recognizes this. And for me in particular, the transition into a new year, with its accompanying look back at 2013 and expression of hope for 2014, is an especially rich story of beginnings and endings.

I'm spending this last day of 2013 interviewing the 84th subject for my research into the prayer shawl ministry, and reviewing and tagging a transcript from one of my earlier interviews. It's hard to remember that eight months ago I had yet to do a single interview. I was nervously anticipating the inauguration of this new project, looking back with some regret at the phase of textual research -- a process I know how to do! -- that I was leaving behind for uncharted waters. One of the most unexpected rewards of this research has been learning that I am good at these qualitative interviews, and that when I'm doing them I am a better person -- a more empathetic person, a better listener, a more attentive and responsive dialogue partner. Another surprise: Just when I'm most concerned about how much I'm asking of those kind enough to agree to an interview, they tell me how much I've given to them, by prompting them to think, by valuing what they say and do, by opening a space for them to speak.

Now the trepidation moves to 2014, when I have to leave the data-gathering phase behind and produce the written analysis. I am optimistic, but still, the unknowns of the process are daunting.

In 2013, I started leaving behind the world of pop culture criticism that I have pursued, in some form or another, since college. I hit my high point in terms of audience and influence in the process of that exit, with my reviews of the last season of Breaking Bad for the A.V. Club. In 2014 I'll review the last 11 episodes of How I Met Your Mother and write an overview of the series for the A.V. Club's 100 Episodes feature. And then I'll be done.

I'm looking forward to exiting that grind and focusing on the grinds that are more directly related to my academic goals as a teacher and scholar. But I'll miss the push to reflect critically and to appreciate expansively. I'll miss the readers and the community of TV critics.

It's almost hard to remember how I fit it in, but the other thing I did last summer was compile a massive four-volume application for promotion to full professor. That rank represents the top of my profession. As of this moment the application has successfully wended its way through two committees and two administrative reviews, and awaits action in 2014 by the provost and the board of trustees. I expect to remove the "associate" from my title this spring, just in time to also remove the "dean."

I'll never get used to this process of looking back and forward. When I turn my gaze to the things already done or set in motion, I can't believe I found the time and energy. When I imagine what current efforts will look like when complete, I can't picture myself as the source and the agent. It's a pleasant shock, though, to glance back and be flummoxed by what you managed to accomplish, and to peek forward and get all excited about what it will feel like to glance back this time in 2014. I hope all of you are having similar feelings on this day -- Janus's Day Eve.

No retreat, no surrender

Now it can be told. The new publishing venture that I mentioned in my last infrequent update, the one that Noel is helping to launch (and his first salaried, non-freelance job in decades) is The Dissolve, a new film site from Pitchfork Media. Right now they're just a placeholder site, a Tumblr, and a Twitter account, but the first real content will hit the streets next month. (And notice how cleverly I titled that last post, before the name of the site had officially been announced.)

Noel is energized and feeling creative, both doing administrative thinking like mapping out how the DVD reviews will be assigned and scheduled, and writing essays and reviews that will start appearing when the site goes live. It's a terrific place for him to be in his early forties: starting a new venture that builds on all the experience and expertise he's developed in the past twenty-odd years of critical writing.

And me? Well, I'm almost as happy as he is. Happier, maybe. I set out with some trepidation on my first research trip last month, to Hartford, Connecticut. This was the acid test. Could I find prayer shawl knitters to talk to? Would they want to talk to me, if I found them? Would my questions elicit the kinds of information I needed to know? I was elated by the result. I talked to 15 people in 8 interviews over the course of 6 full days in Hartford -- mostly in the surrounding area: Windsor, South Windsor, Farmington, Stafford Springs, Vernon. They were generous with their time and with their organizational energy, helping me get in touch with other members of their groups. And they seemed to appreciate the questions I asked, both the prosaic ones that allowed them to explain how their ministries worked, and the more unusual ones that asked them to reflect on what it means. I came home with about eleven and a half hours of interview recordings. And with some new ideas, too, about what themes might be present in this subject matter and in these women's experience that I hadn't hypothesized. That's how qualitative research is supposed to work; you continually reshape your hypothesis and redirect your investigation based on what you find as you explore. How relieved I am to find that it's happening here!

In a couple of weeks I head to Seattle for my second research trip, and my calendar for the six full days I'm there is already chock full of interviews. I'm trying to push myself to make maximum use of my time in the field, but I know now from experience that doing these interviews is hard work. I was glad in Hartford for some downtime, an empty morning or afternoon here and there (my evenings were almost all taken), to be alone and rest from the effort of connecting with other human beings. I was glad for flexibility in my driving schedule, so I could head out early if need be to avoid rush hour traffic and the frequent heavy rain that blanketed Connecticut while I was there. Knowing I was not so tightly scheduled was important for my peace of mind.

