A fork in the road. Photo by Oliver Roos on Unsplash

A few years ago I wrote two posts that reflected my position on the job market – in 2018, when I had just finished my postdoctoral fellowship and had no job on the horizon, and in late 2019 when I had at last secured a “permanent” job. (In inverted commas, because no job in UK HE is permanent these days.) In recent years, this blog has mostly been used to record my grief journey, and so the original purpose of this wordpress account has been on the back burner. But many things have happened on the work front this year, and it seemed like a good moment for reflection.

There are two different ways of telling the story of this year.

Once upon a time, a hard-working Senior Lecturer who had excelled despite her difficult personal circumstances, in an increasingly competitive higher education market carved out a new research area for herself, secured a prestigious British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to support said research, and was promoted to Associate Professor in History.

Once upon a time, a hard-working academic was, with the rest of her team, put through a gruelling redundancy consultation that saved her job but reduced all the historians’ hours (and pay), and faced the uncomfortable truth that in the existential crisis that faces the humanities in Higher Education, this is unlikely to be the last time this happened.

Both of these stories are true. At the recent Gender and Medieval Studies conference, I was struck by how often medieval narratives contain two stories that may seem to contradict one another, how I think it reflects a medieval capacity to hold both in their minds at once, because medieval people were just as capable as modern people of understanding complex truths.

At that conference I had the immense privilege of hosting a plenary final discussion. The topic was: How do we build a truly feminist conference when the world is on fire? The conversation was fierce, focused, fruitful, and while people talked I gave myself the challenge of writing a response to close the conference. In the end I wrote a call to arms, and a love letter. I think both of them summarise some of the challenges we are facing in our field and in our world, and my belief that it is community that can save us. I’m including them here as written – on the fly, in front of an audience – and perhaps their inevitable clunkiness is a record of the clumsy honesty of the heart, which these days I would prefer to anything with the soul polished out of it.

1.

Let’s kick down the door of the ivory tower, let’s dismantle the gate, let’s open all the doors to let everyone in; let’s move wholesale down the street. Let’s care for each other in radical ways by recognising our different and intersecting needs, let’s make sure our community is truly diverse, let us go let go of old models of scholarship that no longer serve us, let’s reach beyond the academy, let’s get medieval with everyone, everywhere, all at once.

2.

I love you because you are brave: you take risks, in your work and with your heart. I love you because you are a good friend, who makes space to hear me, not just waiting for a moment to insert your own point of view. I love you because you show up to do the work, not just talk about it. I love you because you show up, full stop. If you need to hear it again because you haven’t heard it enough:

I love you, I love you, I love you.