Dr Alastair Smith: Life as an Independent, Public Academic
An Experimental Alternative in the Crisis of Human Knowledge
This page is intended to provide information about my current work for the sake of sharing my knowledge and experience.
It is also hoped that readers might use this as a entry point to engage further, perhaps even by supporting my work financially — see below.
Background to My Experiment
When I was a child I always asked “why?”. Lovingly supported by my parents this interest was developed by formal education, and it grew into a passionate obsession with learning and sharing my knowledge with others.
After extending my academic apprenticeship through a PhD award, between 2012–2023 I deepened my vocation through research, but primarily teaching, in Higher Education (HE). I have been mainly employed by Universities in the UK, but I punctuated this experience with time in third sector undergraduate teaching in the Americas (employed in the USA, working in Caribbean).
Early in my career I realised that the popular understanding of universities, that they provide critical and independent research embedded with quality education, is far from accurate in UK HE.
Like many human activities, UK Universities are embedded in institutions densely captured by problematic consequences of neo-liberal coordination and corporate management. Learning experiences are broadly developed according to the minimum standards possible given market forces, not the most pedagogically effective. Overall, HE falls well short of doing a sufficient job in supporting democratic society in the UK to be the best it can — and that’s a problem so far reaching its untrue.
More specifically, I was horrified for example, to see UK universities join the Conservative UK Government in rejecting foundational scientific knowledge and prioritise face-to-face classes as the global COVID-19 pandemic unfolded (forthcoming article). My dissatisfaction only grew with my personal discovery that the vast majority of UK universities have employment policies incompatible with foundational, Health and Safety, UK labour law.
Suffering from what might be well characterised as a “moral injury” and mental health collapse (see Williamson et al. 2021), I withdraw from HE as I no longer believed it was fit for purpose.
Genuine Academic Autonomy: Critical and Transparent, Never Objective
While I have extracted myself from university “employment”, I have not stepped away from my vocational work. As such, I have embarked on an experiment to continue my intellectually, creative work in research and teaching, but now as an independent academic.
Otherwise put, I aim to operate as a “public intellectual”, not in the sense of being widely publicly known (necessarily), but in the sense of working directly for the public as opposed to an institution. I want to continue my work in ways that responds to the widest possible community, without needing to shape this to the specific expectations of a managing institution.
My first set of experiments have been to follow other academics in using Medium as a way to develop and share my knowledge. Quality knowledge must be subject to rigorous appraisal and therefore high quality peer reviewed publications must be the corner stone of human understanding. However, as a transdisciplinary academic — working on questions and themes unconstrained by a concern with using the specific lens of a given discipline, such as “political science” — I recognise that all knowledge has value (forthcoming article).
What is required for effective transdisciplinary practice, in my view, is a deep appreciation for what sources should be rigorously used for what purposes, and an exceptionally acute ability to undertake autonomous critical analysis to determine this. It must, of course include the application of intense awareness of the limits to (my) knowledge. Such limitations arise from the vast volume of things I don’t know, but more importantly, the assumptions, biases and framing I unavoidably use to build what I know.
For this reason, a core skill of academic enterprise must be intensive transparency about how knowledge emerges: both in terms of sources, evidence, but also being explicit the implicit and explicit choices we make when learning.
Beyond my individual work, I have begun to work with wonderful others: previous academic colleagues, other creative thinkers, such as film makers, artists and intellectually inclined and engaged individuals, to create a collective of collaboration. You can read more about the evolving project that is CATLAN here:
Support My Work Financially
Working as an independent and public academic is a precarious life. Through CATLAN we apply for funded projects, but work done outside of these, the majority of my contribution to the public domain through Medium are not directly funded. Therefore, if you have found value in this work please consider pledging a one-off or regular payment through the Stripe links below.
If you got this far, you might hopefully find other outputs of interest:
