And Flesh Became Word: Confessions of hope and invisibility from the in-between spaces of the 21st century academy
Words: Jessica Parish
Images: Tianyue Cheng
Digital witnesses, what’s the point of even sleeping?
If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me
What’s the point of doing anything?
This is no time for confessing
I want all of your mind
— Saint Vincent
I adjust the Jenga tower that is my LinkedIn bio with a frequency that borders on mania. It’s as though I think the exact combination of skill-describing words will conjure my dream job out of air, like magic. A word doc helps me keep track of my various and subtly different on-line selves. I named it biohazard.docx to remind me how mildly toxic this habit is. I have bios on LinkedIn, Academia.edu, the website of my employer, the website of the academic research institute with which I am affiliated, one to accompany a forthcoming book chapter, and so forth. At the moment, only one of these exists in relation to paid employment. The others are dense bundles of hope labour. I maintain them as part of the dream (mirage?) that the work I am trained to do will someday be the work I get paid to do.
[hope labour (n). un- or under-compensated work carried out in the present, often for experience or exposure, in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow. Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013]
A bio is essentially a tool for making a person and their professional accomplishments visible to others. “I did this!” it yells. A rather mundane document, the work of producing one is not itself something that generates a lot of discussion. I think of it as the Russian nesting doll of a working life: within each task enumerated there hides another, and another. My bio, for example, states that I am an associate editor for The Geographies of Emotional and Care Labour, an academic research collection published by a UK based open-access journal. I took the position because the topic and the work are inherently interesting to me, and because this kind of academic CV building exercise is crucial to cultivating a professional profile that stands a chance of being taken seriously on 21st century academic job market. As a recent PhD graduate that line on my CV has much in common with the others in my bio, in that it enumerates work that I did for free, much of it digitally, in the hopes of obtaining secure, meaningful work in the future.
My uncompensated digital life as an aspiring academic originates at the very beginning of my PhD studies. In addition to working towards fulfilling degree requirements (course work, language requirements, comprehensive exams, dissertation proposal and, finally, the all important dissertation) and doing other regular stuff like going to conferences and presenting papers, for four years I was also an active member of the editorial board of my departments peer reviewed graduate student journal. I drafted calls for papers, solicited peer reviewers, attended regular editorial meetings, edited papers, wrote issue introductions and saw that it all got published on our website and in print format. I did this for no pay, no honoraria, no per diems, and I did it quite happily. I learned a lot and connected with peers whom I may not have otherwise met. Then, when I was in the last year of my degree, I took on the previously mentioned associate editorial role. Like the grad school equivalent of cookie monster, I devoured the sugary morsels of “experience and exposure”, oblivious to whether any of the crumbs ever ended up in my belly.
On a hot sunny day in mid-July of 2017 I defended my dissertation, received a verdict of “no revisions”, and strode confidently out into the in-between space of the 21st century academy. Up next: publish, pray, post-doc. Oh, and one more small detail — get a job so I can pay the bills in the meanwhile.
Accounting for the unremunerated work performed by graduate students and people who have earned their PhDs but have not (yet?) landed in a post-doc or tenure stream position would not be complete without reference to the post-doc applications themselves. An increasingly normal part of academic career progression, these require significant research, knowledge creation, writing, revising, and editing in their own right. These facts of my uncompensated working life are unremarkable. Dressed up in so many shades of grey, they do not set me out from the crowd. They are simply the things that must be done, the dice one must roll in order to have a shot at “making it” in the academy.
But the wager is huge — much larger than many people realize when they initially decide to head down this path. And this is where the facts get colourful. For even while the odds of “making it” slide precipitously downwards and the costs of doing so climb steadily upwards, much of the academic world is still firmly committed to the “life of the mind” myth: work hard, write a good dissertation, get published and you will get a tenure stream job. This was certainly the story I heard, from comfortably tenured faculty. But it’s simply not true.
The success rate for a SSHRC post-doc, one of the main sources of social sciences funding in Canada for in-betweeners like me, is approximately 18%. According to the Conference Board of Canada, while some 65% of people who begin a PhD do so in the hope of having a career as a university professor, only 17% actually end up there. Another report, authored by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), shows that the number of assistant professors in Canada peaked around 2005–06. Meanwhile, the number of contract faculty, which had been slowing increasing since the mid 1990s, turned sharply upwards around 2008–09. Staggeringly, the number of contract academic staff increased by 78% in the decade between 2005 and 2015. Countering the popular refrain that the “flexibility” afforded by contract work benefits all parties, CAUT also reports that a majority (53%) of these workers hope for a full-time permanent college or university job, and that this holds true “even for those who have been teaching for 16–20 years.”
