Jo VanEvery 0:00
Welcome to Creating A Satisfying Academic Career. I’m Jo VanEvery, and today I’m going to be talking to Lucie Matthews-Jones. Lucie, do you want to introduce yourself and say who you are and what you do, and that sort of thing?

Lucie 0:14
I’m Lucie. I’m a historian, or as I like to think of myself as a Victorian historian, because it rhymes so well. I’m based at Liverpool John Moores, where I’ve been for the last kind of 13 years, and I probably have a kind of, slightly, kind of, busy, sort of, profile in the sense that I obviously do research, which I really enjoy and I love. It focuses on what could be described as the British settlement movements, which is where sort of socially concerned modern British people went and lived in urban working class districts to kind of bring about kind of education, social, and philanthropic services. But I also am really passionate about teaching, and I’ve done some writing about teaching. And because I can’t bear the idea of not doing everything, I’ve also looked at a lot about what it means to be a disabled and neurodivergent researcher within my own institution. And I’ve done a lot of kind of service work around sort of thinking about what research culture looks like, and perhaps the barriers, but also sort of celebrating and thinking about kind of the exciting ways that disabled and neurodivergent people engage with their research process and what they do.

Jo VanEvery 1:38
Fantastic, and that’s- I mean, because you’re interested in all those things. That’s kind of why I invited you, because one of the things that I do, and I’ve been trying to do with my blog and my business for a long time, and I’m trying to do with this podcast, is to help scholars understand that there are lots of different ways to be an academic, and a lot of times, certain of those ways to be an academic seem to be, to get a lot more notice or a lot more prestige or whatever. There’s a sense that you have to do it a certain way, but people vary, right? And and some of that in ways that can be disabling in current social structures, and some of that just in normal, you know, you vary in terms of why you came into academia, what things were more important to you, all that kind of thing. So I just want to, kind of, with the podcast kind of help people understand some of that, and it seemed to me that you were doing some really interesting things around teaching and service and research that people might want to hear about.

Jo VanEvery 2:53
So, the other thing I want to say though is in the episode that came out on August 7, which is happens to be the day that we’re talking. I don’t know when we’re going to publish this, but the episode that came out on August 7 with Anna Law. One of the things she said was, you know, there there can be the career you want, but there’s only so many job opportunities, and sometimes you go in saying this is kind of what I want, and you get what you get, and then you make the best of it, and sometimes you’re actually like, “Oh, these are the kinds of things that I’d really like to have, and you do have some choices.” In a way, it doesn’t really matter if you can… You know, I sometimes say, like, I like to think of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as prophets in a sense for saying, you know, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you get what you need, right? And so I think it’s okay to want what you want. Sometimes people don’t let themselves want what they want because they’re like, “Well, what if I can’t get it? And then I’m just going to be disappointed.” It’s like, but if you try going for it, sometimes really interesting and cool things happen.

Jo VanEvery 3:57
So, I don’t know exactly what you wanted when you started, or even if that matters anymore, but you ended up 13 years ago getting a job at Liverpool John Moores University, which is for those people that don’t know it, a history as being more of a teaching-focused institution. Not that people don’t do research, but there is more teaching, possibly more serving local community as part of their mission – that kind of, it’s that kind of a a place. It’s definitely not Oxford. It’s not that kind of place at all. So you got that 13 years ago, and you’ve been there, and you have been promoted, and you have all that kind of thing, and even reward – you’ve had awards internally.

Jo VanEvery 4:42
So, maybe we could start with talking about the teaching which you are really interested in. And I noticed in your bio that you won an award from the Royal Historical Society back in 2018 for your teaching. You’ve been recognised by your own institution as well. And that since then, you’ve also worked with one or more of your colleagues to create a – to host a series of workshops called “Creative History in the Classroom”. Like, those are done now, but you did that a couple of years ago. So, what was going on with Creative History in the Classroom?

Lucie 5:18
So, as a kind of, I think disabled and kind of neurodivergent academic, one of the things that I’ve always been really conscious about is the way in which the written word kind of dominates, the sort of, ways in which we communicate. And I think within the British context, there were a couple of things that were, kind of, happening. There was a lot more kind of push to try and think about public history, and how students should be sort of encouraged to think about different ways of disseminating and communicating history. And also, within my own institution, I was at that point teaching year-long modules, and we had to have three assessment points. And so I kind of, you know, was doing the essay, I was doing the source analysis, and I wanted to do something that was a bit more fun and playful. And so I kind of, really latched on to this kind of movement that was occurring, and that had been kind of started in North America around the ‘un-essay’. And so I thought: “Oh, this would be a really interesting sort of assessment point for my own students.” And since then, I’ve really kind of expanded on that idea about what creativity is in the history classroom, partly because, I think I was perhaps a little bit inclined to think that students should be creative, but the learning process that I was giving those students wasn’t necessarily innovative around creativity. Like, we were doing poster work, I was trying to bring in role play, but it wasn’t going very successfully. So then I started to actually think about this idea of actually how creativity is about making and unmaking, and that is what it means to be knowledge producers. We’re always making knowledge. We’re always un-making knowledge. We’re always building on knowledge. And so now, especially since COVID, I’ve really latched onto this idea of small creativity – the idea of bringing kind of, like, small exercises into the classroom. And I do this probably mostly in my gender history module, but also in my 19th-century urban history module, where I invite students to think about what they’ve read and then how they might think about it as a creative product. So that could be the idea of making scenes, or sewing, or maybe creating LGBT plates for for the classroom. And I think, in some ways, this kind of approach to creativity is something that’s always been a part of history. But we’re very shy [at] admitting that we’re a creative subject, because we have such a kind of narrow idea, I think, sort of, even culturally around what creativity is. We often think it is about kind of being artistic, and or having like this ta-da moment around kind of maybe writing poetry, or stories or something like that. So I’ve really been keen to think about creativity, but I’m also very conscious that not everyone has to do that –

Jo VanEvery 5:18
Yeah. Yeah. No…

Lucie 8:30
– and not everyone has to lean into that. But I’m really, I’m really passionate about it. And I, I think for me, increasingly the complexity, and sort of, like, the ways in which our students are showing up in the classroom invites us to have to think a little bit more about how do we dismantle some of the intellectualism, or the academicness of what it means to be a student now?

Jo VanEvery 8:59
So… So, I really like that link that you made between creativity as making and unmaking, and the production of knowledge, because I have – often without really thinking too hard really, about what creativity is to be fair – I have often said that, you know, use that term ‘creating knowledge’ and talked to- about, you know, academic writing as a creative process and made connections. And one of the people that works with me – she provides mostly tech support and stuff for me, and has also become a friend over many many years – is a visual artist. Like, that’s what her main job is. She does a bit of tech support and web design on the side to, you know, to be able to pay the rent when the visual art, when she was building the business. But she’s a portrait artist in in a very old tradition of art. And so, one of the things she does is, like, in her newsletter and on social media, is post things about her process. You know, of painting, like “how does that look?” Because I don’t know anything about that, right? And you know, we often think about that, and there is, like, there are so many parallels to creating other things, right? It’s just, like, she has a particular vision and a particular set of materials that she uses, but you know, the the sort of sense that there are stages where the draft you’ve just completed doesn’t look anything like the final version, right? And all of that kind of stuff. And it’s just like… But also, that sense that as you’re doing these various stages of your process, you’re learning more, and, and creating new knowledge, and learning learning new things, right? And, and introducing students to that process. Like, shifting them from the idea – I mean the, one of the dominant ideas, which has, like, kind of, popped up again because some idiot is about, talking about it, that doesn’t know anything about history is talking about it in relation to AI. But you know, the idea that ‘history is just a bunch of facts’. Right? Like, that’s just such a dominant cultural idea about what history is. So I think this idea that this is – that knowledge is this thing we create – that it isn’t just a bunch of facts that we kind of uncover, or whatever, that can speak for themselves, is is already something we’re kind of, you know, most historians are sort of aware of. So, you’re just saying: “Well, we don’t just have to use words to do this. We don’t just have to use this very limited set of forms, like the essay, and the source analysis” – or whatever, right? Which I’m assuming all the, all the historians listening know exactly what you mean by a source analysis, and the rest of us are like, “Okay, I can kind of imagine what that might be. We’ve got a similar thing in our discipline” – or whatever. So what are some of the activities? Like, I kind of, I kind of have this, like, you were talking in a recent Studio thing about taking students for, like, walks, and I know you do some of that with your own research on the settlement movement. So, like, how do you, how do you use something like walking, which most people don’t think of as creative, in both your teaching and your research?

Lucie 12:27
Yeah, so I think one of the things I’ve increasingly started to realise is a lot of my ideas around research and teaching are all about the body, the body in kind of motion, and in activity, and walking is something I really enjoy doing with my students. And that’s either through just doing a normal conventional kind of walking tour, or alternatively, like there’s one session I do with my Victorian city students, where like, luckily 10 minutes away is Faulkner Square, which is this kind of really interesting kind of early Victorian, possibly more Georgian square. It’s a bit like those classic London squares that you see, but it’s in Liverpool, and at the time it was classed as a suburb, which for us is probably really surprising because it’s like literally I don’t know 12-15 minutes walk from the city centre. But it was the edge of the city, which is what suburbs are. And so what we do is we then walk to Faulkner Square, and I sort of introduce them to the kind of formation of the streets, to the buildings, to the designs, to thinking about “Well, why does this building look like this?” and all of that. And then I get them – when we arrive in Faulkner Square – to kind of, like, think about kind of the senses, and the noise, and get them to walk around, and to think about “What do all the different buildings look like?” And I think, what that really kind of encourages is, in all of this, is… One of the problems, I think, with knowledge production is, we’re not very good at ever thinking about the production side. And it maybe… It sort of like, leans into what you’re talking about process which is, a lot of the times, I think, when you give students reading, it kind of – and history is a really bad subject for doing this is – we don’t talk about methods very well. We just produce the information, like, and we produce our analysis, and what we want to say to our students, but we don’t really give a sense of how we get to that process, how we get to the final product. And so, in getting them to walk around, what I’m really keen to get them to do is to activate their brain, and to think about kind of, like, how the reading they’re set that week is animated through the material culture, or through the layout of the place and space. And I think it just kind of really centres the idea that in some ways, the joining up of knowledge for students has to be more kind of activated and animated for them, because one of the really kind of frustrating things about history teaching is that when they come to us from doing it at GCSE or A levels, they’ve often had to rely on the idea that what they’re doing is kind of like this rote learning. They’re learning facts, but at university we want student voices, we want student agency, and we want them to be, almost like: ‘give us a surprise about something that you can see’. But that’s not how they come to us as students. And so, for me, like, creativity is just one way of actually kind of suggesting to them that when joining up the dots, you can do it through kind of messiness, and it can be playful, and it can be less kind of, like, linear, and it’s not about notes. And I also think the body as well, rather, that if you centre the body, whether or not that’s cutting up, or sort of you know colouring in, rather than writing or walking – what the body is doing is it’s thinking. And there’s not enough space, I don’t think, [given] to the idea of thinking. Partly because, for students – but this is also for academics – we’re bound up by this kind of rhythm, and this speed to always be producing, to be fast. And in some ways, when, with my creative activities, what I really like is the kind of way that they actually get to talk to each other by being slower, by offering them prompts to think about, to think about kind of the reading, but also the process that they’re sort of like going through, and they’re more confident to actually expose when they’re struggling through. Because, like, you know, sewing, for instance, they can often do cross stitch. When they, when I ask them to cross stitch their initial, they’re actually really bad at it. But they don’t mind, they don’t mind being bad at creativity because you’re allowed to be bad, not being creative. But you’re not allowed to be bad in a classroom setting, or to feel that you’re developing in a classroom setting, because we almost can lean too far into the idea that everything has to, or the student has to, be coming in how we want them to leave in the third year, for instance, is how I can, how I can sometimes feel about teaching.

Jo VanEvery 17:35
Absolutely, absolutely. That that… And especially… Yeah, yeah. I think some of the conversation about grading, which has happened, especially in the U.S. where people sometimes have a bit more flexibility about what they’re doing around assessments and grading, has really tapped into that notion of like, if everything is about the grades, then how do you, how do you focus on development? And I think one of the things… You know how sometimes you read a thing, and it sticks with you for a really long time, right? Even though you haven’t read it. And there was a thing I read when I was a graduate student in the early ’90s – and so it was published in like 1989 in the journal Gender and Society – it was based on a presidential address or in a keynote at their conference, and it was it was by Barrie Thorne, and she was talking about children in sociology. I’m a sociologist, right? And she was, and she was talking about how we understand children in sociology, and one of the things she said in that, was that, we often, that these, that she was drawing on some other scholars’ work, and I- (you know, it’s been a long time since I’ve read this, so I’m not going to have all the all the proper kind of citations at the tip of my fingers), but the the really powerful thing for me was this way that she was drawing on other scholars’ work, including a historian, possibly Tamara Hareven, about different kinds of time. And she was talking about historical time, and there were three: there was historical time, and developmental time, and something else. And one of the things she said is that, we often see children purely in developmental time, right? That we see them as always ‘becoming’, and we don’t locate them in the historical moment, right? And like, a really small example of that is when I first had my child, which again, almost 30 years ago now, I remember my mom coming to visit, and making some comment about the clothing I’d put on her, and how I was dressing her like a 20-year-old because I’d put little dungarees and a t-shirt on her as opposed to what she saw as baby clothes. And, and again, it’s this thing about, somehow… “What, somehow babies don’t exist in a particular historical moment? Like, there’s just baby clothes.” Right? And and if you’re dressing them in something that feels like contemporary to the moment in which you’re living, that you’re dressing them like an adult, like that, that was sort of how she felt. And I definitely… Having read that so many years ago, early in my, you know, I was a PhD student at the time – I think that kind of, sense of questioning, like: “How are we seeing these people in time?” Like: “Are we seeing them as kind of individuals living in this historical moment?” Blah blah blah. [Or] “Are we just seeing them as these people in a particular stage of a developmental process?” And, and I think that’s a really important distinction to make. And what you’re pointing out, is that we then created an education system that, at the one, at the- on the one hand, just sees them that way, right? “These are people becoming graduates, and we need them to show us that they can be that thing at the end, even though they’re not there yet, while also making it hard for them to actually be developing and making all the mistakes that we have to make in order to learn” – and and all of that kind of thing, right? And then I guess the other thing is, is this focus on – which, again there seems to be a rising tide of people that are like “Children need to sit still.” – I don’t know… As a Victorianist, you must find it kind of weird to have so many people being like, “Oh, what we really need is more discipline in schools, and people have to sit still, and look at the teacher, and not be staring out the window”, and all this kind of thing. And it’s just like, okay, I’m sorry, I’m not, I’m not really sure… Whereas you’re like, “No. Being in the body [is better]”, “How can I introduce, into my teaching, ways for my students to be more in the body?” That… Yeah… It just… That just seems… That’s, like, really an interesting thing. And, and [as] part of that, you’ve developed those things, like, by running these workshops. Like, how… You’re not just doing it on your own, right? And you’re not just reading books about the un-essay, or whatever, right? You’re actually talking to your own colleagues about these things and developing them collaboratively. Is that true?

