chairs /

• Susan Cahill, University of Calgary
• Erin Morton, University of New Brunswick

This session seeks to explore the personal side of professional academic life over the past three years, under the weight of the latest global pandemic still impacting our work and ourselves constantly yet unevenly. So much of academic work is bound up in the pressure to participate in professional hustle culture, at all levels from graduate school to academic and alt-academic career paths. We often discount the personal toll that such consistent and often non-boundaried academic work takes, particularly in a moment with increased health risks and caretaking responsibilities. And while these tolls are felt by many within the academic context, they have certainly put additional strains on those whose positions were already precarious and who have long carried inequitable burdens within the labour spaces of the university, including women, and gender non-conforming people, Indigenous, Black, racialized diasporic, queer, trans, and disabled scholars. This session invites participants in a roundtable discussion who want to critically reflect and think through their own experiences of academic life within the pandemic, and want to envision other ways possible grounded in compassion and acknowledging the personal side of the professional.

keywords: burnout, recovery, labour, academia

session type: roundtable

Data promises: AI anxieties, the pandemic, and a world on fire

• Mél Hogan, University of Calgary

My contribution addresses some of the conditions that we currently live under—like the rapid introduction of new technologies, wildfires, and an endless pandemic—and pays special attention to the ways universities fail to grapple with “real world problems”.

We generally work in institutions that address threats on a level of acknowledgment for management—where management means a return to normal—, while intentionally failing to address the psychological toll, disruptions to life, limits to resilience, health concerns, and emotional necessities to a life worth living. Universities make themselves places that use tacking “real world problems” as mere branding exercise, to draw in investors, but ultimately deny the threats and fail to make real changes as a result.

keywords: environment, pandemic, fires, threat, university

Resisting Burnout: Confronting white love in a Brahmin mirror

• Dia da Costa, University of Alberta

If recovery from burnout is usefully envisioned as compassion in the academy, I want to explore the challenge of knowing compassionate care when we see it, and its tenuous relationship to the reproduction of whiteness. Thinking from the standpoint of a dominant-caste South Asian in the North American academy, I foreground the coexisting historical structures of white supremacy and caste supremacy, in order to view them as collaborating engines that produce burnout for some and build empire for others within a highly-uneven academic environment. Resisting our part in reproducing the structural conditions for burnout I argue might begin with holding a mirror to dominant-caste South Asians who might readily recognize our burnout from experiencing white love in the academy. White love is different from but related to outright racist exclusion. White love feeds the racialized need to be seen, teetering on the edge of tokenism rather than announcing itself as such. Yet, white love ultimately treats the academy as a white possession (Moreton-Robinson); extractive in its relation to subjugated knowledges; serving individual empire-building; a key lubricant in the racialized patronage system that reproduces whiteness; and gaining traction in and through racialized complicity and assimilation. Dominant-caste complicity in white love suggests that resisting burnout should include noticing our willful misapprehension of our own practices of extracting from and possessing caste-oppressed peoples for our academic careers. Especially when our anti-caste work feels like care work, we could ask what forms of naturalizing compassion as dominant-caste affective property we might be reproducing.

keywords: whiteness, white love, casteism, complicity, academic patronage politics

Apologies in Advance for My Kids: Parenting and Academia During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• Dr. Kristy A. Holmes, Lakehead University

Of the many things the COVID-19 pandemic threw into relief was the difficulty and, at times, impossibility, of trying to carry on with the academic work of administration, teaching and research while caring for and homeschooling children for extended periods of time. This was exacerbated by the inability for most universities to accommodate or even acknowledge the grossly inequitable position that many faculty were put in. Using my own experience parenting three small children while Chair of my department during the pandemic, I explore the burnout, anger and exhaustion I experienced while also trying to think through alternative ways that the institution might better support faculty who have children.

keywords: mothering, COVID-19, pandemic parenting, academic life, academic parenting

Let every ivy inside me find its wall: Poetry as a Path Toward Healing

• Triny Finlay, University of New Brunswick

For my contribution to this roundtable discussion, I will read from a small selection of original poems about my own experiences as an academic suffering from severe depression and psychosis. Through these poems, and the practice of creative writing more generally, I offer a path toward conversation and healing for the despondent, the downtrodden, the disenfranchised.

CW: mentions suicide, paranoia, and other forms of “madness”

keywords: creative writing, poetry, mental illness, madness, academia, recovery