The Grind

It's already spring. Wow. Anyway, I almost can't believe it's been three months since I last blogged, but I was on the job market and actually got interviews. This entailed a lot of waiting on tenterhooks, which translated to radio silence for me as most of the time I was in my head or trying to forget about work. Sadly, I don't have good news to report. The market was terrible for almost everyone I know, including some really amazing scholar-academics, supply far exceeding demand and all that by-now unsurprising stuff.

It was incredibly difficult, being on the market. Like many others, I'm sure, I had to struggle against the feeling of being an impostor and a failure. (That I put that last sentence in past tense is part bravado, I think!) I'm just glad that the season is basically over. But I am still trying to finish this year, keeping my head down as much as possible except for a couple of recent conferences.

Speaking of which, the first was the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference in Riverside (see Jack Halberstam's write-up of this major event), and the second was the ACLA Conference in Vancouver. This was my first time at both of these conferences. While I was on a panel with friends (who are fabulously smart) at the CES, my experience in Vancouver was more to my taste, mostly because of the format of the ACLA seminars: a set group of people meet over the course of 3 days, 2 hours/day, and share their papers with one another. This allows for more sustained conversation among folks who have similar and/or related concerns. I found the conversations very interesting, if not exactly productive; the last meeting on Sunday morning, when I presented my paper, was compromised by half of my seminar going missing, even though I believe that the papers given that day were superb (excepting my own). I heard that at least one of the absent seminar members had to catch his flight, and perhaps it was the same for the others. Indeed, that's the only thing I would change about the conference: shift the conference from Friday-Sunday to Thursday-Saturday so that people can have three full days of meeting and save Sunday for their travel day.

Anyway, I opted not to submit this year to my favorite go-to conference, the Association for Asian American Studies Conference, because I decided that going to two big conferences in a season was enough. I am sad that I will miss seeing old friends as well as the chance to visit New Orleans, but I am relieved to have the time to work not just on my diss but also on copy-edits for my forthcoming article in positions as well as on the course that I am teaching this summer.

So I have a very full plate until the Fall. When the job market frenzy starts again. Oy.