Lucie 17:35
Yes. And like one of the things I really have enjoyed are the creative history workshops that I did a few years ago. And what was so exciting about that is we just had a range of international scholars, because we did them online. And we did them more as kind of like sort of focused workshops rather than a whole one day conference, or two day conference. And so we kind of had these, like, themed focuses, and we were able to get scholars from Argentina, Japan, North- all over North America…

Jo VanEvery 22:35
Wow!

Lucie 22:35
Obviously in Britain as well. And it was just really interesting to hear about how different, different disciplines are using historical sort of modes of teaching, like, to bring creativity into the classroom. And it was kind of intriguing that in some ways it wasn’t- it wasn’t really historians that were sort of leading some of this stuff. It was English scholars, it was art historians, it was people who were teaching English as a second language. And what I really, what really struck me through all of this was, sort of, like, the ways in which almost, I I think, sort of, like… One of the things you kind of said was, like, this kind of historical moment. And I think what was interesting, was actually the ways in which all of these members of staff were actually being reflective about the moment and thinking about how that could be put into their teaching.

Lucie 22:58
Because I’m very convinced that some of the ways in which history, but, a lot – history as a subject, but also universities – are kind of predicated, really, on a very traditional understanding of what university education is. I don’t know how true this is. I feel like I read this, like, probably a billion years ago. But I can, I think I can remember John Ruskin. I think he might have said that: “The reason why Oxbridge students had to write essays was because they’d go into the civil service, where they would always be writing reports.” And I just, I thought that was kind of really interesting, that even then they were latched onto the idea of, like, “Well, where are the students going to?”

Lucie 24:33
But in some ways, what recently I think everything has always been for me, is about this question about: “How do we create learning environments for everybody?” So when I first started at LJMU, I was teaching students that were home-based students. So, they largely came from Liverpool. They were from, sort of, a wider sort of social economic group. They were sort of typically white working class, and that’s, and the profile that still exists in in my university and in my programme. And we’ve also started to see kind of the recognition that actually there are more students that are disabled and neurodivergent, and that’s coming through from, coming from earlier education. But also I think COVID as well actually invited us to be more reflective about whether or not our teaching worked in certain contexts, and I I I kind of really believe that those sort of those kind of like questions that we’ve had have made me want to think more about how we create inclusive environments for teaching…

Jo VanEvery 25:49
Yep.

Lucie 25:50
…that recognise that actually students are a diverse pool, and that everyone benefits from having sort of diversity and difference in their assessments, in the ways in which they’re taught, and taught more broadly. So, I think what’s really nice is that there are these pockets to have these conversations about teaching. Although I do also caveat with: I don’t think we talk enough about teaching…

Jo VanEvery 26:21
No, absolutely not. Yes.

Lucie 26:22
…as a profession. One of the things I used to love about Twitter / X was the fact that actually, I think it was far more open as a space to teaching, and to talking about teaching practice, to kind of celebrating and recognising people’s little small wins in the classroom on a weekly basis.

Jo VanEvery 26:42
Yeah.

Lucie 26:42
I don’t think that culture has translated over into Bluesky, which I think is much more kind of focused on the narrative of crisis and the problems within the sector.

Jo VanEvery 26:54
Yeah.

Lucie 26:55
I can, I can see why there’s a, there’s a… Particularly in the British context, there’s a lot of like, kind of, challenges that we’re kind of faced with. But for me, what that does is… If we can’t celebrate our small wins – and it’s often the classroom where we have the most autonomy – if we can’t celebrate that, or feel like it’s recognised, or to show that actually careers can be developed through teaching, then I think we’re doing a disservice to a lot of staff. Because, as you’re aware, I, for instance, have been very teaching focused.

Jo VanEvery 27:32
Yeah.

Lucie 27:33
I’ve often… I’m- I’m research – I would describe myself as ‘research active’, but that is also running in tandem with trying to think about teaching, of being teaching active, and thinking about the classroom.

Jo VanEvery 27:46
And you’re also thinking about the classroom in a scholarly way. Like, it’s not, like, you bring a different mindset to the way you approach teaching. You know? You approach those issues in this, and questions that you have about: “How do I teach this?” – in the same way you approach your research questions, in many ways, right? Like, it’s the same, and I think you’re right. You know?

Jo VanEvery 28:12
And so many, so many people go into academia, and, and want to work in this sector because of teaching, and because… You know… And sometimes, it’s that they’ve been inspired by teachers. Sometimes it’s, you know, there’s a lot of people that are inspired by: “I want to be able to teach better than I was taught. I recognise some things that I really hated about the way that I was taught, and, and I think it could be better, and I want the sector to be better, and it can be very frustrating.” But even if that’s not your primary motivation, it is just a big chunk of the work, right? Even if you’re working at a high prestige – low teaching load institution, teaching still is a big thing in your workload, and and it takes a lot of time. And I think… I think not- not talking about it, and not recognising, like you say, those small wins, and not recognising, you know, the things that happen in the classroom, as you know, is a real detriment.

Jo VanEvery 29:28
And in relation to the current crisis, I think it also means we don’t have a really nuanced way of responding to some of the ways that teaching is being treated in institutions that are undergoing financial crisis, right? Like we’re seeing institutions reducing the number of options they’re offering, requiring people to teach in more generic ways, all that, all that kind of thing, and and I think that is partly. You know, not that it’s our fault; it’s their fault. Absolutely, but that’s partly made possible by the fact that we don’t have this rich conversation about what teaching is and could could could be.

Lucie 30:14
I also think one of the problems we have as a sector – and obviously, I’m grossly generalising – is, I think we’ve binarized research and teaching.

Jo VanEvery 30:24
Oh, absolutely.

Lucie 30:25
We don’t…

Jo VanEvery 30:25
Yeah.

Lucie 30:26
We don’t accept the idea that actually teaching and research are kind of one and the same thing because we, as researchers, go into the classroom. So it’s our kind of methods, our approaches, our processes that we’re sharing with our students. It might sometimes be the case that we are directly sharing our research, but our research identity is far more than just the articles and books that we produce.

Lucie 30:59
I think one of the really sad things about teaching in university is the way that we often see it as taking away from research time, and yet I I believe that in some ways the frustration of that comes because we are so dogged by an institutional context that means that we are are seen as producers of outputs, and those outputs should only be research outputs if we’re thinking about our identity. Whereas for me, I write about my teaching because I have lived experience of my teaching, and we are all – we all have auto-ethnographic observations and perspectives around teaching. Like, we don’t need to become educationists to write about teaching. But it’s curious to me that as a sector, we only see the value if – of writing – if we can say it’s about intellectual academic [writing]. And so that’s kind of like a mindset that even we put onto our students, because we only see the value in the mindset of the essay, or the kind of like, long prose piece of work that brings about conversations from other academics. Whereas I think we could be doing more to actually showcase our research, whether or not that be a sort of message on social media, or an article, or a blog. You know, the disappearance of blogs is to me really sad.

Jo VanEvery 31:22
Yeah.

Lucie 31:22
It used to feel, like, you used to, like, open up social media, and someone had, would have written a blog, and it used to feel so exciting, and you felt felt like your brain was tingling. And now I don’t think that’s what social media does at all, because it’s just about kind of like sucking you into these…

Jo VanEvery 32:57
Yeah, yeah. And some of it…

Lucie 32:58
…discussions about crisis.

Jo VanEvery 33:00
I mean, I think some people are still blogging. Some people are more… I’m hearing more people talking about missing that. And also I think some people are using podcasts to have those conversations. So, you know, although I talked to Anna Law about you know in the August podcast a lot about her process, and writing the book, and how that fit, and the time, how she found time, and what kind of career she’s had, and whatever, because that’s kind of my focus. She’s done a lot of podcast interviews about her book and about the content of the book and about all of that kind of thing in a way that I think 10 years ago people might have just – they might have been blog posts, right, about things in the book. So, I think part of it is just that. And there are people doing some interesting things with video, though I- I don’t understand why anybody has the time to try and face- how to deal with the YouTube algorithm in order to… You know? Because that’s- that’s a whole thing. But that might just be me being old. Not really want[ing] to… There’s some things I just don’t want to figure out. I feel like I can get away without that.

Jo VanEvery 34:08
But I think you’re right. And I have thought that about the kind of artificial separation of research and teaching, and the ways in which some people talk about – I mean, people will talk about research-led teaching, but they don’t really specify very much about what that means. There is a very narrow version of that, that does get talked about, in which people talk about being able to teach, and, and, you know, assign the things they’re reading for their research to their students, and the conversations they have with their students. I- I always wonder if, when they’re talking about that, they’re really talking about teaching Master’s level students, or PhD level students, or even maybe possibly final year undergraduates. But I think some of those, sort of, star researchers, and the- you know the- you know the people that are teaching at more research focused institutions.

Jo VanEvery 34:54
I think there has also – like, as well as like talking about that split, there’s also, when you look at the pattern, the changing patterns of employment terms and conditions, you can also see that one of the things that’s happened is that the research-focused positions are very much doing the postgraduates, and maybe final year undergraduate teaching, and that the first year teaching is very much contingent people. And so there’s also this sense of “Oh, well the research is only really relevant when you get to these higher levels” as opposed to being something that informs our teaching all the way through.

Jo VanEvery 35:52
And you know when I was teaching over 20 years ago now, there was starting to be this conversation about study skills and introducing study skills and all that kind of thing, and, and, and for first years, that gets talked about in terms of study skills, right? As opposed to, you know, for me when I was teaching a first year sociology class, what I interpreted that as, was: we need these people to make that shift that you’re talking about, from, from thinking of learning as ‘learning a bunch of facts and reproducing them to show that you’ve learned’, you know, what you know, like that, that kind of model to understanding the process by which we produce these things, and [towards] giving them the tools that they need, the skills that they need to be able to do that themselves, right? And and I think that felt very – like, it was good. I really liked how it worked. My colleagues, we were all on board with it.

Jo VanEvery 36:28
But I don’t think that’s become the dominant model. I think what’s happened, for all kinds of reasons, many of which are institutional pressures, and who gets hired to do what, and everything else. And there are some amazing people doing amazing things in those first year classrooms with very little institutional support on really shitty contracts. But the fact is, the institutional and the academic culture is very much, as you say, splitting those things. And the fact that they’re on really shitty contracts for really shitty pay, reinforces the idea that the institution does not value that work. Right? It seems to me like we’re in a capitalist society. The way we value things is by paying people, and if you are paying the people that are doing first year teaching poor wages and putting them on contracts with subsidiary companies so that they don’t get the the same pension benefits. You’re saying these people are not as valuable.

Lucie 37:47
Yeah, and I think it’s it’s really disappointing to kind of see a lot of the practices that are kind of occurring around kind of precarious, sort of, like, members of staff. And you know, I’m really kind of worried about kind of all of these PhD students, and ECRs about the vulnerability of their position in the sector.

Jo VanEvery 38:11
Yeah. Mmhmm.

Lucie 38:12
The other side of that is that I don’t teach with those people because I do the teaching. So when it comes to the skills module, that’s me that’s doing that. So I teach the first year Making History module. We don’t have precarious members of staff employed in in my university, um, in the same way that you would in other parts of the sector I think.

Jo VanEvery 38:38
Which is great.

Lucie 38:39
Yeah, which is great – but it means that historically, and also personally, your experiences of teaching are very different.

Jo VanEvery 38:47
Yeah.

Lucie 38:47
And so, like, you know, it’s kind of… I think one of the challenges of the sector is actually I think to try and understand the diversity of people’s experiences around teaching. I think you can hold certain positions around kind of the research teaching binary if you’re in certain institutions that just don’t happen in post 1992s in the same way that they would in sort of glass universities, or Oxbridge, or Russell Group universities. I would, however, say that one of the things I think that’s really interesting, and I think this is about kind of lived experiences of what it means to be an academic, is that for for me, when it comes to the idea of thinking about skills or processes, I think that has always been a part of what it means to be a disabled person in university education. So I always knew I was dyslexic. I came to university knowing that because I was tested at 15. So I did my GCSEs, A levels, and university career knowing I was dyslexic. And that kind of, I think, being dyslexic did two things. Firstly, I worked with disability support officers as an undergraduate and also as a PhD student as well. And I think what came across to me from that was how unfair the system is at never really revealing how things are supposed to be done, that there was an assumption that everything was learnt through osmosis, or there’s a feeling that sometimes the more reading you do, the better you write, or the better you understand how to structure an essay. “If you just, if you just do more reading.” Like, but actually there are rules, and I still don’t know the rules of the English language, like, I’m not a part of that sort of generation that was taught grammar, or comma, or anything anything like that. So that kind of also meant that I ended up having to rely a lot on my partner and my friends to actually tell me what those rules were. And I think, as an academic, I’ve always been inclined to think about: “Well, how do I make sure that my students understand those rules, or understand the kind of processes?” Because actually, the system is opaque, and I even think it’s opaque, even even for me, like trying to write a book,

Jo VanEvery 41:10
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Lucie 41:25
And I find it really interesting that like the times I’m the most productive at writing my book are often the times when I’m reading about what it means to write books, or I’m listening to podcasts about academic writing, or or I’m just kind of like doing book coaching. Like, I am always having to give myself scaffolded tools to do the book. And I think that’s one of the, for me, as a neurodivergent disabled staff member in the sector, is the biggest challenge, is like: I- I think the book for me has been really hard, because we are so obscure about what it means. Like, even if you read these guides about how to write, it’s always like: “Well, get up early. Structure your day. Do the – do X, Y, and Z.” Like as though it’s like about being productive in writing.

