Work. How do we feel about it in 2020? A nebulous but exciting angle for dissertation research.
I began my professional adult life during the Great Recession, post 2007 financial and housing market collapses. It meant that a lot of what I planned did not turn out, especially employment. And now, we find ourselves a decade later in another recession, likely a depression. Not only that, but WORK as we know it will likely never be the same.
Work, school, and play all happen in one space in the global pandemic novel coronavirus of 2020.
In the midst of the last recession, when I was reinventing my career, plans, and figuring out what I could do that someone would be me for, I frequently pondered what it all meant: working. I had always had some kind of job since I turned fifteen and wanted to make my own money, but they were always temporary, something that would pass before I got to the THING I would do for the rest of my life. Once college ended, the reality of doing a thing for 40 hours a week started to sink in, and caused a bit of an internal crisis. Is this what people did? Every week?
[Well, first I went to grad school, because it was the height of a recession, I had a history degree, loved learning, and someone was willing to cover my tuition, buying me more time. I loved graduate school but left it with a fair amount of resentment that the time spent there would be useless. My full thoughts on this merit another day.]
But then, after grad school:
The importance of finding something I liked doing became critical. I took a lot of odd, one-off, project-based jobs. I stayed at my internship at the National Archives of Atlanta as long as they could let me. I went to job fairs and found temp work and got another job in retail. One temp job ended and another started, until I found work at as a “thought leader” (marketing, social media, reception, and lunch ordering) for a B2B technology company. I spent nearly a year there questioning why in the world anyone would want to read my tweets about ad-hoc software solutions, let alone want to write such tweets. Why was I even showing up here everyday? I counted down hours to Friday when most of my day was used up waiting for men to submit their lunch orders so I could order and go pick up the lunch.
I kept interviewing for better work, including the occasional interview with something semi related to public history, which is what I had studied and felt passionately about. What I landed, finally, was a job as a career and internship advisor for college students, like I had not that long ago been, who were earning humanities and social science degrees.
The layered experience of 1. earning a degree in history 2. struggling in the labor market 3. having crappy jobs and questioning their meaning and 4. then being hired to advise students on what they should also do in those same life decisions convened so that I was constantly thinking about WORK.
[Here’s a vintage piece I wrote about advising students.]
So naturally, I turned to another public historian, collector of stories, who lived through his own Depression (The Great one), who was also preoccupied and fascinated by this thing we do all day: Studs Terkel. Mr. Terkel was a 20th century oral historian who captured critical stories of how we understand life from the Great Depression to the late century. His behemoth Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1972) captures the working person of the middle of an American century that is anachronistic and somehow, equally, as resonant in Work today. In his time, much blue and white collar work was being automated and computerized, so his collection of folx’ stories captures a bygone era. But many of the sentiments of our relationship to work have not changed one lick.
I entertained the idea in my head that I would someday go back to school, not for history, but maybe for sociology, and write my own version of Terkel’s classic volume, for the 21st century.
I compose and work with others on their compositions in tandem in my work and school. It is rewarding to be both student and mentor, in fact helps me appreciate both roles more deeply.
A smattering of years went by and now we face another huge economic upheaval, one that will likely change Work and How We Do It as we know it. My old questions felt timlier than ever.
And look at that, I’m in a PhD program. In rhetoric and composition.. I did not know what the field was back when I first flirted with the idea of returning to school to study WORK, but it is exactly where I needed to be to see my interests come together:
student development - their lives, their writing, their aspirations, their composed selves
history and interpretation - people, moving around this world and seeking to make sense of themselves and their present, by looking at the past
rhetoric and composition - the stories we tell, why and how we tell them, and the audiences, contexts, and purposes we seek
the archives - the stories of the people not included in traditional “historical” texts - thanks to a widening of every facet of learning and history, more perspectives than ever are finally being heard and collected, complicating the human story as it should be (and always was)
work - and what it means to people, how we find meaning, value, satisfaction, artistic energy, joy, sadness, remorse, despair, evolution, growth, inspiration, exhaustion
feminist rhetorics - a fairly new entry on the list, but a field within rhetoric that emphasizes our lived experience as absolutely impacting everything we do, create, and invest in. It is rooted in the idea that no research and no researcher, and no person composing any text, is doing so in an objective way. E V E R Y T H I N G I S S U B J E C T I V E and based in embodied, rhetorical experience. It’s the framework I use for all my scholarly work.
This is a collection of things that on some days feel entirely disparate to me, and on other days, are overlapping so much as to appear indistinct from one another. They circle back on one another in an endless stream of ideas, connecting theories, directions to take the research. The roots are there.
I have dozens of angles I could take it, but I need to write my dissertation on WORK. Engaging all the bulleted items above. If 2020 has shown me anything beyond a doubt, it is that this is a topic worth talking about. Mr. Terkel knew it for sure, but I had moments where I thought his collection said the lot of it, there was nothing more to say. What, after all and many decades later, had changed about people and work? One the one hand, nothing, and on the other, everything.
What do you think?