Crisis Adaptation as an Academic
“Crisis adaptation is not a linear, upward trajectory toward productivity and happiness….In my experience, successful crisis adaptation requires a flexible approach that allows you to reboot and reimagine your process in real time”—Aisha Ahmad, How to Salvage a Disastrous Day in Your Covid-19 Quarantine
You’d think I’d be adapted to crisis. I conducted my dissertation fieldwork in a country whose political climate is volatile during normal times. However, I’ve tended to see my fieldwork as separate from the other kinds of academic work I do. How am I supposed to teach, write up my research, and stay connected as an independent scholar while the world is in the middle of a pandemic?
Writing
When I suddenly had more time on my hands between extended spring breaks and no more commuting hours, my first thought was that I should delve into my own academic writing even though the probability of actually producing anything worthwhile was nil. At least I should try, right? Aisha Ahmad had some very different ideas.
As an academic who studies insurgents and who has worked in disaster zones herself, Ahmad understands that these conditions require a reassessment of our academic works’ value. For example, she mentions that before the pandemic, she advised military personnel actively working in civil war situations. Once the pandemic hit, situations changed and so national priorities shifted, making her advice less critical. Other than changed priorities, Ahmad points out that the mental capacity we use to do theoretical work might be unavailable to us at the moment because we are using our mental capacity to respond to the current situation. We may be taking care of a family member who is a critical worker, making sure we have enough necessities or that an at-risk loved one is safe, intentionally maintaining social connections, re-imagining our work schedule and work space, and watching our own mental and physical health so that we can respond appropriately to the changing situation. As a result, Ahmad suggests that we academics might need to set aside our heavy theoretical thinking for a time and instead focus on low-hanging fruit, like book reviews or chapter revisions.
You can read Ahmad’s articles on The Chronicle of Higher Education and her guest blogposts on The Professor Is In. (note: none of these links are affiliate links; I’m just sharing resources I have found helpful).
Ahmad’s words of advice meant that I didn’t have to feel guilty about declining two requests for new articles for special journal issues; instead, finishing a book review and approving copyedits on an article accepted for publication was just fine. Earlier in the pandemic, I called family members who are critical workers more often (I have relatives working in the medical field and law enforcement), and I coordinated grocery shopping with my housemate. These new routines took up more of my time and energy, but I didn’t need to feel guilty about it. Additionally, my engagement with students as a writing coach took on some additional levels that emotionally drained me, which also prevented me from doing any deep academic work.
Teaching
Surprisingly, I have found that I’ve enjoyed doing more of my coaching work from home. Certainly I miss seeing my students in person, and I’m also aware that remote instruction is not conducive to serving all the different student populations that I work with; however, I wasn’t complaining about gaining almost nine more hours in my week that I didn’t spend commuting. Yet I also found that working more online had its challenges. For example, Zoom fatigue was real. Jessamyn Neuhaus’ article about teaching online while introverted resonated with my feelings (for example, working from home during a pandemic is not an introvert’s dream upon deeper examination). I found Jim Lang’s articles on what he has learned about his students since switching to online and cautioning quick judgments about online learning to be helpful. (Devoney Looser’s older article on what she learned about remote teaching is a nice balance to Lang’s articles.) With some of the time I now had, I started taking free training modules on designing courses for remote instruction made available through one of my jobs. But all of these articles and resources were geared towards course design; what about the writing center work that I do?
As a writing coach, I don’t design course content or create assessments. Instead, I come alongside students, coaching them through the writing process, teaching them information literacy, and demystifying many of the unwritten (cultural) rules of academic engagement. I am often a safe space for graduate students who are trying to determine if they are just dealing with normal graduate school challenges or with toxic and traumatic environments. The pandemic just amplified all of these concerns, so my writing center sessions have become more emotionally stressful for me as I coach students.
A few weeks into our work-from-home situation, my writing center director signed me up for a workshop coordinated by the International Writing Center Association (IWCA) on the topic of self-care. The workshop coordinator acknowledged that people often view the term "self-care" as a selfish thing at worst (like ignoring responsibility or being lazy) or a new-agey thing at best (involving activities like meditation or yoga). But she went on to say that self-care is really about making sure we enable ourselves to be efficient and productive in whatever work we do. Self-care is especially important for writing coaches because we are involved in emotional labor--we work with the writer, not just the writing, which means we deal directly with the writer's feelings around their writing and their life situations that affect their ability to write well. This dimension of our work can make writing coaches more prone to things like burnout or emotional fatigue.
Those comments were timely for the reasons mentioned above. I have found that doing more creative things (specifically, playing more piano and reading more) or taking time to exercise (I run regularly anyway, but I've been going on walks in my neighborhood after my online shifts) have been helpful.
Staying connected, moving forward
Staying connected with people, especially other academics, has been a lifeline. As a freelance academic, I may not have a stable university affiliation, but I do have professional and personal networks in place. Phone calls with a colleague in musicology and my undergraduate mentors (both of whom are still teaching at my alma mater) helped me put my pandemic experiences in perspective: I was not the only one dealing with Zoom fatigue, challenges with online instruction, and an inability to do deeper academic work. While we certainly talked about frustrations, we also shared welcome developments or glimpses of hope. My musicology colleague spoke of new relationships with other programs on campus that share affinities, and my mentors spoke of the resilience of their students and what accommodations they made to their classes in light of the current situation. We also spoke of other plans: my colleague spoke of how she wanted to share her garden produce with neighbors, and my mentors talked about all yard and house projects they planned to do to employ people in their area. All of us are having to “reboot and reimagine” professional and personal processes we took for granted. It has taken me a while to realize that revising these processes can be an appropriate response to the current situation; it is not a sign that I have failed in some way.