Jo VanEvery 42:22
But also, as if, as if you know what to do, once you… Like if you got up early, and structured your day, and turned up to write, that the part that happens in there is not the part you’re struggling with. But what you’re saying is “Sometimes I want to know…” Like… And I remember because when I started as an undergraduate, I was actually a science student, and then I switched to sociology later. And one of the things that, you know, so I knew how to write a lab report, right? Like, there’s there’s sections to a lab report, and I really brought that to other essay writing because it just was, like, “Okay, well, there’s a structure. I’ll use that.” And I think, you know, like, like you say, it’s like, well, that’s a place to start, and having a template is a place to start. And sometimes you need somebody to provide that for you. And that’s not… Like, why do we treat that as “oh somehow you’re not smart enough to figure it out for yourself?” Like, it’s just… Whereas one of the things… My daughter has an ADHD diagnosis, and one of the things she frequently says is, “But one of the things about ADHD is you’re really good at pattern recognition. So when she was like six, she could write properly punctuated dialogue because she read a lot, right? And she did just learn it by osmosis, because part of how her brain works is the pattern recognition. But if you’re dyslexic, your brain works in a different way, right? And you don’t necessarily see all that, or it’s… So… You know? I’m not… I don’t know how… Like, I don’t- I’m not dyslexic, so I don’t know exactly [know] how that- how that works, and how that experience that. But we somehow kind of expect: “Oh everybody [who], if you read a lot, just recognises the patterns and is able to reproduce them.” But that’s not actually true, even if some people do. Right? And we’re rewarding people for things that are not evidence of their, of what we’ve taught them, necessarily. I mean, I think that’s the other thing is the the the lack of conversation around what assessment means, right? Like, you’re creating these new assessments, and partly it’s about: “How do I get people thinking? And how do I get people being vulnerable about the developmental process, so that they can figure stuff out, and learn, and become what I want them to be?”

Lucie 44:46
Yeah, and it’s kind of interesting actually, because I think, I think now we’re talking as a sector more about the end product because we’re talking about AI. And so, like, what’s been really curious to me about the sort of, like, discussion around teaching more recently is: “How can we trust our students to actually [be] producing the things that they claim to be producing?” And that’s, for me, one of the reasons I think we as a sector need to talk more about the innovation that we bring into the classroom, because the narrative of teaching is too much about distrusting the student from the very beginning, that what they’re submitting isn’t their work. But I find it really fascinating, because I can remember for a very long time, people who have been talking about inclusive teaching practices have always said that: “We should be assessing students around processes of learning” – because actually, like, some students might be the hardest working students in the classroom, but they might not be the student that writes the essay that you expect them to write. And so, there’s been an assumption that, like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could start talking about, you know, self-reflective journals?” – all that sort of stuff. And now we’re starting to talk about it, but [largely] because we found that AI has become a barrier to the end product.

Jo VanEvery 45:55
Yeah.

Lucie 45:57
And I, and I think we do need to start thinking about, kind of, like, actually how we test things, sort of, like, throughout the semester. Not… And that might be weekly, with students doing reading reports that aren’t about analysing an article. It’s more about things that they – where they might be talking about what they liked, what they didn’t. You know? Centering the student process, or lots of other ways in which we could be doing that. And I hope that that is some of the direction that we go in. Because for me, like, the hardest part of being an academic, and the things I think my students struggle with are the processes.

Jo VanEvery 46:45
Absolutely.

Lucie 46:45
And it’s about, kind of, like, actually saying “You’re doing a really good job”. And actually, you’re sort of approaching this more like a developmental kind of staging, rather than the idea that actually – you give them the content, they go off and write an essay. Well, actually: why don’t we reward? [Then] Oh, you’ve made an incremental, an incremental kind of learning, like experience.

Jo VanEvery 47:10
Yeah, yeah.

Lucie 47:11
I think the journey matters more.

Jo VanEvery 47:13
I do too.

Lucie 47:15
I think academics and lecturers are not very good at understanding that the journey is really important. Even if the journey becomes about frustration and barriers, as much as about kind of, like, being, and developing something that is a new way of thinking, or yeah, for students and for academics.

Jo VanEvery 47:35
Yeah. Well, and developing a new way of thinking is frustrating, when you’re…

Lucie 47:40
Yeah, it is.

Jo VanEvery 47:41
Right? You know what I mean? Like, it’s, it’s kind of, like, you know? And how many, how many people who, who… You know, I think this is one of the, one of the kind of things is that some people, you know, the… I sometimes think that it’s actually a barrier to doing this well, if you were the kind of person that always got A’s. Right? Because, because, because you didn’t… You know, you might not have… Right? Like, you talk about, you know, dealing with, you know, working out how to do this with dyslexia, helped you see some of the what’s under the hood. And how: “What do I have to do in order to be able to do this well?” And you obviously are very capable of doing historical research, and writing, and teaching, or you wouldn’t be in the job that you’re in, right.

Jo VanEvery 48:29
But for some people, and you know, it’s like, well, we just… If you just are good at things… But then what happens is when that gets rewarded a lot, I know a lot of people who are, like, “Well, when I try something new, and I’m not good at it right away, I just give up.” And, and they start to recognise in adulthood, that that’s not necessarily a good thing. And so there has started to become little pockets of conversation about the value of learning things that you don’t need to get good at, and doing classes. I think I saw a whole big thread on Bluesky yesterday with somebody talking about how they like to take classes just regularly as a sort of leisure activity in – and and [they] allow themselves to be kind of mediocre at certain things for the joy of doing them, right? Which I think gets back to your thing about the body, and about learning as this full kind of, you know… It’s not just about memorising facts; it’s about developing, and about doing things, and about just engaging with stuff. And that some of, for some things, we’re going to do that to a standard where we’re really good at it, and we might actually make a living doing it. And for other things, it’s just “oh.” You know? We need… We enjoy, we enjoy… It’s okay to just enjoy it. That it is okay to enjoy learning. It’s okay to enjoy writing, or parts of writing. It’s okay to enjoy… You know, whatever.

Jo VanEvery 49:54
And I, and I think that sort of sense of: “Oh, well, it should be hard. And it should be…” Right. But also, that frustration, that frustration can be part of the enjoyment, right? Like being frustrated, and then figuring out how to overcome that, or what’s going on, is also in itself enjoyable – which we talk about a bit with early learning, like, early years stuff. But somehow, once people are over about, you know 12 years old, we stop thinking about that, and we stop thinking about… One of the people I follow on Twitter [Bluesky] is an early years educator, and I just love the way she talks about education, because you know she is like: “Well, you can’t.” – you know, she’s teaching three year olds, you can’t make those people sit still, right? I mean you can try, but it does not work. That’s not in the nature of a three-year-old. But somehow, for some people, the idea is: well, yes, for three-year-olds, it needs to be about the body, and about movement, and about all this kind of thing. But what you’re develop- you know, they’re develop- the… Viewing them in developmental terms, means it’s like: “Oh, but by the time you’re 10, you should be able to sit still.” – which, you know, all the people with ADHD have suffered from for their entire lives. Now, it’s like, you know, sometimes we learn better if we’re not looking right at the person speaking to us, or we learn – you know, we’re actually listening better. Like, I often find I close my eyes when I’m really trying to understand what someone’s saying to me orally because getting rid of the visual stimulation helps me focus on the auditory input, and you know? But similarly, you know, some people, you know, you know, just the the thing about fidgets, or walking, or you know, whatever… It’s just like you know, sometimes that actually is not distracting you from paying attention, it’s actually supporting you in paying attention. And and for some people, I can’t work with music on in the background, but I know other people can’t work without it. And I saw a great Facebook meme about that, which is like: “No, I have to have the music on to distract the toddler in my brain, so I can focus on the thing I need to do.” [Laughter

Lucie 52:00
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 52:02
You know?

Lucie 52:03
Yeah, which is why, which is why, like, one of the things I’ve really leaned into, is this kind of relaxed pedagogy. But also – which is inviting you to kind of, you know, dismantle some of those kind of rules. And something like this, is plenary procedures of the classroom that students come in with. So I don’t mind students eating or drinking or getting up and going to the toilet. Or, you know, I do invite them to move around, but they don’t actually do it. The other side of it is that I really love like, [Cate] Denials’ idea of like “A Pedagogy of Kindness”. That’s about being kind to yourself, and it’s also about being sort of, like, kind to your students. And I think that’s a really important kind of like value.

Lucie 52:53
And I suppose kind of like one of the things, like talking about creating the career that you have, is I’ve really kind of actually had to sit a lot with what my values are, and what my – what it means for me to feel authentic as an academic. And I think sometimes we are over pushed to think that to be an academic you have to be a writer, you have to be intellectual. You have to be kind of like the knowledge producer or all seer. Like, that’s obviously a sort of slight generalisation, but I really kind of, really sort of thought to myself, “Well, what does it mean for me to be authentic?” And that has meant that, like, I have maybe, possibly, overstretched myself in doing the things I want to do. But I think that also speaks a lot about kind of what I think it is to be a lecturer. So rather than kind of latching into these sort of cultural and social ideas about what being a lecturer is, or even like our disciplinary ideas, I think teaching is really important. I think if you’re a researcher, the first people who are going to hear your ideas or your approaches or your methods are your students, and I really enjoy that kind of like reciprocal nature that you can have with them by developing kind of a sort of space that they can come into, where they feel they can share their ideas, or they feel that they are sort of there, and it’s not high stakes. And that’s what I always want students to feel when they come into the classroom.

Lucie 54:31
And I really love research. Like I am always researching. Like, I’m… And there’s a historian called William Acton in the 19th century where he was always researching and never wrote his book, and I definitely think I’m probably that 21st century version of him in the sense that, like, I really find joy in researching, and I do, I do do my writing, but what I’ve also started to realise is it’s kind about authentic product. So I have a desperate desire to write my book. I will write my book, but I also really just love writing articles. Articles are a really easy tool for me. Like, like I’ve had more than one academic say to me, “You know how to write articles. It’s really clear that you get what an article should and shouldn’t be doing.” And I… That’s my favourite type of writing. And my favourite type of writing is always looking at a collection of small sources. So if you look at my writing for articles, it’s always about smallness. It’s always about kind of like 80 photographs, 60 letters, one diary, one letter book, and then pulling out of that and sort of like thinking about kind of the details, and kind of what you can get from that, either at an organisational level, or kind of more widely. And the problem is, I’m always trying to do that with my book. And that’s what I mean by the fact that we’re not very clear about saying, “Well, this is what a history book is.”

Jo VanEvery 56:07
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 56:08
Because actually, like what I’ve typically tended to do with that is run run off with the detail, and so I’ve got this like encyclopaedic knowledge of what I want to put in my book, and now the hard part is knowing: “Well, how do you structure it when you know so much?” And: “How do you not get lost in the detail of a story? And what stories are the most important?” So that’s what I’m kind of like grappling with a lot. But I think because I’m always kind of like aware that you’re, I’m grappling with the book. It’s made me really sensitive to the idea that actually doing, doing research, doing a degree is really hard.

Jo VanEvery 56:50
Yeah.

Lucie 56:51
It’s not easy. So I kind of like have a lot of empathy for students around kind of those processes, and I love kind of like dissertation supervision of my third years, because I get to kind of encourage them to think about their sort of processes, and also recognise that it’s very challenging.

Lucie 57:10
But I’ve also increasingly started to think through this work that I’ve done with disabled and neurodivergent researchers, how kind of like, we create a lot of structural barriers within the culture of research around what it means to be an academic. So, like for me, I personally feel that historians overvalue the book…

Jo VanEvery 57:34
Yes.

Lucie 57:35
…as as as the tool of credibility of being able to say: “Yes. I’m a historian. Therefore, I wrote the definitive book on this topic.” Yeah, and what I’ve increasingly started to like kind of really lean into was something that you said when we did book coaching was this idea that historians are really bad at thinking about their research as a sort of kind of like process and a product, so it’s like historians will always just say, “I’m writing the book. I’m writing a book, a book, a book. So when you talk to anyone, it’s always about the book. So I really kind of leaned more into the idea of like, “Well, if I’m writing, what am what am I now writing for? Like it might be the end goal to understand the book, but it doesn’t have to feel like it’s always for the book,

Jo VanEvery 57:56
Yeah.

Lucie 57:47
And what I’ve increasingly started to, like, kind of really lean into was something that you said when we did book coaching, was this idea that historians are really bad at thinking about their research as a sort of kind of like process and a product. So it’s like, historians will always just say, “I’m writing the book. I’m writing a book, a book, a book.” So when you talk to anyone, it’s always about the book. So I really, kind of leaned more into the idea of, like, “Well, if I’m writing, what am- what am I now writing for?” Like, it might be the end goal to understand the book, but it doesn’t have to feel like it’s always for the book.

Jo VanEvery 58:23
Right. If

Lucie 58:24
If you can, kind of, get what I mean? Which is why I think I’m much more happy writing about teaching. Well, not – I don’t say I’m happier writing about teaching. I think that’s *one* of the reasons why I write my teaching stuff, or why I want to think about teaching. Because actually, it’s not an “and/or” question to me. Writing is just writing. And I love- I love writing, writing my thoughts, and writing my processes. And so…

Jo VanEvery 58:52
Well, and and then using that, like forming that into something you can share with someone else, helps you kind of organise your thoughts and processes. Like it, that’s the process through which you create knowledge, which is not just a bunch of facts, but actually… Right? Yeah, something. And it’s even like

Lucie 59:08
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 59:09
Or something beyond that.

Jo VanEvery 59:09
And it’s even, like… Yeah, and it’s even like, these, and creative workshop- creative history in the classroom workshops that we did – that’s now a special issue, and I wrote an introduction for that, which I really loved writing. It really helped me sort of like really lean into thinking about “Well, what am I doing with this? Why? Why creativity? Like why does it matter to me so much?” And then obviously, it’s a special issue that I’ve got some amazing articles by other academics talking about the creative process in their teaching and learning. And I think that’s one of the things I think as a historian, I’m always really keen on thinking about is disseminating the kind of real vision of what it means to be an academic. So I’m always slowly working on the book. But I’m also really keen to have people recognise, or offer a perspective that: You *can* talk about teaching…

Jo VanEvery 1:00:10
Yeah

Lucie 1:00:10
…and it can be a part of your career identity. And that might be because at the end of the day, you know, we spoke about precarious members of staff, but we’re also seeing a sector that is starting to create teaching-only jobs.

Jo VanEvery 1:00:23
Yeah.

Lucie 1:00:23
And you know, I I’m really worried about that just as much as precarity because I think that means that we’re sort of like kind of not showcasing what actually we would like our teaching-focused members of staff to be publishing on. Because what we still see is people saying: “I’m still doing my research. I’m just teaching.”

Jo VanEvery 1:00:47
Yeah. And also, yeah, yeah, and… But then also, the fact that even if you weren’t writing and publishing about teaching, if you were writing and – that the scholarship you’re doing on your research, like the work you’re doing on the settlement movement, and related things, right, is also informing your teaching, right? Both in in the content, in the methods, in all of that kind of thing, and that being an active researcher is something that informs how you teach and what you’re trying to teach students to be able to do. I used to, I used to explicitly say to students, it’s like: “You’re doing the same thing we’re doing. You’re just a novice.” Right? So we’re not expecting you to produce the kind of thing that we, as professional researchers, are producing. But you are, you are producing a novice version of the same kind of thing, right? It’s not a different thing, and, and in order for that to be, right, like, that kind of seems to me [to] also [be] kind of what you’re doing, right? You’re seeing students as novice historical researchers, and you’re teaching them the skills they need as beginners, and helping them figure out how they are going to do it, and all of that kind of thing, which is amazing. Yeah.

