Another Beer? Yes, Thanks! I Am Working, After All!

Trying to explain to non-academics the nature of what academics do is a fraught enterprise. When I travel to South Africa, say, I may spend a lot of time in pubs, or seeing friends, or wandering Cape Town or visiting old haunts in Grahamstown, or catching up on South African sport and pop culture, but most often I am also there to work. Indeed, all of those supposed diversions qualify as work inasmuch as I want to understand South Africa from the inside. The same goes for when I go to do research or hit a conference in the United States. And then there are the "breaks." During the summer months, or for a few weeks in December and January, or for the week of spring break, I can set my schedule. I can certainly choose how much to work. But in the end, that is not time off. Lying on the couch, reading? Probably work. Blogging? Sometimes. When I do it at the FPA Blogs it is absolutely work. Here? Sometimes.

The reality is that in the humanities work is also a fungible concept made all the more inexplicable by the fact that we are lucky enough to be in a profession in which much of our work would qualify as leisure activities for others. Hey, Tiger Woods works his ass off at an endeavor that for most of us is the quintessential example of a leisure-time pursuit. Most people would not ascribe academia with the glamour of professional sports, but at least in this sense there is a workable analogy. If I am lying in the living room reading Sports Illustrated even I would have a hard time saying with a straight face, "I'm working," but at the same time I teach and write about sports and have begun the early stages of a book about sports and society, so much like when I read the newspaper or a magazine about politics, I may not be working but I'm not exactly not working. And then there are those times when I am not working because I need the chance to let my brain work, in which case, I may actually be . . . well, you get the point.

My guess is that most academics, and especially those in the humanities, deal with this issue all the time. It was thus refreshing to see this Rachel Toor article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Toor discusses this exact question -- the sometimes amorphous nature of what qualifies as work in the weeks, months, even years leading to publication.