More Noises from Outside the Humanities

… was that a pivotal historical moment

We just went stumbling past?

Kate Tempest "People's Faces"

The thing about the shock of ice water is that it can be enlivening, even refreshing. But total ice water immersion? It numbs you. The ice-cold shock of collective pandemic-era policy—stay home, shut down, switch to online platforms, be distant from the work of essential workers (unless you happen to be classified as such)—has given way to the kind of muted discombobulation of reopenings, cautious "staycations," and other experiments. The shocks are social, cultural, and economic; they are racialized, gendered, and class-distributed. It is difficult to know exact statistics in Canada, but early in the time of writing this piece, journalists speculated that unemployment could reach 20 percent (Bakx). This was corrected in early April by Statistics Canada who suggest that, of thirty-one million Canadians of working age, over three million faced job losses or reduced hours. Economists repeat what those on campuses have long known: if some Canadians are not unemployed, they are definitely underemployed. Precarity marks the core of academic underemployment and may be entrenched more deeply (Kramnick; Bodin). Precarity also characterizes work in Canada far beyond the academy, albeit with definitional drift (Fong; House of Commons). While the medium- and long-term effects of such numbing shocks may be difficult to see, there should be no excuses to delay efforts to build institutional resilience in the face of such unpredictable change.

As we move on from the delayed preparations for the Conference that Couldn't Happen, I should say that the longer I am distant from the university's halls, the harder it becomes for me to maintain the impersonal tone of stringent knowingness that continues to characterize much scholarship. So too am I less able to speak to the realities and daily labour performed by teachers of English literature across Canada. Nevertheless, collecting my thoughts during the weeks in which Congress 2020 should be and then definitively was (mostly) canceled, it struck me with some cruelty that my two animating concerns seem so mutually intimate: first, the situation of precarious academic labourers and, second, the unraveling necessity of collective responses to anthropogenic environmental and climate changes.

In 2019, my friend Geordie Miller and I co-organized a member's panel on "Bullshit Academic Jobs" for accute. We hoped to avoid scoring points about intellectual value (see, for example, Belfiore). Instead, we wanted to give a platform to the "overworked, underemployed, and demoralized among us," as Geordie wrote. We hoped to see the fits and misfits of David Graeber's general hypothesis: that those who are paid more have increasingly more pointless jobs, and that those whose jobs are recognized as socially useful are paid less. In the background were theories of care labour and the hands of the essential workers whose supply chains cross the world. Geordie and I wished to apply this thesis to the particularities of academic labour and English scholarship. The panel was marked by tales of professional frustration and offers of paths forward but also, in a shared move by all panelists, affirmations of the fundamental value of teaching and reading as forces of dignity and realization. One tentative conclusion was the following: there is work to be done, but the institutional structures to support it are quaking.

At the same Congress, I was able to speak to members of accute on the subject of "catastrophe" and more generally on climate change and environmental degradation.² What I wanted to say, had I then the courage, was the proposition that we in accute consider seriously the disciplinary implications of the present crisis and mitigation strategies related to climate change and environmental loss—that the institutions of English literary study have power but also responsibilities as much as any other professional association and societal institution. I had in mind what Castree has elsewhere called the responsibility of the "engaged analyst [who] seeks institutional and epistemological forms of engagement that might alter important conversations occurring outside the humanities" (234). I also had in...