I've also used my freedom while on sabbatical to think about my mid-life crisis, to examine my reactions to this research activity and to being free of administrative duties, and have some preliminary thoughts about what I want the rest of my academic career to look like. Just preliminary; every time I follow them too far down the road to prospective action I get cold feet. But I'm remembering what led me into this life in the first place, and what fed my fire in those early years. I'm different now, but it's still useful to ask the question of what I would most regret not accomplishing twenty years in the future, based on what I wanted to do when I started out and what I've found that I have to offer along the way.

More to come, of course. Meanwhile. bookmark The Dissolve, and if you're in the Seattle area, let me know so we can cross paths while I'm there.

Taking a break

It's spring break. More accurately, it's the last day of spring break. And it's been a fantastic experience. Every day I've been in the office, mostly all alone (on two days, two different co-workers were also present). Spring break is like a harbinger of summer, with its empty campus and long stretches of unallocated time.

And then the end of the semester rushes back, and it's five weeks of utter chaos before summer actually starts. Usually I think of that chaos as the last gasp of activity before a more leisurely pace for three months. But this year is different.

I applied for and received a sabbatical for the upcoming summer. Most sabbaticals are given for fall or spring semesters, because most faculty don't have regular duties in the summer for which they would need official release. But administrators, like me, can only be granted a sabbatical for the summer, because their administrative functions would (presumably) be more difficult to replace or reassign than the teaching duties of faculty in a normal semester.

This is the first sabbatical I've ever applied for. I'm in my twelfth year of teaching. Prior to a few years ago, when I considered a sabbatical, I didn't have a major project that warranted a request. But now I do -- a book about the theology of prayer shawl ministries, under contract and due next spring.

And the university and the publishing company aren't the only institutions expecting results from my summer off. I have a grant covering some of the travel I need to do for my research and even a course release to give me more time to write this fall. There are another couple of grants still in the pipeline, at least one of which I'm quite hopeful will be funded.

So my sabbatical will be far from relaxing. On the contrary, I'm hoping to travel fully a third of the time. But I'm still looking forward to it as a period of much-needed rest. While I'm not in active crisis like I was a few months ago, I'm still experiencing burnout in my job. I'm still feeling dread about the approaching pressure to step up in administration, and still wondering whether I should instead step aside.

If anything, although my emotional state about it all is more stable, the conditions at work have become harder for me to treat with equanimity. Not that anything overt is wrong, but that the ever-elusive promise of stability and order continues to slip farther and farther into fantasy. I crave work in which I control the pace and the outcome. For scholars, that's research. I'm well aware that it's asking far too much; few human beings ever have the chance of experiencing such control. But those of us in academia usually have some taste of it, and when they're not teaching, faculty typically set aside periods  for it. Right now, that kind of life seems mighty appealing.

So I'm looking forward to throwing myself into research and writing almost full-time for the rest of 2013. It's a test, of sorts, to see whether I get it out of my system and emerge ready to take up the administrative mantle again, or whether I find myself unable to contemplate a life without ample time for scholarly immersion. or something in between.

And when it's over, if all goes as I think it should, my application to be promoted to full professor will be nearing approval. I know my boss will be looking forward to the end of next year as a return to full strength for the department, with sabbaticals for me and another faculty member behind us. But I've long anticipated that moment of promotion as permission to look around and see what other opportunities exist. It's hard to contemplate changing jobs, moving my family, any of those massive disruptions. And I'm not planning on it. But after the freedom to work on my own behalf, on my own project, comes the freedom to see whether that work (and my other experience) can bear more fruit elsewhere than it can here.

The next big thing

I've been going non-stop ever since I got to The Annual Meetings Hosted by AAR & SBL (their official tightrope walking title between the former "joint meetings" model and the less-integrated "concurrent meetings" model). My meetings started only an hour or so after I checked in, and didn't stop except for sleep and an early-morning workout until 2:30 pm today. Even my meals were meetings; an egg salad sandwich I wolfed down before my last two meetings today was the first food I'd eaten since arriving that wasn't connected with some work that needed to be done or some people I needed to meet with.

But I've finally reached the point where I have some breathing room. And with time to stop and reflect, I can recognize how much all that activity has accomplished. On the recommendation of the finance committee, which I chair, the board of directors voted to move forward with a socially responsible investing program. I presented my research on the annual meeting program, for only the second time in a competitive format (I've been on the program on other occasions as an invited participant). And the positive notices for that research presentation included interest from a publisher.

