On strike
My union is on strike over the dismantling of our pensions, so I'm not working today.
In closing all my tabs, I did edit a few things on my poster advertising next year's classes. And the pop quiz for next week needed to be re-saved in the right folder, along with a few screenshots going on a powerpoint, which I don't want to lose track of. I also checked my university email (SUPER quick), just to make sure there wasn't an emergency going on with one of my tutees, who I recently referred to counseling. And in my inbox, there was an email from the international conference I submitted to, with a request to confirm some details so my submission could be peer reviewed. So I did that real quick, because I assume the strike will be over by July and this is the biggest conference in my field. But, like, I'm not *really* working.
I was thinking about this Wednesday around 11 pm when I was still in my office, finishing up so I could strike without, y'know, destroying everything. Even though the idea of the strike is precisely to show the universities that, without us, they would be destroyed. But academic work is so cumulative, and so imbricated in various communities of scholars and students, that to remove one's labor feels like doing a small violence to a lot of people who don't deserve it. Wednesday night, as I prepped playtesting materials for an assignment due in April (because the strike *could* stretch into mid-March and these materials need to be available to students before then), I thought about exactly how academia weaponizes our love for our subjects (who needs benefits when you can read and write all day?? Be less greedy), our care for our students (you don't want to help kids grow and learn however and whenever you can?? Be less selfish), and our loyalty to an institution that, to put it mildly, does not love us back.
As a lecturer in game studies, I see this broken system as fascinating in several ways. For one, the line between work and play grows ever thinner under late capitalism. Games have served as the ludic shadow of the military industrial complex since Spacewar! (as I wrote about here), and games are getting more work-like while workplaces grow more gamified. Work is "fun" and "fun" is work, and rarely more so than in academia (lots of other places too, though. The suggestion that artists work for "exposure" rather than money is the same idea). Many of us are here in the first place because we had an urge to do something else with our brains than put them to work for capitalist systems; the university bubble can seem like a haven, where smart people think about things because they are interesting and not because they are lucrative. Of course, it's an utter fallacy to imagine that academia exists outside of capitalism, but employers can capitalize on the fantasy of it to shame us for wanting pay at all. Don't want to be employed by the Man? Great, just do that work for free, or for increasingly low wages.
When you had a tenured position with job security and good benefits, the relatively low salary was a deal pretty well worth making. But the era of tenure or tenure-track jobs is mostly over. Academia is basically a field for contingent laborers in the USA now, and contingent positions in the UK are growing. The current strike is about universities no longer guaranteeing academic pensions, such that actuaries predict lecturers like me will lose £10,000 per year in retirement. It's a trend fully in keeping with the casualization of labor in a hundred other fields. I'm not arguing that working in academia is worse than working in other fields (and, indeed, the idea that anyone in my generation will even *have* pensions in retirement feels like an adorable pipe dream). But the narrative of academia is different. You love what you do, you believe in the mission, so the mission gets internalized and inescapable.
Take, for example, the teach-outs happening across the UK during the strike. Faculty are giving free public lectures in their subject areas, to stress the fact that we'd *like* to be teaching if only we were given back our pensions. Ideologically, I'm totally on board, and I think that working to be less ivory tower is a great idea. Universities think so, too. They ask you at every job interview how you plan to get involved with the community, to be more of a public intellectual who has "impact" in the world beyond the academy. So these scholars giving free talks at non-university buildings around the UK are fulfilling one of their main job requirements. It's cool, though, because they are definitely not working today.
This is not me blaming them. This is me reminding us that the academic picket line runs across your computer, your brain, your sense of identity, and your wish to make the world a little bit better. The university monetizes that, and then acts horrified when you ask politely for some of it back.
Another game studies concept relevant here is the magic circle, an idea that originated with Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1938) but mostly finds shape in Salen & Zimmerman's Rules of Play (2004). The magic circle is the (permeable) membrane separating a game from real life. Play takes place within this temporary space, in which the rules of a game hold sway and regulate behavior. As Eric Zimmerman has written with frustration, the magic circle can be easily misunderstood and turned into a straw figure. The magic circle isn't Vegas—what happens inside it does NOT stay inside it—and Rules of Play articulates a lot of the ways the magic circle can be a porous space within/overlaid on top of other cultural structures. What the magic circle does do is give actions within a game meaning. A ball entering a net only means that a goal has been scored within the magic circle of a soccer game. Without the magic circle, it's just a ball going into a net.
Academia is a game with a magic circle that the players believe in so much that we fight for years for a chance even to enter it and thus have our work *count* (i.e., be published and certified in the right presses and journals and conferences and permanent positions). Work done without that imprimatur is the same work, but it's also very much not. It's a ball going into a net, not a scored goal.
Take this blog. I wouldn't consider it real academic work, I don't typically write for it during work hours, it's just a way of exploring cool game ideas I and playing with them to see if they are worth turning into articles or conference talks. Occasionally they are; one post has become a journal article currently under peer review, two more became conference talks, and I have plans to turn a few more into articles later this year. So it's clearly some kind of work space, just not a kind that counts as work within the magic academic circle.
To be fair, part of this is on me for framing it this way—my university gives lecturers on a research contract something called a "Research Day" once a week, to work on projects without the distraction of teaching and administrative duties. I could blog on those days, but I would feel guilty doing so, because it's basic brainstorming work rather than drafting an article. This is what I mean when I say the picket line runs across your brain. Even when the structures are in place to support it, it takes effort to untrain the downtrodden mentality that devalues the complexity, value, and time required to do your work. Some of my colleagues are refusing to strike for exactly this reason. They don't want to hurt their students, or they think that we really don't deserve the decent pensions we're fighting for.
But not me! I'm on strike! You can tell by the way I'm not working :-)