Lucie 1:02:05
I think the thing is, is like what’s really interesting to me is, I think so many people are doing that.

Jo VanEvery 1:02:10
Yeah.

Lucie 1:02:10
I just don’t think we are modelling yet, what we want to do with that innovation.

Jo VanEvery 1:02:18
Yeah.

Lucie 1:02:19
Because at the moment, it’s almost like good teaching stays in the classroom. And I think good teaching needs to be shared – partly because of these kind of pressures that that the sector is under. Like, you know, I’ve I think you know research is so important; it’s a cornerstone of what it means to be in a university. Universities are supposed to be research spaces.

Jo VanEvery 1:02:43
Yeah.

Lucie 1:02:43
That’s their, like, that’s their uniqueness. But they’re also teaching spaces. And I think – I I just kind of wish we could be braver to say: “Let’s think about how teaching should be disseminated, shared, celebrated better” – as as kind of a sector, but also I think within our own subject areas as well. Because I think a lot of the time when the government is talking to us about teaching, when you look at the profile of the individuals that are in the government, they’re often Oxbridge educated, and that’s no disrespect to my Oxbridge colleagues, but they’ve only had one experience of teaching, and often that was like 15-20 years ago.

Jo VanEvery 1:03:33
Yeah, 15. Yeah.

Lucie 1:03:35
And yet the sector is doing so much more. Like we are, we are like working with our local communities, we are working with the GLAM sector. We’re trying to connect up students with sort of different organisations, but also invite them to be more creative, and innovative, and more critical. And underlining that is – like, hopefully what I hope I’m doing is bringing passion into their studies. So I think we should be showcasing that far more confidently than we than we do now, because otherwise we can’t talk about the value of our subjects if we’re not doing that.

Jo VanEvery 1:04:14
And I think – I think it’s interesting to come back to kind of a little bit where we started, which is that – you’ve done some of your work sharing that through your scholarly association. You’ve been recognised for your teaching by the Royal Historical Society. And I think a lot of people tend to see scholarly associations as about research, and research conferences, and whatever, and that your teaching side is somehow something else. And so, in a way, it’s nice that that particular scholarly association, and probably some others as well, many others as well, is doing at least some work. And that we can use… But that, as individuals – because those associations are associations of scholars, right? Like, it’s not, it’s not like a university where you’ve got a management strategy, and whatever. It’s like, this is your association, and you can use it to do that, right? You can say, you know, “Can we do this under the gist of the association? Can we…?” Right? We can… We could be… You know, like what are we connecting? It is- It is really a place for scholars to connect with other people in their discipline, and in their field, around areas of common interest. And yes, sometimes that’s about your research, and presenting your research in progress, and getting feedback from peers, and sometimes it’s about doing the same thing with: “How do we teach this? How do we…?” Because all of us do, like, everybody working, you know, in the field is in some way, doing some of that. Pretty much.

Jo VanEvery 1:05:42
But I agree with you that there is this real like in the broader kind of structural constraints, the separation of teaching and research, often at the policy level. I mean, I come from Canada, and education in the federal kind of constitutional breakdown is a provincial responsibility, but research sits with the federal, right? So it isn’t even being funded from the same pile of money, and create, and so therefore universities are this very weird thing in relation to that, because some of it, because they have this dual jurisdiction issue. So you get that. You also just get this thing about where you know the increasing focus you know in the current funding environment is that you know pressure on people who are research active to be bringing in money to support the researcher- research and for a lot of people applying for that funding you know they’re like but it needs to: “I need the money to buy me out of teaching”, right? Because you’re already in this bifurcated system where it feels like those things are in competition with each other, and it just creates more and more of this: “Okay, we need some people to do the teaching, and then in order to support a smaller cohort of people who are kind of stars doing this research”, as opposed to this… You know, so we’re losing something in there. And a lot of individuals are not are you know are just trying to like do the best they can in the context that they’re living. I mean, we all are, right? So there are a lot of people that recognise the kinds of things we’ve talked about today and just don’t really know. “Well, what other options do I have?”

Jo VanEvery 1:07:20
And you’ve been lucky to be employed somewhere where you can really focus on your teaching, where you can A) have a job as a historian, and B) get promoted as a historian without having published a book. And where your institution has also recognised your teaching and the work that you’ve been doing around disability and neurodivergence, you know, in ways that might not be possible for other people. Like, you’ve been incredibly lucky to be in that position, but then you’ve also been like, “Oh, well, if this is where I work and I actually I’m going to try and do this and see what…” you know? And you you’ve actually taken that and been like, “I have the option of being able to do it, so I’m gonna… This is where I’m gonna focus, and these are my values, and that’s what’s important.”

Jo VanEvery 1:08:05
We should probably stop. It’s been really important, really interesting to talk to you. Like, it’s just, I think you’re doing such great work, and I really, you know, I like that. And and the, like you say, like, what what is the book? I I don’t know. I hope the book eventually gets published. It’ll be really interesting, but it’s it is a kind of you know…

Lucie 1:08:28
It will!

Jo VanEvery 1:08:28
It will.

Lucie 1:08:28
I’ve got- I’ve got like, 50,000 words now, so it’s definitely…

Jo VanEvery 1:08:30
Awesome. Like that’s really great.

Lucie 1:08:32
Definitely like in the horizon.

Jo VanEvery 1:08:35
Yeah, that’s…

Lucie 1:08:36
I just need to not get distracted by anything else.

Jo VanEvery 1:08:40
But again, that… Like, in one sense, you’ve been able to do what you’ve done, partly because you got, you know, the job you got, and the institutional location you’re in enables [you], you know, and supports you to a certain extent. And if it’s not supporting you, at least [it] isn’t impeding you from doing this, right? Nobody’s telling you, “Oh, you can’t do that.”

Jo VanEvery 1:08:58
So, what would you say to people who share some of your values, and who maybe want to be doing more of this? Like, maybe just small things that, you know… Do you have any advice for people? Knowing that, you know, they might not be able to take it, because their situation is different, but that it might be worth, you know, like, if they, if they’re thinking, “Oh, I’d really love to be able to do that”, like, what kinds of things could they be thinking about doing?

Lucie 1:09:26
I think what people should do is just sit down and ask themselves: What are their values?

Jo VanEvery 1:09:33
Yeah.

Lucie 1:09:34
Just kind of, like, you know: Pause. Mindset. And think about what they want to actually kind of like, bring to the table, or what they would like to be on the table is really important. I also think that like, this is like where my career, I think, is interesting because I started off with a very high teaching load. Like it was really, really, really high. Like, I don’t know how I survived it at the beginning, to be honest. And so, what that really kind of did was it meant that I think we don’t talk enough about life cycles in the sector, which is that it is always really hard at the very beginning. And I know that there’s a lot of pressure, particularly for tenure track colleagues, to try and like produce. But actually to start thinking a bit about: “What can I achieve?” – not: “What needs to be done?” I think just framing that as a mindset is really important, because I think when you’re too much about chasing what needs to be done, and panicking about it, you can’t actually do anything because it becomes really stressful. So I would kind of, like, encourage people to kind of lean in to, maybe – although I hate that term, “lean in” – I would perhaps encourage people to actually sort of just pause, and think about what is achievable, and isn’t going to break me whilst I’m developing teaching, or have a high teaching load. And that might mean actually asking whether or not something you’re doing in your teaching, can be the focus of what you’re kind of doing and thinking about, in terms of publications.

Jo VanEvery 1:11:12
Yeah.

Lucie 1:11:12
…is what I’d say.

Jo VanEvery 1:11:13
Yeah. So really pausing and not chasing, not chasing somebody else’s ideas of what you should be doing, but kind of looking at: “Okay, how much capacity do I have?” Right? “This is my teaching load. These are the demands on me. How much capacity do I have? Time, cognitive capacity, strengths that I bring…”

Lucie 1:11:36
Yeah, because I…

Jo VanEvery 1:11:37
…er, values that I have. All of those things together, and then: “Okay, where- what are what am I able to accomplish given in the circumstances I’m in?”

Lucie 1:11:47
I mean, I think when you have a binary between research and teaching, it means that you’re always looking, when you’re teaching, to research, and thinking “I’m failing because I’m not doing my research” – but actually that’s just sometimes a junction of your career. And rather than kind of getting stressed about that, think about kind of, sort of, like, quicker, easier wins, which might be writing about your research, [or] thinking about doing something small, in terms of your research. So, like I, one of my favourite articles I wrote in six weeks, and that was a very small, focused article.

Lucie 1:12:23
And then the other side of it is just producing stuff about your teaching, even if it’s about you talking about how your teaching is research informed. So you kind of knit and join it together. Just- I just think there’s so much pressure all the time to be thinking “I’m not doing my research, I’m not doing my research, I’m not doing my research” – when, in actual fact, to survive and also to create meaning in your academic identity, you do sometimes just have to be in the teaching, in the teaching route.

Jo VanEvery 1:12:54
Yeah.

Lucie 1:12:54
And you know, obviously, Jo, you know me. Another thing to say is sign up for writing. Meeting with your Writing.

Jo VanEvery 1:13:02
Yes, one of the reasons I know about what Lucie’s doing is because she comes to a Meeting With Your Writing. And you know, and even if what you’re writing about is your teaching, like, it doesn’t [matter]. Right? It just means that you’re having time to do some writing, and reflecting, and do some stuff. So, like, that’s a way of blocking time in what you’re doing.

Lucie 1:13:20
And I’ve been coming to Meeting With Your Writing for so long, that I remember, that I remember that you used to have to call in.

Jo VanEvery 1:13:27
On the phone! Oh, yeah!

Lucie 1:13:28
On the phone. So… And that, and that, like, you know, established… I’m such a long serving member of that group.

Jo VanEvery 1:13:34
Yeah. No, I’ve been doing it… We’re starting the… It’ll be- it’s 14 years in September! So we’re going into the 15th year of Meeting With Your Writing.

Lucie 1:13:36
Ooh!

Jo VanEvery 1:13:38
And I did try and find whether I still had a list of people who were in the first cohort, and I’m not sure I did, but there are still… There’s still at least one person’s there, that was there maybe 12 years ago, plus several people who were her graduate students, and are now academics themselves.

Lucie 1:14:03
Oh wow, that’s really cool! I think I coming up to 10 years.

Jo VanEvery 1:14:05
Like I’ve got generations, there’s generations of people, right? So…

Lucie 1:14:08
I think I’m definitely coming up to 10 years.

Jo VanEvery 1:14:10
Yeah, yeah.

Lucie 1:14:12
Amazing. Thank you very much!

Jo VanEvery 1:14:13
Okay, so I think we’ve talked for over an hour, probably. I don’t know. Like, my assistant keeps reminding me that people listen to my podcast and therefore they’re okay with listening to what we’re talking about for an hour, and I think we’ve had a really interesting conversation. And maybe they’re going for a long run, or you know, doing, doing gardening or something while they’re listening. I don’t know. Thank you for the people that are still listening.

Jo VanEvery 1:14:37
So I think as much as we could continue to talk about so many things. It was really nice of you to talk to me about the creative history, which is completely interwoven with your experience of neurodivergence and disability as an academic. And so, I think people get a really good sense of how you can bring that, and trying to understand how to be who you are, with the way your brain works in this environment. [And how it] sometimes has these interesting… Like yes, it’s difficult. Yes, it’s a disabling environment, but also it helps you see things and do things like differently in ways that can be really productive and creative and interesting. So I’m really glad about that.

Jo VanEvery 1:15:21
After we get off this call, I would like you to share the details of that special issue, so we can put it in in the show notes for people to find if they’re interested in learning more about what came out of those creative history workshops or teaching history creatively workshops. If you would like to be found, and maybe if there are people that would like to maybe try and start conversations in small ways, like the old Twitter, about what you’ve done in your teaching this week or whatever on Blue Sky. Lucie’s on Blue Sky. Where else? Where else can people find you if you want to be found?

Lucie 1:15:57
I’m also on LinkedIn. Yeah, with my full name, which is Lucinda Matthews Jones,

Jo VanEvery 1:16:03
Right. Okay. And do you post much there, or..?

Lucie 1:16:07
Yeah, yeah, I do. I very, I’ve very much leaned into the kind of, like, you know, positivity of LinkedIn.

Jo VanEvery 1:16:16
Yeah, I’ve I’ve been enjoying it. Um, like I’ve just decided I I don’t need to do it. I think I’ve taken the same approach you’ve taken to the teaching, right? Which is: we don’t have to do this the way everybody says we have to do it. We can be like, what… How do we want this to be? And who are we? And who do we want to be here? And, and, do that, and then we can talk to other people. And there are some really interesting people doing cool things around, around this stuff, so, and, and you can write more on in a LinkedIn post than you can in Bluesky. Like, it’s just that long form helps sometimes, right?

Lucie 1:16:49
Yeah, definitely.

Jo VanEvery 1:16:50
I don’t have any idea what their algorithm, like how their algorithm works, but okay. So you’re on Bluesky and LinkedIn, and we will put all those links in the show notes. So thank you very much.

Lucie 1:17:03
Thanks very much.

[End of Transcript.]

The post Making and Unmaking Knowledge with Lucie Matthews-Jones appeared first on Jo VanEvery.

Jo VanEvery 0:02
Hello. This is Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide of JoVanEvery.co.uk. Welcome to Creating A Satisfying Academic Career. I’m Jo VanEvery, and today I’m going to be talking to Anna Law. Anna, do you want to just introduce yourself? Tell people a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Anna Law 0:30
Sure. Thanks for having me on. I am a professor of political science at the City of, er, University of New York Brooklyn College, and I do research in immigration policy and legal history.

Jo VanEvery 0:48
Right, fantastic! I’ve been following you on BlueSky and possibly somewhere else before that. I can’t remember how I came across you, but I’ve been following you for a while. And one of the things that I found really interesting is you talking about this research, being really open about how long it took you to do this, and some of the challenges that you faced. So, there are a lot of different challenges academics face in creating a satisfying career, and from what I know about you, it’s that, it might be, you might have interesting – I thought you might have interesting things to say about some of those challenges. So, I’m a bit like – I can be a bit like, I don’t know, not too structured in this. This is kind of semi-structured. So, I was thinking I might start with one of the persistent myths about what you need to have a satisfying academic career that I see a lot in the higher education press and on social media and other places where people talk about the profession and especially where newer members of the profession talk about it. It’s often assumed that in order to do good research, you need to get a tenure track or equivalent position at a high status research focused institution where you’ll have a lower teaching load, and that’s not the job you have.