At this point in my career, I'm thinking a lot about what I want to do with the next few years. Because I'm on an administrative track, I can't sustain a research program indefinitely; administrative duties will take over that work time if I continue to move in that direction. So the research that I'm doing now is probably my last chance to make a scholarly contribution to my field in a sustained way.

If an agreement with a publisher comes about, if this research is validated in that way, then I will be making a plan to bring it off and put it to bed. Even though I'm at the beginning stages of the research now, and have much to learn to be able to accomplish what needs to be done, I'm thinking about it in terms of an end. Imagining the final deliverable as a book manuscript means that there would be a last chapter and a concluded process.

That would be fitting and satisfying. I'm surprised that I'm possibly on that path already; I've been proceeding with the thought that I'd need to get farther before searching for publishing partners. But that's troubling in the career sense, because I don't want this project to grow without guidance and possibly spiral unproductively -- or to succumb to the kind of perfectionism I see in my students sometimes, where if you don't finish things because they're never good enough to satisfy you, you never have to face anyone's judgment, including your own. You can pretend forever that it will be great once it's done. I've never been that way; it's why I've been able to get a lot accomplished in my career so far. I don't want to start now.

R.I.P. Richard Rutt

Last year, as I embarked on the beginnings of a multiyear and multistage project on theology and handwork, I read the only comprehensive history of knitting to be published in English in the last fifty years.  The author of this indispensable work, A History of Hand Knitting, was Richard Rutt.  It was clear from his extraordinarily winning book that he was an amateur historian, with very definite opinions and biases on controversial topics in the field, and also that he was a charming Englishman with a passion for his subject and plenty of energy for research.

On August 3, Rutt died in the UK at the age of 86.  Reading through some of the obituaries and remembrances posted after his death, I find what an interesting and multifaceted man he was.  As an Anglican priest, he rose to the rank of Bishop of Leicester after serving almost 20 years as a missionary in South Korea.  In 1994 he switched allegiance to the Catholic church, was ordained as a priest therein (although he remained married), and was made an honorary prelate (with the title of monsignor) in 2009.  The impetus for his conversion to Catholicism was not opposition to female priests or other liberalisms, as with more recent Anglican defections, but dissatisfaction with moves to bring other Protestant groups into full communion with the Church of England.

The bulk of his published works related to Chinese language translation and Korean studies, some of which were groundbreaking.  Knitters valued him for his singular History, however, as well as for a few patterns published in English magazines.  He was known for knitting his own vestments, bishop's miter, and sacramental textiles.  At the time of his death he was the president of the Knitting and Crochet Guild, a national organization that publishes the journal SlipKnot.


Rutt's book was one of the first pieces of my serious research into craft history, and produced a wealth of notes that will form a strand in my work going forward.  Rest in piece, Monsignor Rutt.

How do we find out?

For the next stage of my research project, I'm reading about qualitative research methods.  There's something very common-sense about the notion that we can't find out anything about the process of meaning-making and interpretation except by participating, observing, and flexibly adapting one's investigation as the picture emerges.

But the literature on this methodology reveals why it must be carefully justified.  The human being is both the object of study (in other words, the objects are in themselves subjects) and the tool being used in the study (the researcher is also a human being).  This confuses the careful delineation of object, observer, and instrument that might be considered basic to the scientific method.

What's clear, though, is that the inquirer's self-insertion into the process of inquiry is the only way to discover previously unseen aspects of the problem at hand.  Some questions about human experience can't be completely specified before observation begins.  Instead, the shape of the question and answer alike emerge as the investigation proceeds.

One way to think about this process would be as the uncovering of the unarticulated or as-yet unformed meanings.  Many qualitative researchers are hoping to find out what their subjects don't fully know -- the structures that underlie their conscious meanings.  That's certainly true of my project.  It's not that I want to put myself in a superior position to my subjects; it's that I want to have a broader view based on seeing them in all their variation and similarity, and a deeper view based on a dual role as participant and observer.

To me, there is nothing more powerful in scholarship than bringing what is implicit -- present as a structure for thinking, but unthought in itself -- into full view.  Being able to think through something that before simply limited or channelled thought is the most powerful consequence of being educated.  If we're lucky, we get this training and practice at the same time we get the more common form of education, which is turning what starts as explicit into an implicit way of being.  This is what happens in disciplinary training, as we take structures that are presented as fully conscious chunks of content and process, and transform them by constant use into a set of lenses through which the world appears shaped already into disciplinarily-convenient forms and categories.

