Sunday, May 30, 2021

Boundaries and time off



Most people I know in academia work with their number one interest. What they want to spend their days on is to research and teach, write and read. If they received 10 million dollars in their bank account tomorrow, some would certainly do some things differently. But I think few of them would turn their back on academia and go lay down in a sun lounger. “It’s a way of life,” as Kristian Gerner, who retired ten years ago, usually says when appearing at a seminar or public lecture. 

In light of this, it’s no wonder that many academics find it difficult to set boundaries between work and life. They are attached to one another. Frequently socially as well. And your thoughts don’t necessarily change direction just because you close the door to your office. Sometimes, the best ideas materialize when you are going for a run or taking a shower. 

However, a consequence of all this is that many academics work most of the time. They check their email during the waking hours of the day. There are no clear boundaries between weekdays, evenings and weekends. Vacation becomes synonymous with undisturbed time writing and doing research. In the long run, this kind of lack of boundaries tends to be detrimental. 

As far as I am concerned, I have in recent weeks found it difficult to let go of my job. Ideas have been spinning around in my head but not always in particularly concrete terms. Gradually, I have also broken the boundaries I have chosen to live my life by. More and more evenings have been devoted to reading work stuff. I have also been unable to stop myself from checking my email on weekends. Sure, there are times when there is something important and semi-urgent in the inbox. But how does finding this out on a Saturday morning actually benefit me? I still can’t do anything about it as long as the children are awake. And knowing hardly makes me a better parent … 

There are obviously reasons why things now look like this. May is a frustrating month for anyone wanting to work eight hours a day for four or five days a week. In addition, there have also been some conferences and trips for me. Such things, at least for me, use up a lot of energy. I can manage to be social for three days in a row. But after that, I need some rest. And this is something my planning hasn’t really allowed me to do. 

What happens to me when things pile up is that I get worse at prioritizing what to do. Instead of dropping things, I get started on new ones. I attend an additional seminar. I agree to do something that someone else could have done. I spend less time planning my days and weeks. You certainly recognize this spiral. It’s easy to end up in but difficult to break. 

What I take with me to the next time May rolls around is that I really need to remember that this month doesn’t include as many working days as it seems. That is why it is important to set tough priorities and to have a plan with some air enabling time for recovery. This should not be done in May. This should be done earlier. At a time when your energy levels are higher. 

What I also take with me into the summer is a strong motivation to detox from work. This is a technique I have used in recent years, with some success. It is based on me during the first three to four weeks of my vacation not being allowed to read anything job-related or checking my job email. During summers when I go all in, I tend to combine this with a digital detox. This means a few weeks without the internet. During a couple of summers, I have also, in a fit of hubris, tried to quit drinking coffee. That didn’t really work out. 

But how do you know that a detox has been successful? My own benchmark is that I start to get bored. This is a feeling that at least I don’t associate with adult life. There have been times when I have been tired, worn out, stressed and sad – but I have very rarely been bored. After a few weeks of strict detox, however, this feeling tends to manifest itself. Not in large doses, but still. This is a sign that my recovery has begun in earnest.

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Sunday, May 23, 2021

CVs of failures



Academic successes are visible and desirable. Each time we apply for a position or grant, we attach our qualifications and lists of publications. Setbacks, on the other hand, are often invisible. No one is requesting these. Nor do they offer any likes or congratulations. But all academics know that setbacks are more common than successes. We all have long CVs of failures. 

In recent years, these alternative CVs have received increasing attention. In the Anglo-Saxon academic blogosphere, they have become somewhat of a mainstay during the 2010s. Many acclaimed scholars have decided to publicly showcase their illustrious failures: programs they were not accepted to, positions they didn’t get, applications and manuscripts that were rejected. Some of these CVs have gone viral. 

During this first spring of blogging, I also sought to give some insight into my failures and professional setbacks. One purpose has been to present life as an academic as it is and how it feels. This includes failure. I expect to continue doing so. Fail forward. 

As we all know, there is only one way of never failing. To not participate. Someone not applying for positions can never be ranked in the bottom. Someone not applying for research funding can never be rejected. Someone never submitting an article manuscript for review can never be humiliated and rejected. For most of us, however, this is not an option. Our futures as academics depend entirely on participating in the game. 

If we are to remain healthy in the meantime, we thus need to learn how to cope with failures. They can’t always come as a shock and trigger bitterness, depression and self-doubt. Not every time. Then it’s not worth it. If this is what being an academic feels like year after year, then there must be better things to do with your life. 

