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Introduction: How are you? I am totally stressed at the moment, to be honest. Work is piling up and I’m just drowning. I don’t know when I’m going to have time to start on that secrecy and silence book chapter – I’m so, so late with it now, and I feel really bad that I’m letting Roisin down, but I literally never have a second. I know, I know exactly what you mean. I mean, I had 115 e-mails yesterday and they all needed answering. I’m doing 16 hour days just trying to keep on top of it. I feel like I’m always late with everything, and my ›to do‹ list grows faster than I can cross things off it. It’s like one of fungi in a horror movie that doubles in size every few hours! (Laughter) And I never ever have chance to do any of my own work. I’m sleeping really badly and it all just feels completely out of control. . . It’s the same for me. Reading? What that? Thinking? No chance! And you feel awful, don’t you. With me I feel like I’m constantly stealing time from the kids too – I’ll go off to check messages in the middle of a game of Monopoly or something. Sometimes I just feel like quitting. Yeah I know. It just gets worse. Still hoping to win the lottery, then? (laughter) But how are you? Do you really want to know? ! (laughter) (Yeh) well, awful actually. I’m really fed. I heard yesterday that my article for x journal was turned down. (Oh no!) You know, the one I worked on for ages and ages. I poured so much of myself into that piece (I know). And one of the referee’s comments was vile – it said something like ›my first year undergraduates have a better understanding of the field than this author does – why are they wasting all of our time‹. When I read it it was like a slap in the face, Ros. It was all I could do not to burst out crying in the postroom, but I had a lecture right afterwards so I somehow managed to pull myself together and go and do that. But last night, I just didn’t sleep (poor you) I just kept on going over and over with all these negative comments ringing round my head. And you know the worst thing is, they are right: I am useless (no you’re not), I’m a complete fraud, and I should have realised that I was going to be found out if I sent my work to a top journal like that. This is a transcript of a conversation I had with a female friend in the few days before (finally) beginning work on this chapter. Both speakers are white, both work in »old« (pre-1992) British Universities, and both are employed on »continuing« contracts – thus are already marked as »privileged« in multiple ways in the contemporary academy. Mine is easily recognizable as the voice which worries about how late this article is! Some readers may find this fragment of conversation rather odd, but I suspect for many more it will appear familiar and may strike deep chords of recognition. It speaks of many things: exhaustion, stress, overload, insomnia, anxiety, shame, aggression, hurt, guilt and feelings of out-of-placeness, fraudulence and fear of exposure within the contemporary academy. These feelings, these affective embodied experiences, occupy a strange position in relation to questions of secrecy and silence. They are at once ordinary everyday, yet at the same time remain largely secret and silenced in the public spaces of the academy. They are spoken in a different, less privileged register; they are the stuff of the chat in the corridor, coffee break conversations and intimate exchanges between friends, but not, it would seem, the keynote speech or the journal publication or even the departmental meeting. For all the interest reflexivity in recent decades, the experiences of academics have somehow largely escaped critical attention. It is as if the parameters for reflexivity are bounded by the individual study, leaving the institutional context in which academic knowledge is produced simply as a taken for granted backdrop.
Rosalind Gill (Sun,) studied this question.