Academic Re:searching: Racing Alice Cooper

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Racing Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper, "School's Out," Live from Montreaux

Michelle here. The orchestra is tuning up to play "School's Out (for the Summer)" by Alice Cooper. I have precisely three days left to use my brain and I've got a long Honey-do list for it.

1. Finish Service Reflective Statement

2. Finish Armah encyclopedia entry

3. Write Emecheta encyclopedia entry

Then my boys will be at home with me until school starts up again. We're going to have lots of fun: don't get me wrong.

But I'm racing to at least get the difficult thinking parts out of the way before they finish up and start singing a la Alice, stage makeup and all. It really is going to be a Lord of the Flies redux around here on Thursday afternoon.

I'm racing Alice because difficult writing--the kind that takes two hours to ease into, think about, draft and revise, and take breaks during--is difficult to do with an audience around. And by "around," I mean running circles around my chair, screaming, "GIVE IT!!" "IT'S MINE!!!" "MOOOMMM!!" Maybe that's why my fun summer research project is an examination of mothering bodies.

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What is Academic Re:searching?

Oh, dear. Aren't we over the trite nineties-era insertion of quotation marks into words to signal nuanced multiplicities of meaning? Do we still think that either our readers are that stupid or that we are that clever? Well. We avoid binaries, preferring to think instead that the answer lies somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. Reality decrees that academics must research. Period. Yet reality also involves numerous barriers to carving out and productively using limited research time. As such, we academics are usually searching for research time. With luck, we either find it or make it. This blog is a space in which two Assistant Professors seek to negotiate the fraught processes of research, and to balance these with teaching, service, and (gasp!) personal lives. Since I believe our readers are intelligent, I will let them puzzle out any nuanced multiplicities of meaning in this blog's title.