When the two forms of learning -- implicit to explicit, and explicit to implicit -- inform each other in a single inquiry, we are in the most profound realm of interdisciplinarity. That's what I'm hoping to emphasize in my project, although I've thought less about the latter, discipline-specific contribution.  Now that the chiasmus is formulated, though, perhaps an appreciation of that side will emerge more clearly.

One more time

At the beginning of the summer, I carved out two mornings a week to work on long-term projects.  I didn't go to the office on those mornings -- instead, I went to a coffee shop.  And it's been a successful strategy.  Since mid-May when I started this practice, I've read and taken notes on twenty books and dissertations.  On alternate days, I constructed a new course and participated in my students' summer assignments.  Last week, at what I thought was my last opportunity to spend a morning at Starbucks, I wrapped up my summer by mapping out the next 18 months of the research project.

It turns out I have one more chance.  Classes start on Thursday, and normally the days prior are packed with meetings and preparation.  But tomorrow my calendar is pristine.  Not a single appointment, not a single meeting besmirches its emptiness.  The message seemed clear: I could take one more of those research mornings.  The summer gave me a bonus.

I'm actually a little at sea.  What should I read?  What should I write?  Having tied up the loose ends already, I don't know if I should reopen the project or unpack any new cans of worms.  But I've always been of the opinion that any given segment of a multi-stage effort isn't ready to be put on the shelf marked "done" unless you've gotten a running start at the next stage.  So tomorrow I'd like to construct a draft outline for the first paper I want to write from this research.  If I can generate momentum toward the next step, I'll be able to put the project aside until time permits more work on it.  Even if my bonus half-day doesn't result in a solid start on a publication, though, I can look back at 2010 as my most productive summer of scholarship ever.  And I can look forward to my two mornings a week out of the office in summer 2011.

Productivity

I entered this summer determined to set aside time for personal goals.  There was a new class I was excited about preparing for, a new research project I wanted to kick start, and a lot of crafting in my queue -- including learning a new skill.

As summer draws to a close, I'm impressed by how much I've accomplished, but also aware of how far I have to go to accomplish those goals.  The research project is well underway, and I have a better idea of what kind of products might result, but it's also clear to me how large it is and how many facets there are, including a related and larger effort that might end up being something that occupies me for years.  The class has taken shape, but I can see that it's only a pilot.  A course of this complexity and about a topic rarely explored in academia will take a few years to get right.

What I've most enjoyed is spending dedicated time on these efforts.  And it's great to see some concrete products, like the knitting and crochet I've been cranking out, as well as the course syllabus, the stack of research notes, and the books read.  I wish I could keep on spending several hours a week on my research, but maybe it's possible to carve out a couple, while treating the time I spend on my course as development efforts for its future.  I know I'm lucky to have the chance to devote work time to projects I'm passionate about, and as my schedule becomes orders of magnitude more crowded with the start of the semester, I'll try to remember that -- and not completely lose the momentum.

Presenting solutions

And now for the final chapter in the saga of my students and their research into parking and transportation at my university. You may recall from the four previous installments how we chose the project of researching and proposing changes to UCA's parking, shuttle, and pedestrian culture, where we went to find answers, what guided our communication efforts.

Today one prong of that strategy came to fruition, as three students from the class joined me in presenting hard copies of the fifty-page report to the university president and the vice president for finance and administration. A PDF went to a slightly wider distribution list, with an invitation to share it wherever it might be useful.

And the other prong is underway as well, with the hope that it will spring more fully back to life in the fall when students return to campus. UCA G.O.Y.A. is the name the students chose to brand their campaign. We knew we needed a logo, a name, a consistent identifier that would tie all the elements of the project together. But our brainstorming session to come up with a name sputtered for most of a class period. Everything we thought of seemed too limiting, confining the message to parking lots or cars, when we had recommendations on everything from shuttles to bikes to green space.

As we batted names back and forth, Jesse muttered, "Get off your asphalt." He meant it as a joke. But I gasped and the room went silent. That was it! We were saying that paving over more land wasn't the solution to UCA's parking and transportation problems. And it had an acronym -- not one that meant anything, necessarily, but one that you could pronounce: GOYA. Our most talented graphic designer got to work making a logo, our Facebook team started a fan page where all the links and info could be collected, and the brand was born.

Today UCA G.O.Y.A. became a movement that the administration took notice of. Its name, logo, and the names of its founding participants are on the report that we gave to the president and vice president. The story isn't over, but the task of organizing in such a way as to communicate and advocate is complete. You can learn more at facebook.com/UCAgoya, where the Executive Summary of our report is posted along with a few of the images and maps. We'd love to have you join us.

Interlibrary loan

I love interlibrary loan. I use it profligately, requesting articles and books in great piles when I'm doing research. The problem with that strategy is that the books tend to arrive all at once, and be due within a short time period a few weeks later.

