Settling
Posted on | January 14, 2008 |
2008 marks my fifth year in Brisbane, and by the end of February I will have been here longer than I lived in Sydney. Given how much I have struggled to embrace Brisbane as a long-term location, that’s quite a psychological turning point for me to wrestle with. A few things have conspired recently that make me quite sure that going back to Sydney isn’t likely any time soon. I’m having too much fun on my current research project for a start, but I’m also starting to find a happy balance of things to keep me off the laptop at night and on weekends (have you noticed?). Right now it’s nice to know things are solid and secure for two more years, at which point there could be even more happening in Brisbane than there is already.
Over the break I’ve been reading a lot of material that helps me understand some of my ongoing feelings of rootlessness in a wider context. Richard Sennett’s Corrosion of Character (which I picked up in an unlikely place: a tiny but great bookshop in Yungaburra, just around the corner from where I stayed on my amazing monsoonal holiday) puts a name to the ‘fradulent sense of community’ I’ve experienced as a career migrant in each of the neighbourhoods I’ve lived in Sydney and Brisbane. I’ve also finished William Whyte’s The Organization Man, which has been really enlightening while sifting through the interviews for my ARC project, and in contrast to a lot of the more recent literature I’ve been reading on white-collar, so-called precarious labour. Ursula Huws’ The Making of a Cybertariat was incredibly prescient in parts, even though some of the pieces in the collection have to be appreciated in retrospect. That this weekend’s Courier Mail had yet another generic puff piece spruiking the benefits of working from home ‘for employers and employees’ convinced me that she was right to warn that this is a wonderful convenience, if not entirely a conspiracy on the part of corporate interests to offload the overheads of paid work onto us (and my interviews will reveal a lot more about this, I can tell).
Getting involved in all of these quite dated texts has been a salve for my frustrations about the temporality of new media and blogging discourse — which also explains why I’ve been a bit silent lately I guess. But then Lauren Berlant started a blog over the holiday and Anne wrote such lovely things that it made me want to invest in the potential of this space all over again.
In the end of year rush I didn’t get around to mentioning that I got a promotion in December. Basically this means I am now paid almost as much as everyone else I know who has worked in academia as long as me! But what I have lost in dollars I have gained in independence, I think — and in the current environment, that suits me. After submitting a heap of documentation and sitting a half hour interview months later, I found out I’d been promoted via a Word attachment in an email. Given my current research, this seemed entirely apt. We are a long way from The Organization era, that’s for sure.
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January 14th, 2008 @ 4:57 pm
Happy that you ended up in this funny city for so many years! And that you are sticking around for a few more. Unless of course I decide to jump ship! Then you are all coming with me x