However, my experience from the competitive gaming world is that it is possible to learn to become a better, or rather more constructive, loser. At the moment of losing, of course, it’s hard to avoid these kinds of emotions. They are what they are. But we can choose to focus on the decision-making and working process, rather than on the outcome. Both in ups and downs. 

The art of losing is a learning process. As I see it, however, it shouldn’t just occur at an individual level. I’m sure that it is possible to develop workplace cultures and collegial contexts where failures are managed in a good way. Where they are visible and valued. Yes, even in demand. 

Some of my strongest experiences from this field originate in teaching contexts. Here, I have experienced times when one of the strongest individuals in the group of students has proved to be imperfect. They have stated quite plainly that a text has been difficult and hard to read or that they don’t follow a line of reasoning. When this happens, it can be incredibly liberating for a group. The behaviors of these students show that coming up short is not dangerous. It is an essential part of all forms of significant learning processes. Conversations in such groups can be far-reaching. 

Whether all academics should prepare a CV of their failures is not really for me to say. But surely it would be an exciting seminar exercise to do together? “Attach your biggest failures and the most hurtful comments you have received. No more than two pages.” I think many departments would benefit greatly from this.

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Sunday, May 16, 2021

Writer's courage




The third chapter of the book is now starting to take shape. I have written ten pages and I have a clear idea as to what to write in the remaining pages. The first ten pages, however, were anything but easy to write. In fact, they turned out to require an unusual amount of courage. At the beginning of the writing process, I experienced feelings of doubt. Who was I to write this? Could I present support for my interpretations? Were the arguments I wanted to highlight reasonable? 

To refresh your memory, chapter 3 concerns the prehistory of the major breakthrough of environmental issues in Sweden in the fall of 1967. The chapter begins in the late 1940s. At this time, a new understanding was established with regard to how humanity, nature, the world and the future related to each other. The very term environment was given a new meaning. Previously, this term had designated external circumstances affecting people. Now, on the may other hand, it started to be used to indicate how human activities were transforming the world. Humankind was seen as a force of nature and as a danger to itself. 

How this change in terms of the history of ideas, concepts and science transpired and its consequences are the focus of Paul Warde, Libby Robin and Sverker Sörlin’s The Environment: A History of the Idea (2018). This book was published last fall but emerged over a long period of time. Parts have been published in the form of journal articles and book chapters that have been very important to me. They have shaped the way I approach my subject. These three authors are among the most prominent academics globally in my field. It should here be added that not only Sverker Sörlin but also Paul Warde read Swedish. 

It is difficult to write about – and hopefully also for – people whose research and ideas you greatly respect. For me, it initially had a paralyzing effect. I was unable to jot down any words at all. My writing units resulted in absolutely zilch. I was, however, able to talk about what I wanted to write. Basically an entire working day was spent on discussing my thoughts with some of my colleagues: Martin Ericsson, Malin Arvidsson, Lars Edgren, Svante Norrhem. Nevertheless, I was unable to write anything. The breakthrough only came at night when I talked the whole thing through with my wife. She asked the right questions, listened to what I said, confirmed and challenged my ideas. The next day, I completed four units and when I was done, I had a couple of pages of text. 

This approach is not altogether uncommon for me. Many academics think by writing. So do I to some extent. But above all, I think by engaging in conversations. That is where I try out and develop my ideas. I suspect that this may be quite tiring for the people around me. In my defense, however, I also truly enjoy discussing other people’s problems and ideas. Be that as it may, there is a time and place for everything. I’m not the best person in the world when it comes to sensing this. 

The relationship between conversations, free-roaming thoughts and actual writing is rarely discussed in the literature on academic writing. One exception, however, is sociologist Howard S. Becker’s classic Writing for Social Scientists (1986). Here, he describes how many of his books begin by him lecturing and talking to his students about different issues. In other words, Becker uses his teaching as part of the writing process. In fact, Writing for Social Scientists emerged from writing courses he organized for young academics. It even contains a chapter written by a previous participant. 

Becker’s book deserves a blog post of its own, but that will have to wait. The spring semester is about to end and there are not all that many posts left until the blog goes on vacation. During summers, you should obviously take time off and read entirely different things from what you read during semesters (or not read at all!). But then August comes around and thoughts about the fall start to enter your mind. Read or reread Writing for Social Scientists. You won’t regret it.

