Sabbatical Month One
Currently I am at the gate of Toronto’s international airport waiting to board my flight back to Cincinnati. I spent my morning chatting about my adoration of Ursula Franklin with librarians at the University of Alberta, two days after I got on a microphone and did a very radical (for me, at least) keynote to open up the Access conference in Edmonton. In between I saw men lining up to fly out to Fort McMurray which is the epicenter of Canada’s oil and gas extraction, and I crossed what felt like endless points of surveillance to get back into my own country. In the line before US Customs and Border Patrol (something I feel like we don’t talk about enough is how the omnipotence of the US surveillance state asserts itself even in foreign airports), the woman in front of me was juggling two kids, one of whom was so tearful and she was handling them with such quietly frustrated stoicism that I secretly hoped this woman would somehow be on my next flight solely so I could buy her a shot of liquor. And this trip was the sixth I’ve taken in the last month – over the last several weeks my shamefully disgusting carbon footprint that I incurred, at the same time children half and sometimes even a third my age poured into the streets bearing witness to the horrors of climate change, has taken me to all five of the Great Lakes watersheds, Red River Gorge, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and Edmonton. Most of this was professional-related travel, but when your work involves existential dread its sort of hard to shed the archivist perspective especially when contributing directly to it with the fossil fuel use inherent to the majority of transportation methods.
Tomorrow I’m heading back to my office tomorrow where I have a number of emails waiting for me from high levels of the university asking for advice/meetings regarding our various records policy that I haven’t gotten to yet because I have been on my first month of academic leave (i.e. sabbatical) for the last several weeks.
I have been reporting to a full-time archivist job every day on a regular basis for the last 11 years of my life. That goes back to when I had just graduated from college. And before that, the only time I wasn’t working at least several hours a week part-time since I was 16 or 17 was when I studied abroad briefly for a semester (in England) and several weeks (in China).
This summer I was awarded tenure and I was also granted academic leave, the UC version of sabbatical. I get to take my six months of leave in alternating months where I’m in and out of the office starting in September 2019 and culminating in July 2020. This will be the longest period of time in my life when I’ve been able to be away from the office and still gotten paid. One month in, its still a bit hard to wrap my head around.
During the last several months I have been profoundly aware of the major fortune and privilege in having both tenure and sabbatical available to me. I’ve been having a continuing sense of “I feel so lucky to have this and also every worker deserves access to these things” and then I remember tons of workers don’t even have access to health insurance, paid sick days and paid vacation.
When I submitted my application for my academic leave, I outlined two major projects to work on. During this first month, I didn’t get as much done on those because I was so focused on writing a very good keynote for the Access conference in Edmonton. I felt Extraordinarily Guilty and Freaked Out about this towards the end of September – shit, I was turning into the embodiment of every conservative’s worst stereotype of lazy academics who take sabbaticals. This in spite of the fact that I was writing more than 500+ words a day for my keynote (or later on, spending hours editing it, reading more source material in the form of environmental impact assessments and legal opinions, and rehearsing it several times).
In the months leading up to my leave, I was incessantly angling for advice on how to spend my time. One colleague told me she tried to work the same number of hours she did while in the office but allowed herself the freedom to do her hours whenever. Two separate acquaintances told me they didn’t anticipate how much they would miss the social contact that comes from reporting to an office every day. A retired professor Friend from my Quaker meeting pulled me aside one day after meeting for worship to advise that I should go nowhere near campus during the first stretch of my sabbatical, or otherwise it would be like the bat signal going off that I was available for whatever problem had cropped up in my absence. One of the articles I read from the AAUP (disclaimer: AAUP is my union) website lamented how sabbaticals had been appropriated by much of the same neoliberal logic as the rest of higher ed, and that in the quest to make their sabbaticals the height of productivity, folks had lost sight of the root word of sabbatical – sabbath and its inherent connotations of the spiritual and ecological needs for rest.
Despite my usual orientation towards demanding that rest and time for restorative reflection is a basic human right and something that workers must assert their rights to both collectively and individually, I have a difficult time allowing it for myself (I suspect because I struggle so much with the fact that something like tenure + sabbatical, or its equivalent, is such a rare status for the vast majority of workers. Can I still identify as a worker when I have such privilege?). Towards the end of sabbatical month one, I read two books that profoundly moved me and ultimately helped me reframe my fretfulness around the fact that while I had been working very hard this month, I had made less material progress on my original project proposals than I would have liked.
A friend had given me a copy of Terry Tempest William’s Refuge a few years ago when I was dealing with a very difficult stretch of health crises involving my elderly father. I’d read a little bit of Williams’ writing before, but I finally plucked this off my bookshelf because I was heading to Salt Lake City for a family wedding and I enjoy reading books that are set in areas where I am visiting. Williams’ book is a memoir of the deaths of several women in her close-knit Mormon family, and much of the book focuses on how she supported her mother dying of cancer. The book is set against the historic flooding of the Great Salt Lake and the devastation of a bird sanctuary at which Williams, a naturalist, had long sought refuge. Homages to different bird species are woven into every chapter.
Shortly before I started Refuge, I had been provoked into something of a state of deep existential despair and ecogrief. I’ve been working on issues around climate change for a few years now, and I usually do a pretty good job of managing my emotions so I can keep doing the work. I think what probably set me off was some of the research I was doing for my keynote, where I began listening and reading to Albertan oil and gas industry publications and podcasts. One of the very curious things about Canada’s oil and gas industry is that it acknowledges the reality of climate change more than its US counterparts – which then requires it to engage in even more brazen displays of rationalization. So Canadian oil and gas propagandists will tout their “ethical oil”, or claim that their oil and gas is much more environmentally friendly because of improvements in extraction methods. I think the thing that actually triggered this particular wave of despair was a podcast episode in which two very intelligent women chirped that Canadian oil and gas would be a strong player through 2040, that it would be “part of the climate change solution” and that carbon capture and sequestration would ensure Canada’s oil and gas would have a long future ahead. And that’s when it really shattered my heart in a way only my brain had been able to handle before, that these motherfuckers know the car we’re all stuck in with them is going over the cliff and they’re slamming their foot on the gas while telling us it’s not going to be that bad of a drop.
Perhaps that’s why Refuge finally opened the floodgates I so badly needed to let my anger and grief pour out of me. Williams’ knew her mother was dying a horrible death, amidst the fearfulness and denial from her family members and the loss of the natural landscapes she relied on for solace, and all she could do was to be very, very present for it. When I can pull myself out of my grief and despair, this is what I remember: that for years I have felt a calling to do work around climate change using whatever outlet I can find, and the downside about a calling is once you realize it’s there (or what some Quakers refer to as “the still small voice”) and it’s not going anywhere, you can’t walk away from it.
During the end of my sabbatical month I also read Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing. I had run across Odell’s work first as a visual artist and have always wanted to buy one of her prints of collections of stadiums or industrial waste ponds. How To Do Nothing is kind of a hard book to explain since it’s sort of meandering in the best possible sense of the word. Odell builds a multi-layered and multi-lens argument calling for us to radically rethink how we pay attention to the people and things and beings and landscapes that surround us, but which technology and capitalism train us to very much ignore.
Reading How To Do Nothing made me realize that in fact my first month has been profoundly essential to my sabbatical work, even if its not quantifiable in the normal neoliberalized measures of attention productivity. I realized that what my first foray into sabbatical leave has given me is the recovery of my attention span, which is going to be critical to any further work I do over the next year (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention I also mostly stayed off social media this month, which undoubtedly helped with the repair of my attention span). I was able to read for hours at a time (including difficult and dense law reviews!), and dwell on a particular idea for days at a time by being able to unplug from email and maintain a flexible schedule. Under my normal office schedule, I usually work from 8-5 and am strict about not working after 5 in order to protect the other time chunks of my life. During this month it was not unusual for me to stay up till midnight reading about things relevant to my professional interests, or to be able to go on a much longer morning run than usual because I wasn’t required to be in my office at 8.
For a long time I’ve had a very strong sense that while as essential as this time is to my continued health on several levels, it is still incumbent on me to use it responsibly. I am trying to avoid the usual impulse here to bow down to the managerial perspective of trying to quantify how Time X off produced Y amount of things (though the reality is I am going to do that anyway, both because I have to per the requirements of my leave and because I’d like to ensure I maintain a good chance of being able to take academic leave again). I’m thinking instead along the lines of, “how can this sabbatical help me make more of my work available to the public? how can I use this time to expand my mentoring skills? how can I develop resources that will be of use to the larger archival community?” I’m excited by the potential for the next several months.
Categorised as: life
Well written Eira.