17: Reframe the Relationship to Your Research

Do you find yourself looking forward to the summer but you’re also concerned about having the bandwidth to get your research and writing done in the next 3-4 months? In this 17th Rise with Clarity Podcast episode, I’m going to share some observations on the necessity of rest and also offer some questions that will help you to reframe the relationship to your research. I hope that this reframing of your research can be something that you move forward with, even beyond the summer break.

Find the full transcript for this episode at RisewithClarity.com/17, along with my previous podcast episodes and other resources for women of color faculty in higher education.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

Transcript

Hi Professors!

I’m releasing this episode in mid-April, and I know that for many of you, that means that you are in the final weeks of your spring semester of what has been a very challenging academic year. Don’t you wish you could just fast forward to your summer break when you won’t any teaching obligations or you don’t have to attend any faculty meetings? Did I hear a yes there? I thought so!

If you find yourself looking forward to the summer but you’re also concerned about having the bandwidth to get your research and writing done in the next 3-4 months, I’m going to share some observations on the necessity of rest and also offer some questions that will help you to reframe the relationship to your research. I hope that this reframing of your research can be something that you move forward with, even beyond the summer break. Find the full transcript for this episode at RisewithClarity.com/17, along with my previous podcast episodes and other resources for women of color faculty.

The Realities of Academic Grind Culture

When I was working as a professor, I remember those last few weeks of the academic year as a total blur of activities. There were:

-final presentations

-dissertation defenses

-final committee meetings

-heaps of administrative work

-senior capstones 

-travel for conferences or invited talks

-commencement ceremonies

-and of course, grading, and more grading.

I felt like my days were defined by moving from one deadline to the next. There would be some sense of relief when one task ended … but inevitably there would be another event or another high stakes deadline that I immediately had to turn my attention to. I was never fully rested in this cycle.

I could understand the strategy of some of my former colleagues of when they would get a head start on the summer break by scheduling travel during finals week or after grading. Essentially jetting out of town as soon as possible after the final day of instruction. 

I admit that I later came to do this too—scheduling travel for research trips in mid-June in order to move as quickly as possible into a different mode for my summer months. It was almost like slamming the brakes on the academic year and quickly shifting gears in order to maximize my research and writing mode for those summer months.

Even though I so looked forward to the summer, I knew that there needed to be a deliverable at the end of the break—a submitted article, a revision, or a new chapter. I needed to produce writing by the end of the summer in order to meet the publication expectations for tenure or my next promotion. So I would end up pushing through the burnout.  

I could have used a real break during my early years, but unfortunately I never took a true honest-to-God vacation that wasn’t connected to archival or field research until after I completed my first book manuscript. And that was 6 years into the tenure track. 

The Importance of Rest

Now that I’ve left academia and I have a lot more perspective, I can look back and see how this academic grind culture was so unhealthy, unsustainable, and even demoralizing at times.

1)        First of all, I want to acknowledge that what I was just describing in the cycle of overwork in academia is part of what Heather Archer calls “grind culture”—a culture that “trains us to believe that if we’re not producing, we’re not worthy.” It’s also something that Tricia Hersey pushes back against in her illuminating book called Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto.

Both Archer and Hersey point to the need to resist and refuse capitalist systems of overwork and that we need to understand that rest is actually key to sustainability and to thriving. 

Both Archer and Hersey also speak as Black women, noting that rest as a form of resistance is a refusal to donate their bodies to a capitalistic system that enslaved their ancestors for labor. I’d like to read a little bit from Hersey’s manifesto here because it is so powerful:

We must stand and lay firmly in the space of creating a life filled with rest and radical care, even amid oppression. Rest is Resistance is our tagline and mantra. Our call. Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. 

Both these toxic systems refuse to see the inherent divinity in human beings and have used bodies as a tool for production, evil, and destruction for centuries. 

Grind culture has made us all human machines, willing and ready to donate our lives to a capitalist system that thrives by placing profits over people.

The Rest is Resistance movement is a connection and a path back to our true nature. We are stripped down to who we really were before the terror of capitalism and white supremacy. We are enough. We are divine. (Hersey 7)

I’m really compelled by Hersey’s writings and her manifesto as well as her accompanying Nap Ministry Movement. And I’ve tried to put some of her ideas into practice this year. 

But I do think it’s very important to understand the larger historical and political context from which her writings as well as Archer’s writings emerge when engaging with their ideas. Rest is not just about self-care, but a defiant act of self-preservation and also resistance.

I highly encourage you to check out both books, if you have the time, which I’ll link to in the transcript at RisewithClarity.com/17.

Reframing the Relationship to My Research

2)        My second observation is connected to a recent experience that I just had.

Last spring I was supposed to give a research talk at UC Berkeley on what would have been the topic of my second book on the World Vision Korean Orphan Choir, Faith-based Humanitarianism, Connections to Transnational Adoption, and Cold War Politics. I had to cancel and postpone this talk last year because my father experienced an acute stroke and was hospitalized at that time. 

Now as some of you already know, I resigned from my tenured faculty position last August. And a few weeks after that, I launched Rise with Clarity—my coaching and consulting business for women of color faculty in higher education.

I assumed that my invitation would be rescinded because I no longer held a faculty position. 

But I was surprised when the invitation still stood and I was scheduled as a speaker this spring. 

I was also given an opportunity to give a professional development talk to graduate students on alternative paths to academia.

I would like to thank Professor Jinsoo An, the director of the Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley for the opportunity to present my research as well as the wonderful graduate students there who I was able to meet.

Presenting some of my research—which I’ve been working on for the past 11 years—without the pressures of what I would need to do for my next promotion was a really different experience from any of my previous research talks that I’ve given in the past. 

It was almost as if my research was released from the weights that had previously  caused it to be so heavy in my mind.

Since I’m no longer participating in a system that evaluates me primarily on the basis of my publication output, there’s no need for me to publish a second scholarly monograph. I don’t need to offer a theoretical or disciplinary intervention. I don’t have to be so top of all of the latest research in order to prove my worth as a scholar. 

This has been pretty liberating for me. And I realized that I could still share my research, even though I’m no longer in the academy. The research that I’ve done can help to tell a compelling story. But that story will likely take a different form, that does not require double-blind peer review. And who knows? Perhaps it may reach a larger audience in its telling.

I’m grateful that this research topic is deeply meaningful to me, b/c if it wasn’t, I very likely would have closed the chapter on this in the wake of my departure from academia.

Reframing the Relationship to Your Research - 6 Questions

So, in closing, here are some questions that I would like to leave you with, when thinking about your upcoming summer months and the relationship to your research.

1.        How can you reframe your research in a way that is more meaningful to you?

2.        And this is a thought exercise: for a moment, if you could briefly extricate your research from the enormous pressures to publish on the tenure track, what would your scholarship feel like to you?

3.        How can you move away from the mindsets that your book is only equivalent to your ticket to your next promotion or that your scholarly output defines your worth as a person? 

These mindsets are drilled into us in the academy. 

And it reminds me of what Heather Archer and Tricia Hersey were getting at in their critique and resistance of “grind culture,” especially as it manifests in higher education.

4.        Are you able to build in intentional rest into your summer break while also working on your research and writing? Can you resume your research from a more restful place?

5.        What are your values and can you intentionally infuse them into your research? 

6.        Are there some creative ways that you can connect your scholarship with communities that are important to you?

I hope some of these questions are helpful, especially as you move into your summer break. I also hope you can take some much-needed time off for your mind, body, and spirit after your semester ends.