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Sunday, May 9, 2021

Co-writing: Part 2




Academic writing requires courage. Not least when doing so in collaboration with others. An aspect of co-writing is that it involves another academic reading your texts in an unfinished – sometimes extremely raw – condition. There will be awkward sentences, unfinished thoughts, less than fluent English and incoherent text segments. The kind of stuff most academics wouldn’t want to show anyone. In this respect, most joint writing projects occur in constellations characterized by a great level of trust. The project undertaken by Isak Hammar and myself, which I wrote about in the first part of this series of blog posts, was one such constellation. 

The second co-writing project I want to discuss was of a slightly different nature. This was a collaboration with sustainability researcher Anna Kaijser. At the time, we didn’t know each other all that well. We had gotten to know each other during a PhD course in 2012 and had since interacted sporadically. In the spring of 2015, we ran into each other by chance at an informal lunch with Norwegian STS-scholar and environmental historian Kristin Asdal

During this lunch, we discovered that our postdoc ideas clearly had some things in common. Anna was interested in Scandinavian environmental youth organizations. I was interested in the emergence of modern environmentalism during the years around 1970. Anna suggested that we should write something together. Why not adopt a historical perspective on an environmental youth organization? Perhaps Nature and Youth Sweden (Fältbiologerna), which she had been involved in when she was young? 

To ensure that this idea would actually materialize, we decided to schedule a project day before the end of the semester. The plan was that we would discuss our ideas but also start to familiarize ourselves with a possible empirical material. We decided to order some twenty volumes of the magazine Fältbiologen from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. We booked a room at the University Library in Lund and started reading. We relatively quickly started to find interesting things. 

In particular, our attention was caught by the young activist Erik Isakson. He was all over the place in the material. In the 1960s, he climbed trees and led a series of adventurous expeditions. Toward the end of the decade, he became an editor and took an active part in the environmental debate. Then he vanished. A few years into the 1970s, he made a comeback. It turned out that he had accepted the consequences of his critique of civilization and moved to Greenland! 

Our plan was to study how Nature and Youth Sweden was affected by, and itself influenced, the Swedish ecological turn. Our hope was that Erik Isakson could serve as a common thread. That the larger process of change could be made visible through his life. After our day at the library, we scheduled a new meeting after the summer. The plan was that we would then draw up the guidelines for what our article might look like and where we should submit it. 

Our second project day was also carried out at the library. We then agreed upon a rough structure for the article and who should write what. The plan was to start in the present with the struggle in the Ojnare Forest on the island of Gotland going on at the time. Nature and Youth Sweden played a prominent role in this conflict. On the basis of this, we wanted to address questions on how environmental youth activism has developed historically. We also decided which texts to analyze in more detail and made copies of these. 

Some good things had also transpired between the two meetings. I had been given a two-year postdoc position in Lund and Anna the same kind of position in Linköping. Here, a large environmental humanities environment was taking shape. It came naturally for us to carry out our study within the framework of these two positions. That is why we didn’t find it necessary to apply for smaller project grants. We were ready to start working. At the same time, we had both planned quite a lot during the fall. As a result, the actual writing was postponed until the spring of 2016. We decided to focus on a historical journal and to write in English. We decided on Scandinavian Journal of History. 

Just like Isak Hammar, Anna had written her thesis in English. This made me feel more confident. It meant that my English could be straightened up by someone else. We also made it clear from the outset that we would adopt a more relaxed attitude vis-à-vis our text. Step one was to create an outline. Step two was to prepare a first draft. Only then had the time come to edit, tighten up the text and try to write more eloquently. This worked out well, not least as Anna had previous experiences of co-writing. 

Our text turned into a manuscript during the spring, but before we submitted it, we made sure that it was read by others. Here, we used our various networks to get perspectives from both the field of history as well as from environmental humanities. I was very pleased to travel to Linköping and present our text at their higher seminar. This was attended by senior academics such as Jonas Anshelm, Johan Hedrén and Björn-Ola Linnér. Academics whose texts I had carefully read but whom I had never met. 

After having incorporated comments from our readers, the time had come to submit our manuscript. Anna took care of this as I was about to go on parental leave. We got the text back in various stages and had to make quite a few changes. Among other things, the role of Erik Isakson was toned down and Ojnare Forest didn’t make it to the final version. We talked about our work on the phone, but Anna was responsible for the major revision efforts. I would once again like to stress the advantage of being two authors during the review process. It really makes it much easier not to take criticism personally and to come up with good solutions. 