In grad school I had a colleague who called academia a “free labour sucking machine”. But how, exactly, does this machine work?
Tenured academics are paid by tax-payers vis-à-vis their governments and earn a salary to do a mix of things, usually about 40% research, 40% teaching and 20% administration. They are expected, as part of their duties for receiving that salary, to publish their research in academic journals, which, in turn charge subscription fees to university libraries to access these articles. Because academics already earn a salary that, quite rightly, expects them to do research and publish it, they write and peer review articles for free. This system, while not perfect, makes sense in a situation where most or all of the people researching and publishing are driving on the tenure-track road.
But the growing abundance of hope labourers in the in-between spaces of the academy changes this dynamic considerably. As the authors of the CAUT report argue: “To the extent that short-term contracts tend to remunerate only teaching, they hive classroom work off from research and administrative work” and, consequently, the “ability to do funded research which is fully supported and protected by their institutions is compromised”.
Yet, the only way out of precarity is, presumably, to continuously expand and improve your CV. And, as precariously employed people dreaming of a secure and meaningful job after years if not decades of training and sacrifice, these are the people who can least afford to be invisible. Enter the career focused social networking site: LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Research Gate, and so forth.
According to a 2012 article in Forbes magazine, the economic success of LinkedIn is based as much on timing as it is on technology. LinkedIn came about at a time when the organization of work and the trajectory of a career were undergoing profound changes. The lifetime company career was becoming a thing of the past. As mergers and layoffs became the new normal in private sector employment, “Filling out a LinkedIn profile started seeming downright wise.”
For the average user LinkedIn is an on-line professional networking site, a place to post accomplishments, network, and search for jobs. Members fill out profiles, publicly list their education, past and present job titles as well as a host of other information, such as descriptions of jobs held, details of key professional accomplishments, awards received, publications authored and so forth. Other individual users can access this to make connections, build professional networks, post and reply to job adds and so forth, for free.
As useful as these functions may (or may not) be to these users, they are somewhat peripheral to the core moneymaking business of the network. As CEO Jeff Weiner reportedly explains it, LinkedIn consists in three concentric circles: on the outside, generating the least revenue are subscriptions, like premium accounts. After that it is advertising revenue. At the center “is LinkedIn’s richest and fastest-growing opportunity: turning the company’s 161 million member profiles into the 21st-century version of a ‘little black book’ that no corporate recruiter can live without.”
The data freely and voluntarily supplied by the mass of job searchers in exchange for limited and relatively rudimentary access to the network thus becomes the raw material for profit. LinkedIn gathers this information, analyzes it and sells it to companies, providing them with hiring and HR information that are far more timely, efficient and effective than traditional hiring search techniques. At its first introduction, around the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the starting price for corporate HR access was $21,000 (USD). What’s more, because new users continue to sign up at break-neck speed, and existing users are adding new data all the time the product continues to grow in value independently of what the company itself invests on improving it.
Carbon based, with origins in flesh and blood, the life accomplishments that get compressed into a few key sentences on a LinkedIn page are the diamonds of 21st century digital capital.
While the business models of Academia.edu and ResearchGate are not yet quite so clear, what is certain is that the “free” exchange of information that they facilitate is likewise secondary to the business of stockpiling bits of digital carbon. Consider the daily drip of emails I receive, informing me that someone has searched me on Google, or that an author I cited has published a new paper, or inviting me to view the analytics they have so generously compiled so that I may know how often my papers are read and in which cities those readers are located. Indeed, if the LinkedIn example teaches anything it is that the $100 I may (or may not) someday pay to Academia.edu for “premium” analytics to enhance a job application or tenure file, would be latte money for their investors. The true jackpot is in the totality of data so accumulated, a totality that makes possible the ability to see and to sell the patterns of connection and citation that are only intelligible at that scale.
I don’t yet have a ResearchGate entry in my biohazard.docx file. But I noticed the other day, as I was poking around the site, thinking about this essay, that ResearchGate had taken the liberty of writing a bio on my behalf. Individually the facts it strings together are correct, but the feeling of seeing them arranged on the screen in a way that is so patently not me, is surreal to say the least. So now I am at an impasse: do I accept this state of incompleteness, or do I reach for the carrot and revise the bio, thereby teaching the machine where it has erred in turning my facts into stories? Do I draw the line or embrace my latest role in the corporate experiment of conjuring cash whilst the hordes of hope labourers huddle over laptop screens shouting “look at me!! I did this!!”
Oh, dear. Maybe don’t look at me. Could I have really done this…?
