Adventures in Academia - Part 1
“You can take the girl out of academia, but you can’t take the academia out of the girl.” -Kate Corrigan, B.P.R.D.
One of my worse-kept dirty secrets is that I do academic research for fun. My friends and colleagues give me a fair amount of shit for this, and I cheerfully counter with the above. It’s true, at least for me. I love the intense cerebral discourse of academia. I love the intricate interweaving of the theoretical and the practical. When I was in college, I assumed that I would go to graduate school, and then build a career in academia; I went straight from earning my B.A. to directing a college writing center.
I am no longer in academia.That’s not entirely true—I remain involved in academia. But I am no longer part of the Academy. My entrance to the exclusive club of the comics industry came at the cost of both my academic status and the means to advance it. I lack that vital institutional affiliation. And I lack a physical analog to the academic conversations I still pursue by way of listservs and personal correspondence.
I miss it like crazy.
Within the (mostly virtual) academic circles I frequent, I’m something of a rogue scholar. My background in writing center studies and my current vantage point outside of organized academia make me more prone to challenging artificial strata and what I see as cripplingly narrow definitions of “legitimate” scholarship. These days, I tend to go in on the defensive, a little punk, a little pissed off: a riot grrrl stomping around the ivory tower. I figure if I make it clear that I’m not pretending to be what I’m not, it’ll take the real scholars a little longer to catch on and push me back into the margins.
This past December, I was feeling deeply conflicted about my involvement in academia—there had just been a ruffle on the comix-scholars listserv that started when some poor sap asked if anyone know of good comics shops in London and was immediately and nastily attacked for bringing down the tone of the discussion. Over the next forty-eight hours, it grew into a spectacularly bitter fight (which had been brewing and splashing up occasionally for at least as long as I’d been subscribing to the listserv) over the definition of legitimate scholarship and what (if anything) distinguished it from fandom, lay scholarship, and dilettantism. I don’t post much on the listserv, because I recognize when I am out of my element: most of the participants are professional academics, and many of the discussions relate to their individual specialties. I spoke up in this conversation because it was on an issue I had spent a good deal of time studying and considering, and to which I thought I had something useful to add.
My mistake.
I’d like to think that there was a decent conversation, or at least a remotely useful one—that the entire thread wasn’t effectively sideswiped out of the air when a fellow with a Ph.D. decided that it was time someone put this presumptuous little bitch in her place. The topic foundered, lingered halfheartedly for less than a day, and died. It has not come up since; nor have I posted to the listserv since that conversation, although I still read from the margins.
So, anyway.
As I mentioned above, I’m not particularly confident that I belong in academia on the best days, and the scalding public rebuke left me shaken and wondering whether I had any right to be there at all. And all of this happened three days before the deadline for submitting abstracts to the 2008 UF Conference on Comics.
To be continued…
In the meantime, you can discuss this column here.
No Comments
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.