Anna Law 2:10
It was not the job I started with. It is the job I have now. Look, where does the myth come from? It comes from our graduate programmes. So all of our PhD training departments. I mean, I don’t know about all, but definitely mine. We were told the gold standard is to land a tenure track job at our R1 research university. They didn’t even talk about ending up at a teaching school, which is supremely bizarre in that because most of the graduates of the University of Texas, Austin, didn’t land R1 jobs. Most of us landed at a teaching college. So I felt completely unprepared going into this. Like, “Oh, oh, oh, did I fail? What, what, what, what happened?” So, my first job… Look, I mean, I don’t want to discount a tenure track position because even though I was at a teaching school where I started at DePaul University, I started in a tenure track position. I started with seven courses a year on a quarter system.

Jo VanEvery 3:31
Yeah.

Anna Law 3:31
That’s still fewer classes than people teach as adjuncts.

Jo VanEvery 3:37
Absolutely.

Anna Law 3:39
So there’s, there’s something to be said about a still a tenure track position at a teaching college, like DePaul, and then someone trying to string together enough jobs to to make a living as an adjunct and a contingent faculty member. So I started with a seven course teaching load. It got dropped to six in my third year, but then they – it’s never free – t hey upped the service requirements on us. So I got tenure at DePaul University, published my first book there, and then I had this opportunity to move to Brooklyn College, which was a named endowed chair.

Jo VanEvery 4:22
Right.

Anna Law 4:23
So that dropped my teaching load to a two-two on a semester system. And full disclosure, it came with a research budget, which most positions do not have.

Jo VanEvery 4:35
Yeah.

Anna Law 4:36
So I had both tenure, a lower teaching load, and a research budget.

Jo VanEvery 4:42
But you managed to get that first book written with that seven course, six course load, a lot of service, in a really teaching focused place. But that was presumably a book based on your on research [that] you’d already done for the PhD. Was that correct? So, so the challenge was really being able to start a second project.

Anna Law 5:05
The first book, I mean, so the first book is easier. It doesn’t feel that way for people to write it.

Jo VanEvery 5:11
No. [Laughter.]

Anna Law 5:11
It feels like it’s trying to kill you. The first book is easier because it’s based on my dissertation, so I’m not working from scratch. The hard part about the first book is trying to juggle. When I got to that DePaul job, I was teaching six classes the first year. I had no classes prepped. The first three years of me teaching at that school was me prepping classes. Zero research got done. It wasn’t happening, and so I took the advice of one of my undergraduate mentors, who said, “You know what? At a high teaching level school, you have to prioritise quality over quantity. If you can get out one strong article a year – that’s good. People will forgive you if you produce one solid article a year, because they see your teaching load. They will not forgive you if you turn out a bunch of schlock just to say you published something.” And you know, my my undergrad professor said, “Don’t do it. Prioritise quality over quantity, especially at a high teaching load school.”

Jo VanEvery 6:32
That was excellent advice. But it’s interesting in relation to what you said earlier because you were saying, you know, one of the reasons this myth persists that you have to be at an R1 with low teaching load is because that’s what the people who train PhD students are telling PhD students, most of whom are working in, I mean, a lot of PhDs are being trained in you know more research intensive institutions. W hen it came to getting good mentoring for this career that you actually had, you ended up going back to somebody who you knew from when you were an undergrad, who had a better perspective on what could be possible and seemed to be more encouraging of: “Yeah, you’re good. You can do good work in this job.”

Anna Law 7:24
He… So my undergrad mentor from Brandeis University was Sid Milkis, and Sid told me, “Look, kid, I started at a high teaching load school, so I know what it’s like, and you should not try to write a book and articles at the same time. You should choose one and go with it and commit to it.” What I did, which is put all my eggs in one basket, was with the book was highly risky. I wouldn’t advise doing that to people who like their jobs and want to stay where they’re at. That is, writing a book is not easier than writing five articles. Neither one is easier, but the book is especially risky because, look, I knew by the second year at DePaul, I didn’t love the teaching load. I wasn’t trying to get tenure. I was trying to move.

Jo VanEvery 8:27
Aha. Yeah.

Anna Law 8:28
I knew that a bunch of articles from journals that are not the top ones in my field weren’t going to get it done. So I went for a big giant monograph, which is a risky move, and again, I would not advise that for people who are actually happy at their jobs.

Jo VanEvery 8:48
Right, right, yeah. Get the tenure and then finish the book, if you like where you are. Right? B ecause you’ve got a bit more flexibility once you’ve got over that first hurdle. Right, but then you move. So, what kind of a college is Brooklyn, is Brooklyn College?

Anna Law 9:06
So, the City University of New York has 20-three campuses. It is a urban public college. It is extremely diverse in terms of race and income, but it is deeply and chronically underfunded. So, we, we have a lot of first generation college students, and a lot of first generation immigrant students, and so they’re great fun to teach. But we are, have been underfunded for a very long time.

Jo VanEvery 9:40
So is your, is your workload typical of other people in that kind of college, or is the name chair, which came with some funding, just a kind of anomaly in that context?

Anna Law 9:55
It’s an anomaly. The City University of New York, Brooklyn College, my campus, there are only three or four permanent named endowed chairs. I have the second one. Everyone else is at a three-three or a four-four. You can get your teaching load reduced based on administrative duties, but I have a permanently lower teaching load than the rest of my colleagues, so it’s, it’s an anomalous position.

Jo VanEvery 10:27
Right? But it still took you 16 years to, like, do the research and write this book.

Anna Law 10:33
That’s right. [Laughter.]

Jo VanEvery 10:34
So, like, so like, one of the things… Because one of the things I’ve been doing, is I run like a 12-week small group coaching programme for people writing scholarly books, and I was meeting with those people this week, and you know, one of the things that comes up is just how long it’s taking, right? Like even if you’re working on it regularly, it takes a really long time, and it just feels like: “Oh.” You know? Like: “How do I, how do I keep going?” And some of those people are in a a situation like your first sort of job. Some of them are on- in other, you know, in research intensive institutions. But no matter what they’re doing, it’s like writing a book is like a huge undertaking. So you were in the relatively privileged position of having this two-two load and some research funds, but it still took you a long time to write. So, how did you organise that? How did you kind of keep that as a priority for you so that you could produce this kind of work? Like, what what sort of strategies do you use to kind of keep it going?

Anna Law 11:40
Okay, so the glib answer is: I wish I could tell you it was the pursuit of knowledge and creation of groundbreaking research. Okay, I know I should be saying that, but the truth was, a lot of it was pig-headed stubbornness , and just the idea, and the realisation that this is a sunk cost. Okay, you’re seven years in. I mean, are you..? Am I gonna finish this thing, or is the thing gonna finish me? I mean, but look, the second book, I have the protection of tenure, and so I didn’t have the the tenure clock ticking where I would be fired from my job.

Jo VanEvery 12:28
Right.

Anna Law 12:28
There are still professional consequences of taking 16 years to write a book, which is I got stuck at the top of the associate professor pay scale, and I couldn’t go any higher because it took me that long to get to full professor. But you’re… For the purposes of other people, you really have to believe in your project. Don’t try to game it out, thinking: “Okay, this this area of research is hot, so I’m going to do this.” I mean, you really better be into, and believe in your research project. That is the only thing that drives you forward. It can’t be about: “I think this area is hot, so I’m going into it.” I didn’t write consistently. There was an entire year in there where I stopped research altogether because I’m an only child and I had elder care in Hawaii. So, many trips home, many phone calls, arguing with insurance companies. I ended up with clinically diagnosed PTSD because of an elder care emergency, and so no research got done for an entire year. I mean, life is going to intervene. You’re just gonna have to go with it. I mean, I- the book didn’t get done in the time, in the length of time I wished. It took much longer, but I’d rather get it done right, than… I mean, I was also switching academic fields, so I wanted to be accurate. You can be accurate, or you can be fast. Rarely can you be both.

Jo VanEvery 14:10
Yeah. So maybe talk a bit about the book, because like you didn’t go into this… You went into it because this was something you were interested in, and you wanted to find out more about what went on with it. It has turned out post- publication to be [a] way more hot topic than you probably ever wished. But maybe tell people a little bit about how you got started on it, and what that switching feels [like], because you’re [in] political science, b ut this book is very historical, but also, as I understand it, you work at that kind of boundary between political science and law. Like, you’re interested in how the law works. So, politics, some of what politics does is to legislate, and then you’re interested, I guess, in how that plays out. Like how did we end up l egislating this thing, and then how did that work out in- in practice? And you’ve, in this book, taken quite a historical approach to that. So maybe talk a little bit just about what the project is for people that don’t know, and how you got interested in it.

Anna Law 15:15
So I got interested in this topic because my background is U.S. immigration policy and legal history. I I know U.S. immigration law very well, and the policy history behind it. And what always was nagging at the back of my mind was, you know, what this this nation always – they had slavery. I wonder if slavery had any effect on voluntary migration, so I’m not calling enslaved migration ‘ immigration’, which implies consent, but I wonder if the existence of slavery had anything to do with voluntary migration, any effect at all. And so, after the 1619 project essays came out, I’ve had a much less hard time explaining what I’m doing, but I started before that, and people are like, “Oh!” So, that was the initial impetus of me getting into this area. My training as a political scientist – I’m in a subfield called American political development, so we study U.S. history a lot like historians, but we periodize differently from them. And I figured out that this question I want to answer, I can’t just use political science methods alone. I can’t use doctrinal analysis and case law, like law professors use, and I can’t just do historical research like historians. And I needed all three, so I needed all of those methods together, which will take you longer.

Jo VanEvery 16:57
It will. Okay, so the book – I’ve lost the title. Where the heck have I put the title of your book? Maybe tell people the title of your book and where you ended up.

Anna Law 17:06
The book is called “Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants.”

Jo VanEvery 17:14
Right. So, so it has become very topical because we’re apparently relitigating all of that, [Laughter.] but, and one of the things was you were also… Like, I mean, America is a federal system. I’m Canadian, so I’m sort of vaguely familiar with that. I’m a sociologist, though I don’t know like detailed things, but I’m not a an expert on politics or political development. But one of the things about studying politics in a federal system is the whole thing about, you know, which level is responsible and whatever. And one of the things I’ve seen you talk about a lot is the fact that right now immigration is a federal jurisdiction, but it wasn’t always that way. And this book is partly about pulling that together, right? Like, how did we get from…? I don’t know, as a country, I mean, if you’re starting back in 1619, you weren’t even a country then, right? So, it’s like, you’re a bunch of colonies. You’ve got a whole lot of different things, and then it comes together to become a country, and then you you get a lot more changes, and the slavery, and Native Americans are really crucial to all of that, right? And so you were kind of really interested in, y ou started with: did slavery have impact on voluntary migration? Where did that question lead you?

Anna Law 18:35
So I ended up with a research question that is about federalism. And it is… The research question was so deceptively simple. The question I was trying to answer was in a federal system of government where the federal, the U.S. national government shares control of policy and laws with states and local governments, w here the, where’s the location of the dividing line on migration and citizenship? And it turns out the location of that line keeps moving. It’s not in one place, and it depends on on what part of U.S. history you’re asking about. So, I was trying to keep straight: ” Okay, wait, wait, wait. What? No, wait. It moved.” And so the bottom line of the research is one concrete effect of slavery’s influence on voluntary migration policy is that it delays transition of migration controls over internal and international borders from the local level to the federal level by over 100 years.

Jo VanEvery 19:55
Ah, right. So it kind of links w ith all that kind of common knowledge we have about the Civil War, and the, the, you know, who can…? A nd the the end of slavery and people being able to be returned to states, and all that kind of thing, gets tied up with international migration, and all of that kind of thing,

Anna Law 20:17
Right. Because states and the local government from the colonial period, the colonies, not the metropole in London, had control over internal and international borders, and the states did too, not the federal government until after the Civil War, and the reason is because of slavery. Because slave states are not going to… They’re freaking out at the prospect of the federal government having deportation power. They could deport all the enslaved people. That cannot be. So it had to be held at the state level.

Jo VanEvery 20:55
And how did the Native Americans get into it? Because you started with this question about slavery. Native Americans are already living on this land. How did that get into a question about migration and control of migration, and especially international borders?

Anna Law 21:11
So I knew going into the project I would have to learn African American history and slavery. I did not anticipate until halfway through the book: if you’re going to tackle a question of federalism in the early republic and in the antebellum period, you have to try to learn federal Indian law and Native history. A nd how that becomes related is, listeners are probably thinking: “What do Native Americans have to do with voluntary migration?” I knew they were tied together when I read federal cases where Native Americans, where, where slavery and Native Americans are mentioned in terms [of], and citizenship cases. And so the people that… It was an indication to me that the people of those earlier eras saw the ability of one group to stay where they wanted, and another group to go into that same area as relational, not just relational but zero sum. So, as an example, in the 1830s, in the southeastern states that were slave states, the price of cotton was going through the roof internationally, and so the enslavers, the planters, greedily eyed Native American land, and they they goaded the federal government into carrying out a deportation of 80,000 people for the purposes of extending the cotton crop and slavery. So here you have an example of a group of people, 80,000 Native Americans, whose ability to stay on their ancestral lands was viewed by the legislators of the time of those states, and the federal government, as zero sum. nd so the ability of one group to go into an area and another to stay there are linked, which is why Native Americans are in this study.

Jo VanEvery 23:23
This is all super fascinating, and that sounds like a really fascinating book. But I can also see why this took 16 years to write, because – this is something that comes up with a lot of my clients as well – w hich is, you start writing one book, you think, you think you’re writing a book about this question of how does slavery and, like, the involuntary migration of slavery relate to voluntary migration, and the control of voluntary migration, a nd as you’re investigating that – you’re in archives, you’re reading case law, you’re doing all this to investigate this question – your your question gets more nuanced. You get a better understanding of what’s going on, and then all of a sudden, you’re like: “Oh, wait a second! There’s this whole other area that I hadn’t even thought would be relevant that is really crucial to understanding how this whole thing works”, and that: “My bigger question is actually really about federalism and how does, (if I’ve understood you correctly), how does my the control over migration and citizenship become a federal responsibility as opposed to a state or like a national responsibility opposed to a state one, and that actually has an effect like that, so it became a bigger. So part of the reason it took you 16 years, and, and why even people with those mythically wonderful “this will help you have a good research career” jobs might find it hard to publish as much as they want, as quickly as they want, is because it isn’t always about how much time you have, and how good of a researcher you are! It… Sometimes being a really good researcher means that, you know, you’re following all these threads, and these questions raise other questions, and the book kind of develops into something else as you’re going, and it just becomes a bigger project. Is that part of why it took you as long as it did?

