On Safe and Unsafe Academic Workplaces: An Email to a Colleague

Here, on this blog, I have often written posts about the academic life. Some of those posts have concerned themselves with the state of affairs in my discipline, philosophy, and yet others have been more generally directed–perhaps about academic publishing, for instance. A recurring concern in my posts on academia might be termed ‘workplace issues’–matters that make our professional spaces for working hostile or friendly, supportive or inhibiting. Unsurprisingly, some of these have centered on how women and other minorities might fare.

In today’s post, I want to reproduce an email I wrote to an academic colleague–otherwise very friendly and great company–with whom I had several uncomfortable interactions over a period of time. I was finding myself increasingly resentful of the interjections and interventions that were made in our conversations and suspected I was heading toward what might be an irate, loud, and potentially friendship-destroying response. To head that off, I wrote my email.

Here it is, edited to protect identities. (NOTE: I’ve realized since I wrote this post that my use of “colleague” implies a member of the philosophy department; this email, however, was not written to one.)

Dear X:

I don’t think I would be representing myself fairly if I didn’t say that I’m finding your style of referencing India and all things Indian quite off-putting. I don’t know how serious your feigned ignorance of the subcontinent, its culture and history is, but I think you should be aware that when you do so you don’t come across as remotely funny, and only serve to marginalize me and make me feel extremely uncomfortable. These comments of yours, which relentlessly push India to the dusty margins of history, culture, and material accomplishment, do no justice to your intellect and wit, of which there is abundant supply. They are especially peculiar because they are made to a person who never, ever, tries to be a triumphalist about anything Indian, in which case you could at least say that you were trying to bring me down a peg or two. These remarks of yours, which depict you as Euro-chauvinist, simply do you no justice, and are unfair when directed at someone who fights an almost constant battle to have himself taken seriously somehow, to get people to look past his accent, his brown skin, and his association with a country that despite its rich historical and cultural accomplishments is almost only ever associated with the kinds of images you seek to conjure up again and again.

I’ve come to accept the fact that I’ve lost my ‘home’ and will never find one here, no matter how hard I try, no matter how ‘American’ I become, no matter how knowledgeable I become about this land, its history and its peoples. But I find it hard to accept that even in a space that I normally find so intellectually and emotionally invigorating, I have come to feel that I have to tread warily, making sure that I don’t ever mention India or anything Indian, thus continuing a process of effacement forced upon me in many other contexts.

I write this to you because I consider you a friend, because I respect your intellect, and because I consider my conversations with you to have been some of the most intellectually simulating that I have had in a long while. And it distresses me to think that there are times that in those spaces I feel tense, uncomfortable, and carry resentment out with me.

I might have come across as stereotypically too-sensitive, bristling with a chip on my shoulder. Perhaps I have run the risk, in writing this email, of having you consign me to the trash heap of all those folks who complain too much, who lack a sense of humor, who can’t roll with the punches. But I thought it better that I take the risk and express myself, perhaps not clearly enough, rather than simply pretending that I don’t feel a particular way.

When I wrote this email I was, as I am now, a tenured full professor. I do not know how many untenured juniors simply hold their tongues.

Larry Gopnik: A Serious Man Dealt a Bad Hand

Ethan and Joel Cohen‘s A Serious Man is a very funny, very bleak movie. It is very funny because it points out that life is really quite ludicrous, a gigantic joke at our expense; it is very bleak because it points out that life is really quite ludicrous, a gigantic joke…you see where I’m going with this. Life isn’t just one damn thing after another; very often, it’s just one damn painful, miserable, mystifying thing after another. Its terminus–death–doesn’t promise much more than a continuation of the same mysteries that plagued us during our conscious, waking lives.

Larry Gopnik is a physics professor–seeking tenure–who is used to abstruse mathematics making clear the perplexing details of the reality it purports to model; he can master its seemingly inexplicable formalisms better than he can the incomprehensible actions of the humans around him. His wife wants to leave him for another man, one who imagines himself a rabbi in disguise; his students don’t like the grades he gives them; his kids are proving, yet again, that you have no idea who your kids really are. And his rabbis and his faith can offer little consolation, except to descend into the kinds of homilies and bromides that can only comfort those who utter them. Life seems cruel, relentlessly, puzzlingly so.

Tales of middle-aged men encountering crisis and dysfunction at the workplace and at home are familiar to us (consider American Beauty for instance). Our protagonists sometimes transcend these cosmic misfortunes; perhaps they find new talents in themselves, or in those that surround them; perhaps they indulge in dramatic acts that are supposed to jolt them out of their grooves–they engage in various versions of getting tattoos, buying sports cars, or finding lovers half their age.  Larry Gopnik does none of these; rather, bemused and befuddled by the endless series of insult and injury sent his way, he seeks help again and again, hoping desperately that he will find answers and solace. (His encounters with his sexy, sunbathing-in-the-nude neighbor, despite involving the lighting up of marijuana joints, do not lead to therapeutic sexual consummation.) None, of course, is forthcoming.

A classic, well-worn trope in cinema that provides agonizing tension is the depiction of fragile hope: a condemned prisoner is promised deliverance, sees it on the horizon, and then has it snatched away. The narrative arc of A Serious Man is similar: we fear for Larry’s fate, we dare to hope as his star rises, and then, in the movie’s brutal, unrelieved ending, as storm clouds gather (literally), we learn that that hope was illusory. Life might not just be indifferent to us; it might actually be against us.

This last possibility is the most unnerving of all; it is hinted at by the movie’s epilogue, in which the Coen Brothers present us with a Jewish folktale, about a family who  might have brought a curse down on their heads by inviting a dybbuk across their threshold. Gopnik might be their descendant; perhaps he is merely paying for the sins of his ancestors. But the tale itself leaves it unclear which sin could have provoked the cosmos’ curse–bringing a dybbuk home or assaulting a harmless old man.

In the end, none of it matters. We will all die; we will often be miserable and unhappy; we will receive no satisfactory answers to our most anguished and persistent queries. This is an absurd state of affairs. No wonder we are a species whose laughter turns to tears, which often finds humor in the misfortune of others. We are a joke, and in our clearest moments, we know it.

“Look Out of the Window, Camel Jockey”

Twenty-seven years ago, I arrived in the US, and shortly thereafter, began graduate school at a small technical school in Newark, New Jersey. Once classes picked up speed, I spent increasing amounts of time in our grim library–rather inefficiently if I may say so–struggling to stay awake while finishing my readings and programming assignments. To this end, I would often park myself in one of the many carrels that ran along the walls of the library. Thankfully, some of these were positioned next to windows through which one could cast despairing, if drowsy, glances at the world outside.

It was on one of these desks that I spotted a bit of illegible graffiti in Arabic. Written below it, clearly in response to its provocations, was a blunt and sharp message:

Look out of the window, camel jockey. Do you see any sand? Do you see any camels? No? Then learn how to speak English or fuck off back to where you came from.

My graduate school’s student body was richly populated with international students (like me then). Most of them, unsurprisingly, originated from the usual suspects–India and China/Taiwan–with the rest drawn from the Middle East and other far-flung corners of the world. They were often a source of much perplexity to the college’s administration, which desperately sought their tuition payments, but didn’t quite know how to cater to their visible and vivid presence on campus. Neither, it seemed at times, did the staff, the faculty, or the rest of the local student body; stories of brusque, unhelpful, rude, or racist behavior were all too common. Administrative staff disliked the daily negotiation with unfamiliar accents and incomprehension of bureaucratic procedures; faculty were made irate by the constant, anxious requests for fellowships; local students found the international student’s cliquishness annoying and intimidating.

International students found their own ways to combat this prickly response to their presence; some retreated, as noted, into cliques; yet others into heavy drinking. And some began counting down the days to their graduations and onward movements to jobs or returns back home.

One member of that demographic had decided to lazily doodle on a desktop in the library; perhaps he or she was thinking out loud about distant homes; perhaps a witticism or rude joke or dirty ditty had occurred to them, which needed immediate commitment to concreteness; perhaps, sloppily, a note was being left for a fellow student.

Whatever the reason and rationale, the effort had not gone unnoticed. It hadn’t been appreciated. It had reminded someone of the ever-present imposition of the unfamiliar on the previously familiar; it had evoked prejudices and disdain of all sorts. It provoked thus, a sharp and pungent retort, an exhortation to remove themselves from the premises if they were unable to abide by its rules.

I wasn’t from the Middle East; I didn’t speak Arabic; I was not a “camel jockey.” But I was unnerved anyway. I knew that for those who could and would write graffiti like that, these variations were irrelevant. It certainly kept me on my toes.

Julian Young on Schopenhauer on Suicide

In his concise introduction to Schopenhauer, Julian Young notes he considered it “incumbent on any ‘ethical system’ to commit suicide.” Indeed, that Stoicism fails to do so, and indeed, even recommends it “in cases where  pain is intolerable”, is for Schopenhauer, proof of its “intellectual bankruptcy.”

Young rightly makes the obvious point: this seems like a strange view to be professed by someone who considers birth a terrible tragedy, existence a state of unmitigated misery. Wouldn’t such a conception our state of being entail a moral duty to bring this state of affairs to an end, to bring our consciousness to a merciful conclusion? (Yes, I know, this does sound a bit like Rust Cohle of True Detective.)

The problem is that the suicide is “ignorant of the truth of philosophical pessimism”; he has come to believe that his suffering is solitary; he has been picked out for a special dispensation of misery and pain; were he to be disabused of this notion and come to realize all around him are equally condemned, he would not count himself so unfortunate. As Schopenhauer pointed out:

We are not usually distressed at evils that are inescapably necessary and quite universal such as old age and death.

(On a related note, Montesquieu noted: “If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.”)

Knowing the “universality of pain” makes a crucial difference: the potential suicide who is able to identify with the suffering of his fellow companions comes to realize  suicide is “futile”, an ineffectual attempt to cure an incurable affliction. More damagingly, as Young notes, it is “an act of extreme egoism, the most extreme failure of emotional identification with others, extreme lack of empathy. If I care equally about me and you…then my suicide is a complete irrelevance to solving the problem.”

Young then concludes:

There seems to me something insightful about this picture of the suicide as exceptionally self-obsessed; as someone who has become so isolated from the rest of the world that it seems to them that only their own pain matters, indeed that only their own pain exists. This is, I think, particularly true of men who commit suicide on account of business failures. The relative triviality of the motive requires that the suicide has become absolutely insensible to the vastly greater suffering of millions of others.

This condemnation of the act of suicide is interesting, of course, because the suicide’s death causes pain to others. Not just loved ones like fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, lovers, children, friends, but also those that might depend on him or her for aid and succor of all sorts: a doctor’s patients, a teacher’s students, a lawyer’s clients. The suicide might have realized all of this but perhaps have pressed on anyway, knowing his act will bring an end to the pain caused by this knowledge.

A broader point to be derived from this view of Schopenhauer (and Young) is also of interest: we are not isolated and alone, but inescapably linked to many others through a complex set of inter-relationships. We cannot coherently imagine our actions affect only ourselves; a diminution of us is a diminution of others.

Tribalism’s Easy Allure: Brooklyn Does Not Like Toronto Anymore (in the NBA)

Tribalism in sports is a curious thing; it is especially so in professional sports, where as I’ve noted, we encounter:

[T]he mystery of how millions of sports fans, here in the US, and all over the world, develop long-standing, passionately defended and articulated, emotionally infused, personal allegiances with large, profit-seeking, corporate entities, an enterprise that should be–but most definitely isn’t–akin to finding someone to cheer for in a Ford vs. Chrysler encounter.

Tribalism in sports is a much written about and theorized phenomenon; I won’t offer further analysis here (for the time being.) I do want to point to an interesting occurrence of it this week–one of personal interest.

