Thank you for putting this out, in the form it eventually took. The piece reads as something that became more than a newsletter edition as it went, and that's part of what makes it valuable to read.
The observation that stayed with me was the one about academia continuing to assume forms of stability that many scholars simply don't have. The doctoral discourse most researchers encounter is largely written for an assumed reader who has a kind of stability and continuity many real scholars have never had access to and were never going to have. Your point about resilience needing to be collective rather than only personal feels like the most important move in the essay — the work of staying with scholarship through difficulty is real, and it's genuinely harder when the structures around it assume conditions that don't exist.
The one observation I'd add, from the audience I think about most — part-time doctoral researchers carrying serious intellectual work alongside full professional and family lives — is that the most sustaining thing is often not a strategy at all. It's the recognition that the slow, interrupted, partial version of scholarship they're actually doing is still scholarship. That doesn't solve the structural problems you describe, but it can change what continuing feels like.
Congratulations on the Centennial Grant. That's a real thing, and the fact that it arrived between two rejections doesn't diminish it — if anything, the timing makes it more itself.
Thank you for putting this out, in the form it eventually took. The piece reads as something that became more than a newsletter edition as it went, and that's part of what makes it valuable to read.
The observation that stayed with me was the one about academia continuing to assume forms of stability that many scholars simply don't have. The doctoral discourse most researchers encounter is largely written for an assumed reader who has a kind of stability and continuity many real scholars have never had access to and were never going to have. Your point about resilience needing to be collective rather than only personal feels like the most important move in the essay — the work of staying with scholarship through difficulty is real, and it's genuinely harder when the structures around it assume conditions that don't exist.
The one observation I'd add, from the audience I think about most — part-time doctoral researchers carrying serious intellectual work alongside full professional and family lives — is that the most sustaining thing is often not a strategy at all. It's the recognition that the slow, interrupted, partial version of scholarship they're actually doing is still scholarship. That doesn't solve the structural problems you describe, but it can change what continuing feels like.
Congratulations on the Centennial Grant. That's a real thing, and the fact that it arrived between two rejections doesn't diminish it — if anything, the timing makes it more itself.