Geo-Time

While others who work in higher education use their twitter feeds for insightful and wry remarks about pedagogy and inquiry, mine — as even a cursory glance at the weekly archives here stored reveals — is largely a repository for anecdotes about puppies, pregnancy and coffee breaks.  I don’t make too many apologies for this, since my internet presence is largely recreational and Twitter itself a valuable locus of relationships and conversations for me: the last year of happy days with @Ghetsuhm and @MeganWegan is just one example.

At the moment, however, I feel as if I am necessarily talking in asides, analogies and ciphers as the restructuring of my workplace moves into my own area of work and my union and teaching roles converge.  I am not of a mind to put at risk my professionalism by talking in specifics here, although a search of the education archive on the Stuff webpages should reveal for those who are interested a little of what is going on, and on what, in my union role, I am frequently asked to comment.

Four years have passed since my colleagues and I were restructured from top to bottom, which is in both the public and private sectors the equivalent of geological time, and yet this seems to have come around very quickly indeed.  (Coincidentally I was in that former time also enjoying the delights of new puppies.)  At the time I wrote something that more or less captures my mood now:

I’ve got yin and yang tangled up together at the moment. This is the week in which the axe is falling at work; each email announcing “appointments” has with it the shadow of those whose names aren’t there. It’s not yet my turn–there are more reports to come and decisions to be made before I find out if my patch is to be scorched–but in the last two or three days I’ve woken up feeling as if there’s a flat stone lying on my chest. Ich habe angst.

Let me illustrate, another way, what this is like by way of an anecdote.  Regular readers may remember the large fridge the señor and I bought from a departing colleague early last year.  I didn’t lie when I said to my colleague that each time we cleaned the fridge, we’d think of her.  She isn’t coming back now; her team has been reduced from four to one and that one transferred to another part of the institution.  Now instead of thinking of her, I think of this, in all its pathos (and indeed bathos too; a frigid reminder).

Well before I know the fate of my own, and my remaining colleagues’, employment, I will have some serious and rather more personal labour to do, and the timing of this may well take me away from the workplace just as the decisions are being made.  I wonder what the history of my industrial labour will turn out to be once my maternal labour is completed.

The work I do that under the previous government (a State, I should add, that I didn’t particularly laud) was deemed part of higher education’s social mandate has under this one become, in contemporary parlance, “not core business”.  The work hasn’t changed but its funding, and thereby its status, has, and my employment status may yet change with it.

In the five years since last my unit was restructured I have gone from free agent to breadwinner, a change in status of my own that seems just as large in scale.  Puppies; pregnancy; coffee: all my redundant emotions get here spun out in idle ciphers, while I spin my employee’s wheels and my daughter, for whom now I’m doing so much of this, grows obliviously all the while.  I don’t know what will happen next, but hope seems at present about as useful as fear.  I wonder, nonetheless, at the longevity of my resilience.