As NBA fans are well aware, the first round of the 2014 playoffs are underway. In the East, Washington and Miami are already through to the next round. Meanwhile, the score in Brooklyn and Toronto’s clash reads 3-2 for the latter; Brooklyn need to win tonight to force the series into a seventh game this Sunday. Thus far, despite meaning to watch the Nets in action against the Raptors I have been unable to; personal and professional commitments of all stripes have conspired to keep me away from the television.

But I’m almost certain to watch tonight’s sixth game, and what’s more, I’m itching to see the Nets thrash the Raptors. A plain win won’t do; a shellacking is called for. What’s up Doc?

Well, I’m a little ticked off at Toronto. The Raptors fans have used the Brooklyn chant to taunt the team, its general manager Masai Ujiri, at a a kickoff rally in Toronto, pumped up the crowd with a loud “Fuck Brooklyn” and lastly some Toronto fans have even desecrated the Brooklyn Bridge. Fuck Brooklyn. Not Fuck the Brooklyn Nets.  Graffiti on our bridge. Yeah, my feelings are hurt. Sniff. They haven’t been assuaged by going online to read more about the Toronto chants and Ujiri’s outburts, and finding, unsurprisingly, hordes of Toronto fans  echoing Ujiri. (And on buttons too!)

Toronto is one of my favorite cities in North America. I have visited it a few times–though it’s been too long since my last visit–and have always enjoyed its cosmopolitanism, its multi-ethnic food, its intellectual life, the list goes on. I’ve been to some great parties in Toronto; met some wonderful people; seen some great sights.

But right now, I feel like giving Toronto the finger, of sending a few ‘Fuck you’s up north, across the border–where, like any other American, they won’t need a visa–straight up the CN Tower, to be emblazoned by klieg lights across the Canadian sky. Are they all like their mayor?

My reaction is juvenile, of course, as was Ujiri’s provocation. But there is no denying the surge of irritated defensiveness I felt on reading the relevant news and viewing the videos; I identify with my city, my home for over ten years, and have become susceptible to provocateurs who seek to get under my skin by dissing it.

Of course, they weren’t dissing it. They were dissing the team. Note that at various points in my post, rather than using the terms “Brooklyn Nets” and “Toronto Raptors” I have simply gone with “Brooklyn” and “Toronto”. It is this easy contraction, this easy conflation of the city and the team, that does considerable work for the professional franchise’s marketers. Ujiri knew this too, of course; which is why he didn’t simply say “Fuck the Nets!

And it works. Read the comments on this page and you’ll see how.

Relativity and the Immigrant

As a postscript to an essay explicating the theory of special relativity–written at the request of the The Times (London), Albert Einstein wrote:

Here is yet another application of the principle of relativity…today I am described in Germany as a “German savant” and in England as a “Swiss Jew.” Should it ever be my fate to be represented as a bête noire, I should, on the contrary, become a “Swiss Jew” for the Germans and a “German savant” for the English. [originally published November 28, 1919; reproduced in Ideas and Opinions, Souvenir Press, London, 1973.]

A year or so ago, after returning from an academic trip to the University of Luxembourg, I wrote a blog post on some thoughts sparked by my trip. It began with me quoting a short note I had posted on my Facebook wall:

As an American in Europe, I am getting shit for (on this trip): Budweiser (as always), the lack of a really good football/soccer team (as usual) Lance Armstrong (a new one), and the fact that fifty million Americans think universal healthcare is a bad idea and worth repealing.

When I travel in India, I am frequently taken to task for–among other things–American foreign policy; one good gentleman told me, back in 1998, after the US had announced sanctions on India for its nuclear tests: “You go tell Bill Clinton to go to hell!” (I am also subjected to the usual rants about the decadence of American culture and morals.) At that moment, I am ‘American’. And of course, in the US, I’m often treated as an expert on all things Indian, and expected to listen patiently to ample hectoring critique of that nation’s many faults.  Then, I’m ‘Indian.’

This is straightforward. The converse treatment–of sorts–is far more interesting. When my American political activist friends seek to enlist my support for a favored political cause, my national origin is of little interest; at those moments, I’m straightforwardly an American liberal.  When my Indian friends and family seek similar subscriptions, my citizenship and residence is of little interest to them; then, I’m Indian all over again.

I’ve done little for either of these two demographics to brag about so I cannot provide an exact analogy to the examples Einstein provides. Winning a Nobel Prize or two might help; then perhaps both nations could proudly claim me as their own. And no doubt, were I to become an axe-murderer, I would be rapidly disowned by by both nations; America would cluck over my unredeemed origin and India would point to my corruption by the US–those damn decadent morals all over again. Sports fanhood is another interesting domain: I’m often drafted in as an American fan during the time of soccer’s World Cup, and of course, when it comes to cricket, I’m treated as Indian.

My identity is a matter of much perplexity and fascination to me; it remains an ongoing of project of both discovery and invention. It is made as interestingly complicated as it is by these sorts of external understandings of it (and I’m sure, by my bilinguality); I fulfill roles and serve as target or ‘person of interest’ for a wide variety of interests, each driven by its own ends. My attributes receive selective attention depending on these interests and ends; then, one is highlighted at the expense of others and made central, essential, distinctive.

Note: I had always thought of Einstein under several different headings: ‘American academic’, ‘German physicist’, and ‘Jewish’. When I first read this justifiably famous quote of Einstein’s I was struck by how despite the prominence of Bern and Zurich in his biography, I had never regarded him a ‘Swiss Jew.’

Readin’ and Ridin’: Transportation within Transportation

Forty degrees and rain, soggy train platforms, and an unhappy toddler–my daughter, not happy at being dropped off at daycare–can make for a miserable start to a day.  It was only partially redeemed by finally finding dry shelter in the shape of a subway car for the ride into Manhattan. After my wife had disembarked at her station in downtown Brooklyn, I rode on by myself, finding companionship, as usual, in a book.

As I read about general relativity, inertial frames, non-Euclidean geometry, the instrumental nature of science, and so on, I looked around me: my subway car was full of daily commuters, reading, listening to music on headphones, some even engaged in quiet conversation. We were traveling over the Manhattan Bridge, and I could see the city’s massive skyline rising up out of the mist, visible through the raindrop-streaked window panes of the train.

At that moment, I was confined and crowded; passengers pressed up around me, hands jostled for hold space on various bars, and newspapers and books had been artfully held or folded to take up minimum space (and avoid the angry glare). I was hemmed in, boxed in.

But when I turned my eyes back to the pages that had been commanding my attention, I felt no such restriction. I was reading a masterful exposition of a fundamental physical theory; I was immersed in abstractions, in foundational questionings of concepts whose meanings are all too glibly assumed. I was transported, away from my immediate surroundings, lost in reveries.

This sounds a great deal like some schoolboy reporting on his first experience with an adventure book borrowed from the local library: “I was traveling distant lands, meeting strangers, doing amazing things, all while at home! Can you dig it?” (OK, that last part is an embellishment, but you catch my drift.)

This similarity shouldn’t be surprising at all. Reading is an intellectually respectable form of escapism and day-dreaming; why wouldn’t we seek, and be entertained by, those same pleasures that so enthralled us as children? To be sure, the form and content of our fantasies and speculations are markedly different from the times we read about adolescents solving mysteries in their hometown, but the primal need to be elsewhere, and the susceptibility to such diversions hasn’t gone away.

I’ve written before about reading on the New York City subway; my experience this morning was a reminder of one of my favorite reading rooms and its distinctive setting. In the subway, I travel to familiar places, surrounded by the familiar: well-traveled streets and bridges pass me by and around me, students go to school, workers go to work, lovers snuggle up, and readers read. But while I’m surrounded by the seemingly quotidian I also find myself absorbed in the distant, the abstract, the esoteric. Sometimes, like this morning, I look up from the pages, experience a slight start, and even smile a little: if only the folks around me just knew where I’d been, what I’d been up to.