Anna Law 25:21
It was part of it. I mean, so what you’re referring to is the framing of the book took a long time to come into focus.

Jo VanEvery 25:30
Yeah.

Anna Law 25:31
Because this could be three to five books in here, right? So I chose to do a synthesis, which is me not going to archives, and except for one chapter, not consulting primary sources, because I am trying to braid together my own readings of these laws, these local laws, and the monographs of other scholars instead of reinventing the wheel, right?

Jo VanEvery 26:02
Okay.

Anna Law 26:02
So the thing that took the longest time is – and I don’t, I, I think someone at an R1 with the same resources as me would have taken equally long – is because I’m going into subject areas I don’t know, so I’m learning slavery for the first time. I’m learning African American history and Native American history because I was not taught those things in political science at all. If you’re going to go wandering into another area, you need to read deeply to understand. I mean, so historians like to say, going to a different time period, the 18th century and the 19th century are foreign countries.

Anna Law 26:47
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 26:48
You really don’t know what’s going on there until you read a tonne. So to give you an example, the book starts in the colonial period. The colonial chapter took me three years. That was two years of reading for me to understand and get myself up to speed about what- what is happening in this time period, before I was comfortable putting pen to paper. So that’s what took so long because I’m going into a time period I don’t know, going into multiple time periods, I don’t know, and I’m going into subject matter areas I have no training in. If you don’t spend the time reading, you come off as a dilettante and you make mistakes that other people are going to easily see. People from those fields will easily poke holes in and say, “She didn’t do her homework.”

Jo VanEvery 27:42
This can happen to anybody, right? Because you ended up going into those time periods and into those other things, like needing to learn about Native American history, needing to learn about all these things, because that’s where the question took you.

Anna Law 27:56
That’s where the question took me. But also, my academic training, my master’s degree, is in American Studies, and my PhD is in Political Science. It never occurred to me to read only in one field. That sounds so boring and so constrictive.

Jo VanEvery 28:14
Yeah.

Anna Law 28:15
I think that you can have a really successful publishing career if you stay in your lane. If you, if I had just kept publishing in political science, if I had done a riff on the first book, I think I could have had a very successful publishing career. But that’s not; those are not the questions that motivated me. They were boring.

Jo VanEvery 28:41
And that’s that’s kind of, I mean, I think that’s kind of why I’m focused a little bit on having a satisfying career because sometimes, you know, it’s just, you know, you can get caught up in “Oh I need to publish this much, and what would be the easy way to do this?” and whatever. And there are times when you need to pick that easy route because then it gets you something you need, right? Like you said about your early career, right? Like the advice that your mentor gave you about: “Look, if you publish one good article a year, you will be okay for tenure in this institution.” Like you say, if you liked that job, you could have done that and then been able to like branch out into something, right? You could have taken the safe route, figured out some things, done some good work, still good work, but there would have been a slightly easier route. And sometimes it’s worth taking that. But for you, a satisfying career was: “I really want to be like digging into these questions, and I want to do a particular kind of research there.” And I think there’s a lot of people, like, this raises this question of the sort of a place of interdisciplinary research in the current kind of landscape, because on the one hand, for years now, like decades, we’ve been talking about how important interdisciplinarity is. And when I first left academia, you know, over 20 years ago now, my first post academic job was working for a funding agency. So I was working for a funding agency in Canada at the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and and I was a policy analyst when they did this huge consultation about their forward direction on their 25th anniversary, you know the way organisations are, right? “Oh, it’s a significant anniversary. Maybe we’ll do a big consultation and do some big strategic thinking about where we’re going.” And you know, in the course of that, you know, there were discussions, there were things that I, you know, read that have been published about interdisciplinarity, and one of the things that came up was like, if you have interdisciplinary PhD programmes or postdocs or whatever, those people really struggle to get jobs, right? Like, because the whole structure is set up in a disciplinary way. And even just before I was talking to you, I was like just taking a moment between things, and I was just scrolling through Bluesky, and somebody that I follow there who does interdisciplinary work and you know has just had a grant rejected and she’s just like “There’s this real struggle if you do interdisciplinary work in terms of the fact the whole structure of funding and everything is set up around disciplines, and and different disciplines have different kind of ways of writing grant proposals, and even if you’re doing an interdisciplinary project, you’re being, you’re often being judged by disciplinary panels” – or you know any of that kind of thing. But what you’re raising is that the other thing is that you end up, you, it takes you longer because you’re learning new methods. You’re reading deeply in new areas because they’re relevant to their question, but you, you know, you haven’t come in contact with them as much before, and there’s just a lot more work to do. But that the reason that it’s worth doing that is not just to produce good research, but because it enables you to answer questions you can’t answer without that. Like what was satisfying for you is actually the questions were super interesting, and that kept you going. And so, on the one hand, you’re saying “You can’t start a book project unless you’re excited enough about it to keep going”, but sometimes the thing that’s exciting enough to keep you going is also kind of making it really hard work. But it’s hard work you want to do because that’s what makes your career satisfying to be able to kind of do all these things. Is is that..? I

Anna Law 32:37
I would… Yeah, I think that’s about right. I mean, I would… So I was oriented toward interdisciplinary research because of my training. My… Because of my MA is in American Studies, which is inherently interdisciplinary. My PhD is in political science. But the second book, I would not have written as my first book. That I needed to get tenure first. So, if you’re early career, don’t go too crazy on the interdisciplinary stuff because, as you just said, it affects your ability to get grants. When your, when your department, if you have a tenure track job, sends your materials for external review, they need to send it to people in your field. So get the tenure, and then… I mean, I… And and then I’m doing this interdisciplinary stuff now because I have the safety and security of tenure. I mean, it is it is really hard to not – to be able to do any research without the guarantee of permanent employment with with a paycheck that you know is coming, and so try to be strategic about [it]. But then you got to balance that, about, “Well, if I’m just interested in interdisciplinary questions…” If, I mean…

Jo VanEvery 34:08
Sometimes if you’re publishing, if you’re publishing articles, sometimes you can, you can be strategic about your publishing, in a way that, that makes sure, you know, that you are at least publishing some things in the field where you’re employed, right? Like, like you need to, and then the interdisciplinary stuff is like, “Ooh, and she’s having an impact even beyond our field”, because there’s no question that if the central question of your book is something about the development of federalism in this particular area of law and policy – that that’s not relevant to political science and the subfield of American political development. You’re just, you just went about it in a very different way, and you’re presumably making the kind of contribution to that disciplinary field that kind of actually shakes things up a bit, right? Like you’re bringing in things from other fields and saying, “Here’s, here’s some, here’s… This actually helps us understand this better as political scientists.” Like that’s at least part of what ends up coming out of what you’re doing.

Anna Law 35:17
I think that one of, one of the lessons I’ve learned now – because it’s the same lesson that I had from book one – you can’t predict who’s going to be interested in your book. I wrote this second book in exile from political science. I kept attending political science conferences and presenting early drafts and people were just not interested. I don’t think they were being rude. I think that political scientists didn’t have the historical background to ask me questions, or to engage in what I was doing.

Jo VanEvery 35:58
Right.

Anna Law 35:58
So three or four times of me presenting on a panel, and I get no questions, and everybody else got the questions, and I stopped attending conferences and started attending history conferences. So, right now, the two groups that are the most interested in my book have been legal historians and early republic historians. There’s a handful of federalism political scientists who are interested, but yeah, the interest in this book did not come from who I thought it would come from.

Jo VanEvery 36:34
[Laughter.] I mean, that’s yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Anna Law 36:38
So all you can do is put the book out there, and look, it’s still early in the life of this book. My book was published on March 2, so I don’t know if other people will adopt it. I have no idea, and you have no control over who will like it, and who will read it, and who will engage with it.

Jo VanEvery 36:59
No, no. Do you teach on these questions? Like, how does, like…? One of the things that it strikes me is kind of important when you’re, especially if you’re working in a more teaching focused institution, is having some kind of overlap between the things you’re interested in researching, and the things that you’re teaching. Somebody mentioned in my book group just this week, you know that they were starting to look at their autumn courses and they’re teaching some sort of a… And they’re like, “Okay, there’s a bunch of reading I need to do for this book right now, that’s probably relevant to these- this group of students. So I’m gonna, you know, I’m gonna like make it all match up a little bit to mean that it’s not competing for my time.” Did… Is that something that happens with you, or is teaching and research really separate? Like, how do they relate to each other in your career?

Anna Law 37:48
Teaching and research didn’t have much to do with each other for me. I do not teach any classes on immigration. I teach classes on constitutional law, the federal judiciary, and American political, you know, the intro to American government survey course, of which none of it is about immigration. I did teach one graduate class a number of years back at the CUNY Grad Centre, which overlapped with the book I was writing a little bit, but the two have been separate for me. I’m not sure if that’s ideal, but that’s just the way it was, it panned out. CUNY hired me to teach constitutional law, federal courts. They did not hire me to teach immigration, so that’s what they, that’s what I teach [in] – Federal court, federal courts, and constitutional law.

Jo VanEvery 38:44
Cool. So that for you, the the the there’s just that they’re very different spaces. Presumably, you’re keeping up with the scholarship in the areas you teach, even though it’s not directly related to the research you’re doing right now. Or..?

Anna Law 39:00
you know, I’ve heard I’ve heard people say, “Oh, I used my seminar to do more thinking about my book project.” I mean, I can see how that works, but I I don’t I don’t mind that my teaching and research are separate because after spending 16 years on the book, do I really want to teach immigration on top of it? [Laughter.] Enough already! Enough. I mean… Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 39:24
Okay, okay. So, you are managing to do research, satisfying research, even if it takes you a long time while you’re working at Brooklyn College. What what else is satisfying about your career? I mean, you’ve got a named chair that presumably, that also allows you to do some of your… I mean, what what else is, would you say is worth considering for people about different types of institutions? Like, the institutions that you’ve worked in, like, instead of, you know, maybe they’re only getting advice about “Oh the cream is…. Go to an R1.” Right? And then nobody’s really talking about “Well, there [is]… If, if you like this, or if if if you value these things, this might be a good place for you to be.” Like one of the things you said about Brooklyn College and the City University in New York system in general… I mean, obviously, it’s not very satisfying to work in an institution that’s chronically underfunded. Nobody likes that. But one of the things you really pointed out about it is you’ve got this incredibly diverse student body, racially, new immigrants, also like a lot of first generation students, that kind of thing. And and that’s not always what you’re going to get at other kinds of institutions. So like, what would you say? Like, is that part of what you really like about where you are, the kinds of students you get?

Anna Law 40:43
No, I lucked out. Right? I mean, the hard hardest part of academia is you don’t get to pick where you live, and so I really lucked out in my move to Brooklyn College that my student body is racially and income diverse; those are two characteristics that are important to me. It means something to me that I’m teaching at a public-funded institution. Yes, it means we’re underfunded, but it makes me feel like I’m giving back to the community. There is no substitute for meeting my students’ family members and they’re first generation college students, and you realise that you played a role in the trajectory that this family is going to go in now. So CUNY has the statistics from multiple independent sources is that the CUNY system moves more people into the middle class than all the Ivy’s combined. I mean that means something to me. That is payment to my, you know, to what I stand for. I mean it’s not… I mean, I’m not the highest paid professor, or the CUNY professors are not in New York City, but it’s worth something.

Jo VanEvery 42:09
Yeah. Well, and I think that’s you know that’s the thing. And you’re, I mean, you are living a really long way away from where your family are, you know. But it’s but there are other things that are… You know, it’s not just your research that’s satisfying. It’s not just… Right? It’s like working in a public institution, working with particular types of students. That… It’s allowed… You know, I often say to people, like, “You’re allowed to want what you want.” You can’t always get it, but you have to admit, like, sometimes people are giving you advice based on what they wanted, right, which might have been status, or you know, I don’t know, all kinds of things. And it’s not like you don’t have status, right? Like you’ve got a good paying job, you can pay, you know, you’re living in a nice place, and and you’ve got a named chair, which comes with its own kind of thing, right? And recognition for your research, right? You’re getting a lot of, I mean, a lot of people are interested in this book, even if they aren’t the kind of people you thought you were writing for it for to begin with. But like, different people have different values, and it’s okay to kind of prioritise those values when, when you’re looking for work, and not… Like, really paying attention to what some of those options are that align better with your values. I mean, the Ivy’s aren’t really intended to like help increase social mobility. I mean, a lot of those institutions are there to kind of cement current hierarchies, right? They were founded for the privilege to be able to maintain their privilege and network with each other, and you know, the legacy admissions in a lot of those places are part of that system, right? That’s…

Anna Law 43:45
Right. I mean, so the other thing is, I, you know, once again, I lucked out majorly in both my jobs. That my first job was in Chicago, and my second job was in Brooklyn. And as a woman of colour, I need to be somewhere where I see other people of colour.

Jo VanEvery 44:09
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Anna Law 44:09
But if… But I have no control over where the jobs open up, and I did a very wide job search when I was finishing my PhD. I remember applying for 40 something jobs all across the United States, and I could have ended up anywhere. But your, you know, you… The toughest part about this job is we can’t pick where we go.

Jo VanEvery 44:36
No. No, sometimes that’s, yeah, that’s hard, right? Yeah. So you’ve you’ve got very lucky because yeah, Chicago, Brooklyn, both very diverse. You feel, like, yeah… One of my one of my clients lives in a place that is not very diverse, and she said something about her sister in law says, “I’m not coming to visit you there. You can visit me because I’m not going anywhere where I raise the percentage of black people in the room just by turning up.”

Anna Law 45:03
Oh, I understand. I totally understand.

Jo VanEvery 45:07
You know? So, and, and, you know sometimes people do decide, you know, that they have… You know, like, you you also get to pick your compromise. You don’t get to go where you want to go, but you get to pick your compromise. And sometimes if having an academic career means living somewhere where you never feel safe and where you can’t do the kind of work you really want to be doing, then you can compromise on something else, right? You’re still a smart person. You’re still doing really good things. You could do a lot of other things, right? You’ve been incredibly lucky that you’ve been able to do this really satisfying academic work that really, you know, like you find really interesting. You get to do this work that’s hard, and it takes you a long time, and it’s you know it’s hard to keep going and write that book. But you know you’ve done that because it is so important to you, and you’ve had the resources to be able to do that. You’ve had the job and the, you know, the resources that have enabled you to do that, and you’ve used those to do some really amazing work that hopefully will have some kind of impact on how we think about… I mean, maybe maybe it’ll take a while for the political scientists to understand why they need to think about these questions, right? It’s just… Sometimes that’s the thing about having an impact on the advancement of knowledge. You don’t always know right away, right? Because it’s like it… People have to think about it, right? They’re like, “Why would this question be interesting?” And then they they read your book and they’re like, “Oh, wait a second”, and it starts sparking ideas. But it takes a while before you can notice that they’ve even done that, right?

