Greetings from my summer 2026 travels, dear PBP readers! This week I’m sharing another one of my top PBP posts of all time, which would normally be behind the archive paywall but is my little gift to you this week! Enjoy!
Goooooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might happen to be!
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had chats with friends and colleagues who, like me, are precariously employed. Sadly, precarious employment has increasingly become the norm in academia over the past couple of decades. There simply aren’t enough jobs to go around! Meanwhile, universities continue to crank out fabulously qualified PhD students, who emerge into the job market only to find that there’s not really much of a market at all.
Although the end of my current contract is creeping ever nearer, I really have been one of the luckier ones. I’ve always worked on short-term contracts, but always in beautiful places. My colleagues have (for the most part) been wonderful and supportive. I’ve had the chance to pursue dream projects in world-class institutions. I’ve even managed to build a little family of my own in a beautiful country (which is now my country!). And even with all of those privileges, advantages, and lucky breaks, it’s been really, really hard.
The chats I recently had with my friends ventured into the usual territory—how hard it is to plan ahead or build something when you don’t know where your next job will take you; how frustrating it is to ‘tick all the boxes’ and still miss out on opportunities; how powerless you feel when you’re waiting to find out whether some department or institution will deign to employ you or fund you. Whenever I try to talk about these things with people who don’t work in academia, I find it weirdly hard to explain why it’s so hard. After all, most people don’t ever have ‘permanent’ contracts. But when you’re supposed to be constantly coming up with new ideas for research, making new discoveries, and designing new courses, all of that is extra hard to do when you’re also constantly applying for jobs and grants.
When I talked to my friends about their ideas for future research projects, they described projects they thought would be ‘strategic’. For years, academics have been taught to be strategic. We’ve been encouraged to accumulate a certain number of publications, a certain amount of teaching and administrative experience. We’ve been told that publishing with This Press or winning That Grant could be the ticket to getting The Tenure-Track Job. We’ve been taught to play a game in which there are more and more players every year, and fewer and fewer winnings to go around.
What if we refused to play by The Rules? What if we stopped thinking about what was most strategic and started focusing more on what we wanted to do? What might happen then?
After listening to my friends describing ‘strategic’ projects they were barely interested in proposing (let alone pursuing), I found myself asking, If you could just say ‘screwwit’, what would you REALLY want to work on? Is there a topic you’d really, really love to pursue, if you could?
And the amazing thing was that, every single time, these brilliant friends of mine would light up and start talking about something that wasn’t just exciting to them, but also sounded exciting to me. These were ideas that sounded genuinely innovative, genuinely groundbreaking. THAT’s what you should do, I replied. THAT sounds like an awesome project.
As I kept thinking back to these conversations in later days, it occurred to me that there just might be a silver lining to precarity, to the knowledge that the odds were most definitely NOT in our favour. It’s oddly liberating to know that all your careful planning and networking and striving and strategizing might not ever get you anywhere. When that’s the case, why not try to find ways to do the work you really want to do? Why not go out on a limb and pitch that risky project or new course or genre-defying, field-spanning book? What is there to lose?
My current project is partly the result of a ‘screwwit’ mentality. I was absolutely stymied by something I’d observed, and wanted to understand it. Even when someone tried to persuade me that there was nothing there, I went looking. And somehow, somehow, I managed to write my way into not one, but two amazing grants. I have no idea when (or if) something like this will happen ever again in my career, but I know I’ve had my absolute dream job since 2018. And I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that everyone should just go out and say ‘screwwit’ when it comes to planning their professional lives. (Maybe in another PBP post down the line?) But if you’re precariously employed in an industry where the odds are against you achieving Professional Stability anytime soon, I would recommend at least taking a moment to imagine: What is the project you would pursue if you forgot about being ‘strategic’ and focused on what you are most interested in doing?
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VB,
M
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