So this is interesting.
As a person who wouldn’t use that particular word to describe my own experiences, as much as I respect it, I want to instead of ranting about how people act offer an anecdote. The two days before my birthday were the Global Game Jam. Our faculty were a little busy, so I ended up being there the entire time, awake the entire time other than a few times that I blinked out for a minute or two. I was awake for 56 hours straight.
During that time, I was working on my book revisions. I was also discussing some of the elements of my book with the jammers, mostly the ones who were my former students. These interactions made a few things really clear to me about work and creating what I guess we’d call theory (I feel like people force that word out of need, like it’s the badge– people try to make me turn all of my work into it, even the stuff that is clearly praxis, but I digress). Things I noticed after 40 hours without sleep:
- We should be talking to our students about our writing, not to our peers. My students were straight with me about what made sense and what didn’t, and unlike the last several sets of comments I’ve gotten from peer scholars, my students didn’t subject me to their desires for me to have written about something else. They spoke frankly and helpfully about the actual topics.
- When our censors go down, we can engage in better professionalization. My students asked me about writing a book, about doing research, etc. and because it didn’t feel as formal as a teaching moment, I was honest with them.
- Taking inspiration from the spirit of a process like game jam– working fast, trying to innovate– you can transform a manuscript.
As I think about the book I’ve written, I’m proud of it, I think, but I’m stunned by how slow the process of getting it out has been. It’s been 6 years since I did the research that the book is written about. Luckily World of Warcraft is still around, but a number of people will balk at some of the content of the research because it’s dated.
we better as academics think carefully about how we want to treat time. Unless there’s a hybrid beast that can research with breakneck speeds, trying to hold someone to the standard of utilizing things written in the last 2 or 3 years to make an argument isn’t going to work when articles can take as long as 18 months to be reviewed by editors. What we stand a real chance of creating are academic liars, people who do a research project and then, once they’ve written up all the results, try to figure out how to link that work to the most recent articles when, in reality, the most recent articles couldn’t have possibly influenced research that happened before they were published.
I hope one day someone will find my work valuable enough to cite, but by the time a book that could possibly cite my book could be published by the current standards, my research will be almost 15 years old.
I know that’s just reality, and I don’t mean to seem ungrateful. I’m overjoyed to have a book contract and to be nearly done with revisions. Just after being awake for two days straight, it seemed to me like it was all a bit foolish, that so much of my career might depend on whether or not people find my now aging research important enough to finally let it see print. It seems like we could do this better, somehow. It seems like a badly balanced game.