Anna Law 46:42
The… So Andy Coppleman, who’s a law professor at Northwestern, when my first book came out, he said, “Okay, Anna, look, you you got a really good publisher for your book, and you’ve done all the hard work. You know what? The book is out there. It’s got to make its own way in the world now.” I’m like, “What?” He said, “You have no control over how many people read it, who reads it, how they react to it.” He said, “My strong advice: Next project.”

Jo VanEvery 47:17
And I think he’s right. Like, you have to let go of the idea [that] you control that. But, I think, with this book you’re also doing a lot of things that are helpful. Like, you can’t control who’s going to read it, but you are making sure that lots of people know it exists, right? You’re talking about it on social media. You are doing interviews with people. You’re coming on different podcasts. Some of those podcasts are more directly related to the topic of your book than this one. You know, we’re talking about how do you be an academic and do satisfying, you know, do satisfying work in in the current context. And some of that is just about luck. But and then taking the opportunities that you get and doing what you can with them, but you’re also taking the time to… You know, and some people shy away from the kind of promoting your book, right? And, and, and the extreme of that is this sense of, “Oh well, you know, people that need to read it will find it. You know, they will do. They will be doing their proper database searches, and it will come up when they do that.” And that’s not necessarily true. You need to, like, you you do need to, like, talk about what you’re doing. Not to force people to read it. Like you can’t force anybody to read it. But they aren’t going to read it if they don’t have… Like, everybody’s busy, right? Everybody’s busy. They can’t even read all the books they know they want to read. So you just need to get it on their radar, right? They need to know it exists, and they need to know what kind of interesting stuff is in there, and then they get to make their own decision about: “Is that interesting to me? And is it interesting enough and related enough to the things I’m trying to do that I’m going to make it a priority right now?” That’s where publishing with a good publisher sometimes helps, right? Because people are like, “Oh, what’s this publisher publishing lately? Like, what what’s good stuff..? They publish good stuff in that I’m usually interested in. What’s coming out in that field?” I did a workshop once with a group of academics where I asked them, like, “How do you decide what to read?” And of course, one person said, and this was a mixed group of mostly social science and humanities people, different, all different disciplines. And one of them immediately was like, “Well, you know, this is my project, and I get a keyword list, and I do a database search, and blah blah blah. And doesn’t everybody do that?” But then we went around the room, and people had all kinds of things, right? Some of them were “When I hear good talks at conferences, I make a note of those names, and I kind of keep an eye out to see if they’ve got anything. You know, sometimes I go and see what they’ve already published, but also I kind of keep an eye out to see if they’ve published anything based on the thing I heard a talk.” Or, you know, some people were like, “Oh, there’s like two or three journals that I always check their table of contents and read interesting things. But then sometimes I find something interesting, and I go off and find other things that person wrote. And that leads me in other directions.” So there’s just so many ways that people find out about what’s going on, and there’s so much, you know, that you know being able to talk about what you’re doing isn’t… You can’t control who’s going to read it, but you can at least make sure that there’s people out there that have heard about what this is and how it fits.

Anna Law 50:20
After the first book was published, I I was naive. I didn’t know any better. I believed in the meritocracy. I thought, “Okay, I’m going to put this book out, and people will read it. They will understand how smart I am and how important the argument is.” Okay, none of that happened. None of that happened. I published the book with the number one press in political science, Cambridge University Press, and these, these all these presses they have limited budgets of of publicity offices. You have to do the promotion yourself. And I know, I I’ve done a lot of promotion of my book on social media on Bluesky to the point where some senior scholars have looked at me funny. I don’t care. I don’t care.

Jo VanEvery 51:11
Well, and I think you know because I follow you on Bluesky. I know what you’ve said about it. It’s not like you’re out there saying: “Buy my book.” You’re just, you know, you’ve been talking, and you started that promotion… I mean, the interesting thing, which people really need to pay attention [to], you really started that before the book came out. And part of that was just about talking about the process, talking about the interesting things you were finding, talking about going to conferences and you know what was happening there, all that kind of thing as you were going along. So the people that followed you were like invested. They were interested. Like, what is it that Anna’s doing? This sounds really interesting, right? And that meant, that meant that when the book did come out, you could just be like, “Oh, the book came out.” And then I remember you saying, “Like, all these people are sending me pictures of getting my book. I didn’t I didn’t know all these people would pre order my book” – but people did because they were like, “Oh, that sounds really interesting. I will, I’ll order that and see.” Right? Now, what, how how long it takes from arriving on your doorstep to actually getting read? I mean, people do have like you know health and safety issues with the piles of books next to their bed. [Laughter.] That’s the part about like making people know that just making people aware that it exists. Right?

Anna Law 52:21
Either you’re gonna hire a $12,000 publicist, which almost nobody has money for, or you have to be prepared to do some promotion yourself. And it is… You’ve, you’ve got to think outside the box. I mean, I knew that to get a… I’m not at a research university. I’m not at a you know quote unquote, gigantic eye roll “elite institution” sarcastic quotes, where they have their networks, and so I knew I was going to have to work a little harder on social media to to use my networks to get the word out about the book.

Jo VanEvery 53:05
Yeah, yeah. So, and I think you’ve done you’ve done a pretty good job about of that. So, one of the other things though is you’re not on you’re not on Bluesky just promoting the book. Like you’re there and you’re engaging with people and talking about things. You are super into cooking. You make some amazing things and do stuff that’s, like… I mean, you like a challenge. That’s what I’ve decided. This is the thing. If you want to say one thing about Anna Law, she likes a challenge. She likes a challenge in her research. She likes a challenge when it comes to cooking dinner for her friends. Like you don’t just slap stuff together. You’re like, “Oh, this is a really interesting. I’m gonna try laminated pastry this week.” Like, I mean, what…? Like, like maybe said, like, what’s that’s that’s kind of seems to be one of your big outside of work interests. Is that is that how did you get into that?

Anna Law 53:54
You can’t be all work all the time. I mean, for people going into academia: please, for the love of God, have hobbies. Your job is not your hobby. Please do not define yourself only by your work product. You have to make friends outside of work, and cooking, and playing tennis, and drinking wine are three ways that I’ve made friends.

Jo VanEvery 54:19
Cool.

Anna Law 54:19
Look, you can’t doom scroll. If if I have a sharp knife in my hands cutting up vegetables. I can’t doom scroll.

Jo VanEvery 54:28
That’s a that’s a good case for “Why cooking?” But you do, yeah, and and you like that’s a thing you like, and clearly it’s a creative outlet for you. You know, you share pictures, and you share recipes and you try some interesting [things]. You were making Madeleines a couple of weeks ago, were you not?

Anna Law 54:43
Right, right.

Jo VanEvery 54:44
Yeah.

Anna Law 54:44
Yeah, I mean, Madeleines are not that hard, believe it or not.

Jo VanEvery 54:50
They just, they just look fancy. See, that’s that’s the other thing.

Anna Law 54:53
They’re not that fancy. You just need the fancy pan.

Jo VanEvery 54:56
Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. That’s good. Yeah. Yeah, but yes, I think you’re right. Yeah, you can’t just… Maybe it takes you 16 years, but if you didn’t take time off and play tennis…

Anna Law 55:06
Oh, I would have went nuts. If I if I… Also no one is following you on social media if you only post about your research, I can read your CV. Why should I follow you?

Jo VanEvery 55:19
Yeah,

Anna Law 55:19
Are you an interesting person?

Jo VanEvery 55:21
Yeah.

Anna Law 55:22
What else can I learn about you? I can read your CV. I don’t need you to keep posting about your research. Are you posting other else, other people’s research in your field? I mean, if I follow you, will I learn about other people who are doing migration research and legal research, or is it just you, you, you, you, you, and that’s the entire feed?

Jo VanEvery 55:44
Yeah, and I think that’s what people get confused about. The “Oh, I need to be on social media to promote my work”, right? It’s that it’s not a you, you, you just talking about your work. It is about… It’s about building networks, and you know they’re different kinds of networks, but they they are networks of people, and I’ve met some great people on social media that have become really good friends. And then there’s just other people where it’s like, “Oh, these people have interesting things to say”, and and they’re like whole people, like I’m interested in seeing. And then it’s also the fact that when you publish, when you write about the book or whatever it is you’re promoting, it’s not the only thing they see from you. It’s part of this broader thing, right? And and and I think especially when you’re posting about it while you’re working on it, because while you’re working on it is when you’re like, “Oh, I read this really cool article today”, right? It’s not about your own work. It’s about

Anna Law 56:42
It gives people insight into what else is going on in your life, and what are you reading. I mean, you are curating your feed, so what other interesting things have you read, or what else are you doing with your time?

Jo VanEvery 56:58
Yeah, yeah. Okay, there’s plenty of things we could talk about, but I think we’ve had a pretty interesting conversation about your research, which – and doing interdisciplinary research, and working in a public college with, you know, the kind of students you just feel it’s really satisfying to be able to contribute to society through your work. Like that, you feel like you’re making a contribution there, and you’re doing this really interesting work. I’m sorry that your research on slavery, Native American history, and all of that stuff has become so bloody relevant today. That seems like some things we would like to have left in the past, but you have really important things to say about how the current moment relates to the development of these policies and legal situations over the course of the history of the country. And anybody that’s interested in that should probably check out your book. I will put all of that in the show notes, so that people can find your book and all of that kind of thing. It was great to talk to you. Thank you very much.

Anna Law 58:08
Thanks for having me on today.

[End of Transcript.]

Related Posts & Links:

Anna’s book is available via Oxford University Press here: Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants

Anna’s website: https://www.annaolaw.com/

Anna has written a blog post about why the 2nd book is much harder, including the care duties people have mid-career including eldercare and childcare.
Read ‘Why the SECOND book is so hard and what to do about it‘ here.

The posts that inspired the title of my podcast:

• Creating A Satisfying Academic Career – Part 1
• Creating A Satisfying Academic Career – Part 2

The Spectre of Professionalism: Field, discipline, interdisciplinary

This interview was conducted on 10 July 2026, auto-transcribed by Otter.ai and human-edited for accuracy. It has been published here for ease of reading and was sent to the newsletter on 7 August 2026.

The post Why it took 16 years to write a book with Anna O. Law appeared first on Jo VanEvery.

Sometimes you drop a ball.

You didn’t do a thing you were supposed to do at the time you were supposed to do it.

There isn’t really a good reason. Things got away from you. You forgot. You thought you’d assigned that task to someone else and there was a miscommunication. Or the person you assigned it to dropped the ball.

This doesn’t mean you, your assistant, or colleague is incompetent. Sometimes these things happen.

Whether you have an official diagnosis or not, if you are an adult who is neurodivergent in some way (or thinks you might be), this kind of thing might trigger all kinds of terrible feelings.

After all, you’ve probably had a lot of experience of this happening in the past. Even if you’ve developed systems to address the more common issues, sometimes those systems fail.

There is nothing wrong with you!

Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone.

Most of the time, when you’ve calmed down from the initial reaction, you try to figure out what happened and create or update your systems to prevent it happening again.

But sometimes, you look at what happened and you know that your system just failed randomly.

You look back over a longer period of time and realize that it’s been a long time since you’ve dropped this particular ball. Your system does work. It just failed once.

No big deal.

You become a bit more attentive about all the parts of your system for a bit just to make sure.

Random doesn’t look how we think it does

Most people assume that if something similar happens multiple times fairly close together, that it wasn’t random.

If you’ve ever decided to knit a scarf or a sweater with stripes of either random width or random colour changes (or both), you will probably have confronted the fact that sometimes you get blocks of colour that are bigger than you thought. Or one colour is more dominant in the overall garment than you expected. Even when you used a dice or some other random number generator.

Sometimes your systems randomly fail in 3 different ways in one month.

From the outside it looks like you have no systems and you are just incompetent.

But you can see that those were 3 different things, each of which hasn’t happened for a long time, but which all happened in a short span of time.

This is when you invoke mercury retrograde, pixies, or some other supernatural cause that you aren’t even sure you really believe in. It helps.

Self-compassion FTW

As an adult who’s had this kind of brain your whole life, you might also have a long history of being told you are incompetent, lazy, or stupid when these things happen. You now have a gremlin who turns up to repeat some of those things. You might have other physical reactions including pain or nausea.

It sucks.

That physical feeling you get will probably always accompany this kind of dropped ball. It’s okay.

That feeling is a signal. It’s a reminder that you care about this thing. You feel bad that you made this mistake.

Don’t make it worse by berating yourself for feeling how you feel. Or for needing some time to feel those feelings and let them pass.

You can acknowledge the feelings, and give them some time and space, without exaggerating the seriousness of your infraction.

This is hard. You can do hard things. It’s okay to need support to get better at this.

Once the feelings are under control, you can look at the facts and decide how bad this is. There may be consequences for you or for other people.

Forgive yourself first.

Do what you can to repair things…

Apologize to the people affected. Even if there is nothing you can change, you do feel bad that this happened. Acknowledge that you dropped a ball and that affected them. Say sorry.

Keep it short. Don’t overexplain. They are allowed to feel how they feel about it, too.

If there is anything you can do to mitigate the consequences, do it. Sometimes there is nothing that can be done. If you’ve missed a hard deadline, you’ve missed a hard deadline. That thing won’t happen. This also sucks. For everyone involved.

Take the time to look at how this happened and assess the risk of it happening again. Maybe you do need to update your systems. Maybe you don’t. You need to decide based on the facts.

You can never reduce the risk to zero. If you are going to change things, you can briefly explain what you are going to do to prevent this happening again in future.

Most people are understanding. Some people are not.

Sometimes you are going to lose a relationship and/or opportunities because of the person who is not understanding or compassionate. You get to feel grief for that. And, you need to remember that the pressure of working with someone who is not understanding about this kind of thing is probably not worth it.

Carry on.

The most important thing is to not let it derail you.

Let this be a small thing. Limit the impact on everything else.

It’s okay to feel a bit nervous as you do this. You might be extra careful for a while.

Learn what you need to learn and carry on.

You have important work to do. Go do it!

Related Posts:

Treating each day as a new opportunity

You’re coping, until you aren’t.

You are not lazy

The post When your systems fail appeared first on Jo VanEvery.

Most of my clients have more than one writing project they are working on. And by “more than one”, it’s not usually 2, either.

They might come to me because they need help “finishing this book” or “getting things published”. And part of the problem is managing the teaching and admin and what do you do when your kids are sick and all that…

But there are usually a lot of other writing projects, too. In various stages of completion.