But to tell you the truth, I kind of like that, too. Having to get the books read and the notes taken creates a kind of urgency. I have to organize the sources to get through them in the order in which they're due. I have to make time to work my way through them -- and that means setting aside time.

My time is Friday morning. I go to the coffee shop and spend three hours, if I can get there early enough, doing nothing but reading and notetaking. It's wonderfully extravagant to have that much time for books and ideas. But the luxury, the largesse of hours to dedicate to this task, is dependent on the urgency of deadlines. If I had the books indefinitely, would I ever get around to reading them? Isn't it the short-term loan of these items, the fact that their possibilities will only be available to be gleaned until a specified date, that makes them such a source of pleasure?

Like all indulgences, I feel guilty about this one. Yet as I spent the day with eighteen-year-olds entering the university, I realized how weird that must seem to non-academics. Feeling guilty about a half-day devoted to research? Maybe I'm through the looking glass. But you take your pleasures where you can find them, and I'll bet some of my colleagues will agree: nothing beats an empty calendar, a stack of books, and a citation organization system.

The limits of obsession

When I get on a roll, real life annoys me. I'd like to do whatever I am currently obsessed with doing with from morning until night. Moderation is not for me. If it's something I enjoy, I'm not interested in taking breaks. Right now there are three things I'd like to just keep doing until they are done. I'm working on a storage and decorating plan for our extensive collection of games; I've got loads of yarn I'd like to knit up; and I'm at the beginning of a couple of fascinating research projects.

But that way of working isn't compatible with family life. Kids won't let you take over their spaces for days to decorate. Parenting can't be put on hold for marathon knitting or research.

The summer comes with longish stretches of time during which my obsessive nature can express itself. I can take hours or days and just do one thing, because there are fewer tasks to get crammed into each day. No classes, fewer meetings, periods of time when people are on vacation and the office is empty. And I can start to think that I have a right to that organization of time and that one-thing-at-a-time, all-the-time lifestyle.

Home brings me back to reality. It's not worth thinking about huge redecorating projects until somebody could be persuaded to take the kids for two weeks. I can't pull all-nighters in the library or crank out a sweater in a weekend. So the things I want so much to do have to get done in bits and pieces. And to be frank, that's a good thing. Because the problem with that obsessive tendency is that it can be an excuse not to do anything at all on the grounds that you can't do everything you'd like. Better by far to tackle a minor reorganization of a room than a wholesale retrofit, since my visions for the latter are probably unrealistically grandiose Better to fit my knitting and my research around the other tasks for which I'm responsible, lest I fail to live up to what I imagine limitless time at those occupations would produce.

Waiting for the words

I've never subscribed to the notion of a muse. My approach to my work has been, well, workmanlike; it's not always easy, but when I need to produce, I grind it out. When I was writing my dissertation, I treated it like a job. By the time the day was done, I needed to have five pages done. And as a result, I produced the dissertation in about six months.

But it's clear to me that I need time for thinking built into my day if I'm going to make progress on my research, or on constructing a syllabus, or on a review, or nearly any other creative endeavor on my plate. My thinking time on most days consists of my walk to and from the office, about 10-15 minutes at a leisurely stroll, longer if I stop to get a beverage.

During the two mornings a week I'm spending off campus for intensive work, I've found myself more consciously taking time for thought. As I lift my eyes from book or computer, stare out the window, and try to formulate or follow an idea, I feel more like I'm waiting for inspiration than usual. In fact, I sometimes feel like a parody of an academic, surrounded by books, scratching my chin, gazing absent-mindedly into space.

It's not so much waiting, though, as processing. In no more than a few moments, I'm able to see clearly what the next step is, and decide whether it follows on the course I'm currently plotting, or need to make a note of the insight to be pursued later. Does that mean I'm more like a bricklayer than an artist?

Listening too long to one song

Today's post about gifts for the fashion-forward is at Toxophily.

I spent the morning off campus working through a long-term research project. It was a long-overdue chance to reconnect with something that many of us academics love -- reading books, making notes, building a conceptual framework around a topic, constructing an argument. When you spend your time in administration trying to build policies and procedures, you can forget about the other things you enjoy building.

It felt slightly silly to be at the coffee shop doing my research, because the only other person who was scheduled to be in the office today was a secretary. Surely I could have been just as productive in the empty office. But it turns out that letters we sent at the beginning of the week alerting our students to various levels of problems with their GPAs were received today, and the floodgates of calls and questions opened up. In the afternoon the phone barely stopped ringing. And the wisdom of my off-campus research retreat was revealed.