Another stage where this form of dual authorship proved valuable concerned disseminating the text. I took Anna to the national history conference in Sundsvall and she invited me to the Science and Technology History days in Norrköping she was organizing. It was great presenting our research together and fun to better get to know each other’s acquaintances. 

By writing together, we became friends. Our joint project was never a major track for either of us. But it was a very meaningful, interesting and instructive project. The finished article, “Young Activists in Muddy Boots: Fältbiologerna and the Ecological Turn 1959–1974,” was finally published in the summer of 2018.

This is the second part in the blog-series "Co-writing". Read the first part here.

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Sunday, May 2, 2021

Time for a history conference!


Tomorrow, I’m traveling to Växjö along with some 400 other academics to participate in a national conference for Swedish historians. This national conference is organized every three years and serves as an important venue for various kinds of historians. If you’ve been in the field for a while, as I have by now, it serves as an opportunity to socialize with friends from all over the place and see what’s going on in the field. This has not always been the case. 

My first conference was in Lund in 2008. I had just been admitted as a PhD student, but had not yet started working. The only person I knew was Isak Hammar, who was in the same position. We mostly kept to ourselves, exchanged a few words with people we knew as teachers and supervisors and attended a few sessions to watch and learn. I didn’t take the initiative to talk to anyone by myself. 

Yet I felt special and chosen. I had become a PhD student! During my undergraduate years, I had been told that this was virtually impossible. A dream had come true. I would get paid for four years to work with history. I would have the opportunity to write a thesis. A book! For me, all of this was incredible. Socially, I had also received a new identity. When someone asked me what I was doing, I could now answer “PhD student in history.” The reactions I got from the people around me were quite different from “I study history.” 

My second conference was in Gothenburg in 2011. At this time, I was more at ease in my role as a PhD student. I was comfortable in my home department. It was large and there were many PhD students. Once at the conference, I spent time with the people I knew. Isak and I had scheduled a session in which we would present our thesis projects. It was slotted for 8 a.m. the day after the large conference dinner. The audience consisted of four PhD student friends from Lund, a retired journalist and someone who had entered the wrong room (who left as soon as we started talking). I really didn’t feel like one of the gang. 

The next conference was held in Stockholm in 2014. At this time, I had received my PhD, I had temporarily been assigned lecturer, received some attention and – as faithful blog readers may remember – become more humble. That spring, I was also on parental leave and socially cut off from the academy. Intellectually speaking, I felt like a vegetable. I was scheduled to participate in three sessions and was quite nervous about this. The result, however, was pretty good and I felt – perhaps for the first time in a conference setting– that I fit in. During my stroller walks, I had thought a lot about my career options. Perhaps I should become a teacher? But in Stockholm, it became clear that what I truly wanted to do was to try to become a historian. In any case, I had to give it a chance. 

A few months after the conference, Johan Östling called me. He told me that he was going to try to start up something called “history of knowledge” and asked if I wanted to be involved in preparing a major application. I had never encountered the term history of knowledge and found it a little vague. But I said yes without hesitation. This is something I have not regretted. 

My fourth conference was in Sundsvall in 2017. It was a busy conference. I organized two sessions, spoke at a third and was also involved in an infamous roundtable conversation. At this time, I had also started to look at conferences in a new way. In the past, I had mainly participated to gain intellectual impressions and learn new things. Now, I saw it more as an opportunity to get to know people. I had a list of people with whom I hoped I would have the opportunity to talk. Academics whose texts I had read and wanted to get to know better. I succeeded in doing this and I am glad that I had worked up the courage. 

The other thing I wanted to try in Sundsvall was to bring people together who I knew but who didn’t know each other. The two sessions I organized – one on the history of the perception of the future during the post-war period and one on the ecological turn around 1970 – were thus already successful by bringing the panel together. The audience that attended and the interaction that took place were nothing but a bonus feature. This is an area I truly don’t yet master, but I have at least gotten better at introducing people to each other. 

Perhaps one may sum up my experiences from Sundsvall as being the first time I “used” the conference media. I have greatly benefitted from what I learned from this conference in recent years and in a number of other contexts, not least international ones. Conferences are what you as a participant make of them. The ten to fifteen minutes when you present something represent a minor element. Their purpose is to facilitate interactions and conversations. It took me a long time to finally come to realize this. Almost a decade.

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