Who gets the right to speak? Or to write? It can be difficult joining a conversation when the conversation is already happening, especially if that conversation is being dominated by largely white men. Some academics lean into their exclusion from the conversation, but it is mean to say this is a case of self-sabotage. It is a matter of how we work to get the right to write, and how those already within the conversation invite others to join them.

Academic writing shouldn’t involve too much ‘masking’, to imitate those already there, but a certain amount of this may be used, as described in The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong: masking to be heard.

Where teaching or administration takes up most of an academic’s time, seeming to push research to the margins, there is always SoTL: the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. That means, writing about the teaching and learning that dominates the job. Or we can (and should) write textbooks for students. (Universities have become sniffy about academics writing textbooks, but they are useful, important, and, in contrast to research monographs, they may even make money!)

Teaching should bleed into research and research should bleed into teaching, and both should bleed into administration and back again from bleeding administration to teaching and to research.

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