Dr. Erika Alpert @ErikaAlpert@scholar.social

“I have never wanted to work on my book so badly as when article reviews come in”: A case study of labor and affect in the practices of one early career academic.

Frodo: “I’m glad to be here with you, Samwise Gamgee, here at the end of all things.”

Me, an intellectual: 😭😭😭😭😭

Even on a short field trip, one will usually be there long enough to need days off, alone time, or just quiet time sorting through data that has already been gathered so that it's not a total disaster when you're in a place to really sit down and analyze it. Taking time to write down notes. Sleeping and resting and preparing for and recovering from intense sociality.

And yet the sense that I'm wasting this precious chance to be here is overwhelming.

I've been in Japan and fieldworking for a week and today, today I crash for a tiny bit because I am just SLEEP.

Pizza delivery is lifesaving, thank you to the Karasuma Imadegawa Domino's.

Some people have honestly never contemplating the possibility of rejection, that they are imperfect and fallible and not universally beloved—and it shows.

Getting into the fieldwork rather than just setting up camp now. Starting to collect stories about bad behavior in dating and matchmaking, some of which are tremendously happy but many of which make me wonder how humans ever tolerate each other at all 😅

Protip: if you keep not proposing to something who is expecting a proposal (and you met through a MATCHMAKER), do not be surprised when they break up with you.

Always going to find reasons to come back to Kyoto (selfie w/ec).

If my marriage works, it's because my partner and I operate at really similar levels of clingy. This is my third day in the field and I'm already exhausted from texting all the things I'd normally just say or show 😅 Ethnographic fieldwork is so paradoxically lonely at the same time that it is definitionally a hyper-social activity.

I'd like to note that once upon a time I had a paper publicly shredded by an extremely senior scholar whose work I very much admire.

It was ROUGH.

But I did not melt into a sobbing puddle of despair, because it was detailed and harsh but also clearly CONSTRUCTIVE.

(Also, to be fair, I had voluntarily submitted said paper for feedback at a writing workshop.)

But the point is: there's a qualitative and VERY OBVIOUS difference between constructive and destructive comments.

I'm taking a brief moment from sobbing my eyes out over a truly, truly hateful review to be grateful that somehow I've made it through a PhD and five years into professing and this is the first actually hateful, not fundamentally constructive review I've ever received.

I feel very very grateful for linguistic anthropology as a discipline, in a broad sense.

Now back to sobbing my eyes out. Fairly literally.

https://soundstudiesblog.com/2019/05/13/vocal-anguish-disinformation-and-the-politics-of-eurovision/