[This post was invited by Helen de Cruz on behalf of The Philosophers' Cocoon, where it runs simultaneously here.]
Once you have received tenure or (in Europe) a permanent position, the time available for research often goes down drastically. You will be expected to take on more leadership, mentoring, and service positions in the department and university. With job security you are more like to start a family. The challenge is that parenthood, even when joyful, can make constant demands on your time. In a discipline like philosophy (and most of the humanities and social sciences), where ‘research’ primarily presupposes having continuous, uninterrupted stretches of time to think, read, and write, you find that this simply evaporates in the period you are most eager to develop your ambitious projects into a (second) book, an ambitious grant, etc.
Being a good parent, partner, colleague, director of graduate studies, teacher, and researcher is demanding in the best of times; it feels nigh impossible when you are also sleep deprived because one of your kids has night cramps and your spouse is on rotation at the hospital. It becomes really difficult to maintain good cheer when the subject of ‘research’ comes up. Even when you can ignore office email on intersessional holidays, these offer little respite because this is now key ‘family-time.’
The problem can be masked, for a while, because you are finishing projects, including working on revise and resubmits. But at some point, you realize that your backlog has disappeared and is showing up in print. What to do? There are, of course, lots of time-management strategies (worth discussing), including spending less time on twitter and blogs; but the problem is without solution. There are periods in one’s life where research in the sense of having continuous, uninterrupted stretches of time to think, read, and write is simply impossible.
Not accepting this fact is a recipe for frustration, self-loathing, and worse. One of the most frustrating features of trying to do research when stretched for time, is that each time you start up the project you make no advance at all. When I am in the pure research and initial drafting of a paper stage, I need a bit of time – thirty to ninety minutes -- to orient myself to the problem each time I fire up my laptop. My kid used to have a 42-45 minute sleep cycle. He would awake just as I was reaching the possibility of a new ‘start-of-research-flow’ moment.
My slogan is: when you have the least amount of time for research that’s the best moment to do editorial work for a special issue or an edited volume. (Okay, that won’t go viral.) For, while editing presupposes considerable skills, such editing work has three key features that speaks in its favor for time-stretched-academics: (i) it can be cut up in lots of discrete units; and (ii) the work done is, when properly structured, generally cumulative. While one should take care in wording emails that nudge authors (and referees), the time needed is relatively brief (and repetitive, cut and paste does most of the work) compared to getting oneself up to speed at where one was, say, in embedding a partial grounding relation inside different kinds of action-guiding modal landscapes.
Moreover, editing other people’s work (iii) allows one to stay abreast of developments in one’s field precisely when one often has least time to attend conferences or (ahh) read journals. Yes, editing can be drudgery. There is nothing thrilling about reading a peer’s not quite polished paper for the third time. Sometimes the academic life simply is no more than work.
But editing is the plumbing of the discipline. You help maintain standards and you are a key-sounding board that can help guide other people’s advances. I don’t want to suggest one is shaping the field by editing a special issue; but it is not an impossible outcome.
Yes, there are other tasks that await the time-stretched-academic’s attention. You could referee more. But the time-stretched-academic is most likely to be the unpleasant referee #2. Moreover, refereeing does not solve the problem of a collapse of the appearance of research productivity noted above; it worsens it. That is to say, when you have the least amount of time for research that’s the best moment to do editorial work for a special issue or an edited volume and to decline invitations to referee.
Two final comments. First, editing a volume or special issue can be a lot of work, some of it quite unexpected. I don’t just mean that dealing with other people’s missed deadlines is quite frustrating; but also you need to navigate the demands of publishers and journals. Second, editing also generates the problem it is meant to tackle: you do need to take time to think through the pitch to the editors and prospective authors. More important, editorial guidance or the email in which you ask for major cuts (etc.) may require a quiet moment so you can compose yourself, and take a deep breath, just as you need to run to a meeting. Don’t press send in a hurry.*
*The first articulation of the ideas in this post originate in a discussion with John Callanan (who may lack time to read it).
I did have time to read this! And enjoyed it. Got the draft of my edited collection off to the publisher's not too long ago.
Posted by: John Callanan | 08/12/2019 at 05:09 PM