Between the general pressure to publish more, the tendency of research to produce more interesting questions, and how difficult it is to say no when someone invites you to contribute to a volume they are editing, you can accumulate a lot more projects than you can reasonably work on at one time.

Why limit your active projects?

To summarize what I said in Do you have too many writing projects?, if you have too many active writing projects, you can’t give any of them enough time to make a satisfying amount of progress and the costs of frequent task switching further limit your progress.

You risk being so frustrated that you feel like you can’t do this at all.

You do not necessarily have to limit yourself to just one project. The drawbacks of task switching may be compensated by the benefits of using a different project as a form of rest.

However, it is not advisable to have more than 3 projects active at any given time. Many people find 2 to be demanding enough.

How do you choose which projects?

There are multiple ways to do this.

Your overall goal is to get more things published. A published article is definitely no longer on your to do list.

An interim goal will be to get things off your desk to someone else: a co-author, peer reviewers at a journal, etc.

One criterion for selecting a priority is “closest to done”. A variation on that is closest to ready to hand off to your co-author (even if only as a draft).

Anything that has received a Revise & Resubmit decision after peer review is, by definition, very close to done, in the sense of ‘published’.

I strongly recommend making this your top priority. Use the comments from the journal editor and reviewers to make a revision plan. Then keep this project moving so you can get it back to the journal, and hopefully published and off your desk.

Anything that you’ve submitted is by definition, inactive. It has become impossible to predict how long the review process will take. You don’t want to spend time and energy worrying about stuff you can’t control. It’s better to feel mildly annoyed when you get the decision because you have to reprioritize your active projects.

As I said in Do you have too many writing projects? to get the full benefit of switching between 2 or 3 projects, you want projects that need different kinds of work, so working on one is a rest from the other.

If you haven’t already used the free workbook to get more clarity on

• how much and what kind of work each project needs,
• how you feel about each project
• Whether other people are involved
• The consequences of finishing or delaying

You can do that now. It will help you see which projects might complement each other either cognitively or emotionally.

I am not recommending “finish one thing before you switch to another” except for those things that are very close to finished.

I’m also not saying you need to abandon some of your projects completely.

Your goal is to be able to devote enough time and cognitive resources to a limited number of projects to see real movement and feel like the time you spend is worthwhile.

How long is “for now”?

You get to decide on the timeframe during which you will focus on this limited set of projects.

It needs to be long enough that you will feel like you’ve made progress on it, even if it’s not finished. Perhaps you define that by a specific milestone like “drafted the middle section” or “clarified the argument and outlined a new structure”. But it can also just be “this is what’s getting my limited writing time this month” and you can see how far you get.

Sometimes the work you do on the project will not directly affect the draft document. Perhaps you need to read more before you can draft the next section. Or, you need to go back to your analysis and refine it. Setting a time limit for this kind of activity can prevent necessary background work turning into a way to avoid writing the thing.

I suggest starting with a month.

You might have one “closest to done” project and one “other“.

You can also consider what kind of time and capacity you have this month, given the other things going on. Then choose a project that needs work that is possible in that kind of time.

For example, in summer, or on sabbatical, you probably want to prioritize a project that needs deep intellectual engagement with fewer distractions.

In contrast, in the busiest part of your teaching year, you might prioritize something that requires a lot of relatively straightforward work that can be done effectively in smaller chunks of time even when tired.

At the end of the month, use the Monthly Review prompts I send to summarize what kinds of work you have done on the projects you prioritized, and how much time you spent on each of them.

Clearly articulate how each project has changed because of that work, either in the document or in your head. Clarity about what you are trying to accomplish *is* progress.

Then you can also look at your longer list and decide if these projects are still your priority for the next month, or if you want to change something.

Maybe the kind of time available is different. Maybe something else has become more urgent. Or maybe you just need a change to keep you interested.

Resist the temptation to question your decisions more frequently than this. Changing things too frequently will lead to feeling like you aren’t making enough progress on anything. It’s discouraging.

The one exception is if you receive a decision from a journal about an article that is currently under review. A decision means it’s back on your desk.

A Revise & Resubmit decision (especially if it’s “minor revisions”) is, by definition, your top priority. You need to do enough work on it immediately to determine how much time you need, and ask for an extension on the deadline if necessary. If it’s been rejected you can wait until your next Monthly Review to figure out where this fits in your priority list.

What about the things you are NOT doing (this month)?

Prioritizing a very limited number of projects means actively deciding that another group of projects will be inactive for a while. At least a month. Possibly longer.

The Monthly Review helps ensure that they don’t get forgotten completely. But you kind of do want to forget about them for this month at least. Open loops take up up cognitive resources you’d rather use for your priority projects.

Remember: You will write this. Just not today, this week, this month, this summer.

If you’ve been taking on commitments with the mindset of “How quickly could I do this?”, there will be some emotional adjustment.

You are not lazy.

You are shifting your focus from quantity to quality. You are creating the conditions in which you can do things well. You may even finish more things per year because you are able to do better work in the time you devote to each project.

If one or more of the projects you are not working on right now involves other people, you will need to renegotiate timelines with them. The reflection prompts in the workbook will have resulted in some notes about the importance of this relationship and this project.

You might also want to remind yourself of all the ways in which you and the other person agree, or are aligned in your values.

Don’t assume they will be upset. They may also be overwhelmed and actually welcome your suggestion to put this particular project off for a month or so. That will help them deal with other things, too.

If you agreed to write a chapter for an edited collection or special issue and it is not one of your top 3 priorities, you will need to drop out of that particular publication. That doesn’t mean you are never going to write this thing. It means that after serious reflection, writing this thing in the timeframe required for this particular book or special issue, is not a priority for you.

Trust that you will be able to publish it somewhere else when you do get around to writing it. Show your respect for the editor and other contributors by communicating clearly and not slowing the bigger project down.

Here is some suggested language you can use as a template in this instance:

“I have been reviewing my commitments and have realized that I really do not have the capacity to take on this project right now and do a good job.

I’d like to withdraw now while you still have time to find someone else.

Thank you for inviting me. The project really is interesting. I just don’t have the capacity to do it justice.”

If you cannot renegotiate, then recommit.

Prioritizing is an iterative process.

You made your decisions based on what you learned by reflecting on the prompts in the workbook.

Figuring out how to communicate about a particular project made you realize that there were some factors you did not consider.

You can consider those factors now.

Make it a priority and drop something else.

This is difficult.

Making these decisions, communicating with the people you need to communicate with, making reasonable plans for your writing projects, and feeling confident that you are doing enough is really difficult.

It is made even more difficult by last minute demands from your head of department, opportunities you hadn’t anticipated, and the ways in which your colleagues may spread their own lack of confidence and fear around.

Many academics struggle with this at all stages of career.

There is no magic that will make it possible to do everything you want to do right now.

Be kind to yourself.

You are not a bad person for having started all these things. It’s pretty normal for things to get out of hand. You are excited about your work. You took on those things for good reasons.

The people you have made the commitments with have also been in this situation at least once. They might not like it, but they understand.

Limiting how many projects you are working on enables you to focus better on what you are working on.

You will enjoy your writing more. You will probably get more done.

You are now being realistic about what you can do and adjusting your plans. That’s it.

You can do this, just not all at once.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get the FREE workbook: Finish More by Doing Less and get your projects moving again.

Related Posts:

Do you have too many writing projects?

Starting a new project

Optimizing Focus when your project brings up difficult emotions

What to do about a stalled book project

This post was based on the original June 2019 version sent to my newsletter, but it has now been completely rewritten and split into 2 separate posts. The other new post can be found here: Do you have too many writing projects?.

The post How to choose which project to work on appeared first on Jo VanEvery.

Most of my clients have more than one writing project they are working on. And by “more than one”, it’s not usually 2, either.

They might come to me because they need help “finishing this book” or “getting things published”. And part of the problem is managing the teaching and admin and what do you do when your kids are sick and all of that…

But there are usually a lot of other writing projects, too. In various stages of completion.

Between the general pressure to publish more, the tendency of research to produce more interesting questions, and how difficult it is to say no when someone invites you to contribute to a volume they are editing, you can accumulate a lot more projects than you can reasonably work on at one time.

Fragmenting your writing time.

The time you have available for writing is limited.

Dividing your time between multiple projects means that each of them is going to progress more slowly than if you’d given all of the time to one of them.

There is a real danger that the amount of progress you make on each one in any given time period is so small that you begin to wonder if you are doing anything productive at all.

It’s not just the total amount of time, either.

Many people complain, quite rightly, that it is particularly difficult to find the kind of time that allows you to really immerse yourself in a project so you can do the deep intellectual work it requires.

I talk a lot about making good use of smaller chunks of time. But I would never argue that you can do all the writing you need to do in just 15-minutes a day.

When you have long periods of time in which you can make writing a priority, do you really want to divide that time between 6 different projects?

You need to find the sweet spot where your projects move forward at a pace that feels satisfying.

Cognitive capacity is limited.

Your frustration about the kind of time available is a recognition that even when you have time you could devote to writing, you don’t always have the cognitive capacity necessary for the particular kind of work your project needs.

Each of the writing projects you have on the go are complex. All of them need deep intellectual work at some point.

• Reading.
• Thinking.
• Struggling to articulate what you really want to say as a result of all that thinking.

That part of the work can’t be rushed, either.

“Sleeping on it” is an actual cognitive process. Your brain needs time to process what you’ve put in there. That’s happening in the background, but there needs to be capacity for it.

This is also why overwork doesn’t work. Fatigue reduces your cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive function. But that’s a whole other thing.

Task switching is like an extra project.

The act of switching between tasks or projects has its own time and cognitive capacity requirements.

The more frequently you switch tasks, the more often you spend the first part of your writing session “getting back into the project”.

Yes, you can develop practices that make that a bit easier. But the feeling you crave of being in the project and just moving forward without having to consciously think about the next step is not available.

You can only hold so many details in your head at a time. All the extra energy and thinking you spend switching between projects, remembering where you are, and getting back into a project, and panicking about forgetting things, is energy and thinking that you are not devoting to your writing projects.

Second guessing your plans, worrying about being behind and not meeting deadlines, and beating yourself up for not being able to focus take even more cognitive resources away from the projects on your list.

Don’t forget that a certain amount of task switching is inevitable: between teaching and writing, or life stuff and writing, or whatever. Adding more switching between your writing projects compounds the problem.

If you spend a significant amount of your writing time engaged in task switching, it will feel like you need even more time. Time you are already struggling to find and dividing between too many projects.

That’s not motivating.

You must reduce the number of active projects.

Note the word “active”.

It will be helpful in the short term to declare a moratorium on accepting new projects.

However, you don’t have to give up on anything on your list completely.

You need to set some things aside for now to free up time and cognitive capacity for the one(s) you will be working on.

You have to make some difficult decisions and you may need to engage in some tricky negotiations about deadlines.

You cannot do your best work with too many things on the active list. You need to make a more realistic plan.

I propose you think like a (successful) circus juggler and limit how many things you are trying to pay attention to at once.

This reduces the amount of energy and cognitive capacity you devote to switching, so you can focus more effectively.

You don’t have to go down to one.

I’m not expecting you to become a different person.

If you know you work most effectively if you can do One Thing At A Time, consider this post permission to organize yourself so you are actually only working on one thing at a time. This section will probably help you figure out how to combine ONE writing project, with the necessary non-writing projects you also need to keep going.

For the rest of you, focusing on only one project at a time can also have drawbacks. Sometimes a change is exactly what you need to help you optimize your focus.

Given the time and cognitive capacity available to you for writing (which varies over the year), you need to limit how many projects you can switch between.

The general consensus is that 3 is the maximum. A lot of my clients tell me that they struggle even with 2.

I want you to think carefully about the specific projects you are combining. Ideally they require different kinds of work.

For example, if one of your projects is at a stage that benefits from time to ruminate and allow your brain to process things in the background, you want tasks you can do while that happens. Another project that is further advanced, and needs you to implement decisions already made, line edit or copy edit a fairly complete draft, or some of the more tedious tasks required before submission would pair well. Especially if you find it hard to focus on those tasks for long periods.

This is also helpful if you are trying to keep that thinky project going when you don’t have a lot of time.

Feeding your brain with things to ruminate on before spending most of your day in meetings or teaching, can make the one morning you can protect for writing more satisfying.

The same thing applies if your main project is emotionally demanding. Allowing yourself to switch to a more straightforward project when you’ve reached your emotional capacity has several benefits. It means you are less likely to avoid the emotionally difficult project. Not exceeding your emotional capacity also reduces the recovery time necessary. And another project is getting attention, so you aren’t falling behind on everything.

The trick is to ensure that the type of work required is sufficiently different that switching counts as a rest from the other project.

For example, the intellectual heavy lifting of one project may be creative rest from the tedium of formatting tables and checking references.

This is also why you need to strictly limit yourself to only 2 or 3 projects. If you have more than 2 or 3 projects in rotation, the restful element of switching will be counteracted by the effort required to keep track of what’s going on.

The benefits of being able to switch to something else when stuck compensate for some of that. You are spending a higher proportion of your writing time moving projects forward and less of it staring at a screen pulling your hair out.

Free resources to help with all of this!

This is difficult.

I’ve created a free workbook to help you make these decisions. You’ll start by making a list of everything currently in progress. (Ideas that you haven’t started working on yet don’t count.)

Then I encourage you to consider a range of factors, including:

• How much and what kind of work each project needs
• How you feel about each project
• Whether other people are involved
• The consequences of finishing or delaying

I’ve written another post helping you choose once you’ve done that reflecting, and what to do about the stuff you are putting on the back burner for now.

You will occasionally panic that you’ve dropped one of the balls you were supposed to be juggling and it’s rolled under the sofa. Keep breathing.

• Panic is not the best state to write in.
• Panicking about a project that isn’t the one you are trying to focus on right now is even less helpful.

The Monthly Review email I send at the end of every month will help prevent the panic.

I remind you to review what you’ve accomplished and adjust your plans for the month ahead. I share specific prompts that focus on your writing, and include a nudge to check whether your priorities have changed.

Subscribe to the newsletter to get the FREE workbook, Finish More by Doing Less, and the Monthly Review emails.

Related Posts:

Overcommitted? Declaring a moratorium

What to do about a stalled book project

Optimizing Focus: 3 elements to consider

Juggling 101: Elements of a good plan

Communication vs Validation: why are you publishing?

You need a writing practice

The power of 15 minutes a day

This post was rewritten and updated from an earlier 2019 version that was sent to my newsletter and included in the October 2021 Optimizing Focus Spotlight. It was then split into 2 new posts and republished in May/June 2026, the 2nd can be found here: How to choose which project to work on.

The post Do you have too many writing projects? appeared first on Jo VanEvery.