Photocopiers and the Failure to Agree on Meaning

Brett Weiner at The New York Times has put together an amusing Op-Doc titled “Verbatim: What is a photocopier“? As  Weiner describes the provenance of the piece:

In a deposition in Ohio, a lawyer became embroiled in an absurd argument about the definition of a photocopier….The dialogue was so sharp, inane and fully realized that I assumed it was fiction. I traced the deposition back to the Ohio Supreme Court and downloaded hundreds of pages of legal documents from the case. To my pleasant surprise, it was as strange as it was true.

In this short film, I sought to creatively reinterpret the original events….My primary rule was the performance had to be verbatim — no words could be modified or changed from the original legal transcripts. Nor did I internally edit the document to compress time. What you see is, word for word, an excerpt from what the record shows to have actually unfolded.

Wiener’s short film is entertaining enough; the conversation is exasperatingly funny.  My first  response to viewing it–on a friend’s Facebook pages–expressed the suspicion that The New York Times‘ readers might rest content with snickering at just legal conversations:

I hope people don’t think – as the New York Times seems to want them to – that this captures some conversational dysfunction unique to the legal profession or to its discourse.

The New York Times, of course,  seems to think it is on to a good thing when it comes to showing us how dysfunctional it thinks legal discourse can be:

This marks the debut of a new series, presented by Op-Docs, that transforms verbatim…legal transcripts into dramatic, and often comedic, performances. Here you will find re-creations of actual events from the halls of law and government.

But the dysfunction on display in Weiner’s short film is far more ubiquitous and widespread – it is not confined to the legal sphere. This should be evident from the fact that the conversational interlocutors cannot and will not agree on the meaning of a widely used term; such disagreements are not unknown elsewhere, precisely so many conversations between humans are adversarial (like that between the lawyer and his unfortunate witness). In these settings, the acknowledgment of a shared meaning can  all too often entail the concession of a debating point, a rhetorical disadvantage that may seem unbearable enough to seek refuge in obfuscation. At those moments the failure to agree on meaning is a tactic to retain conversational advantage; it allows for the creation of an ambiguity where definite resolution would lead to unfavorable outcomes. (The witness in the video above is clearly worried he might concede too much by agreeing on a meaning of the term ‘photocopier’).

The most common and painful instance of this occurs in arguments between couples headed for a break-up: as the relationship disintegrates and falls apart, so do the conversations between the former lovers. (Our literature is replete with these; the mastery of a novelist is often displayed in his or her recreation of these agonizing moments.) These become increasingly conflicted and intractable; the shortest, simplest resolutions cannot be arrived at. All too suddenly, a pair of humans who had once imagined their significant other could actually intuit their inner feelings and sensibilities, find themselves unable to make their simplest pleas and requests comprehended and heard. Failures of memory are a well-established trope of these conversations, of course–“You hurt me when you did X?” “But I didn’t do X, so I have no idea what you are talking about”  – but so are failures of commonly understood meanings. We find out that our former lover ascribes meanings to “respect” or “commitment” or “listening” or “fidelity” that we don’t; our best attempts to point out we once shared meanings flounder. My examples are all of terms that are quite complex but as folks engaged in break-ups find out soon enough, you can’t agree about the meaning of just about anything as things get worse.

Failure to agree on meanings is more common than we imagine; it is how we indicate to our interlocutors we are not full, or even partial, participants in our conversation; it is how we indicate that our ends are different and will be achieved in our own distinctive ways.

Falling Off the Wagon

I had a bad week. Starting Friday April 18th, my brain went on the blink. In the following nine days, I only blogged twice (instead of my usual daily schedule), went to the gym only three times (instead of my scheduled seven times), read no books, and only entered into minor bouts of editing. I had thought I would take a small one-day break from my regular schedules, but it became much bigger. I was ‘unproductive’ in all the ways you can imagine; I did not take care of body or mind; I let them come asunder. This was a falling off the wagon, a derailment, a stumble and fall on a slippery peel I placed out for myself.

Today, I’m back in the library, my hands are back on a keyboard, the book I began reading more than ten days ago is in my backpack, waiting to be finished. (I returned to Albert Einstein‘s Ideas and Opinions on the train ride into Manhattan today.) I will go to the gym again today evening–my workout clothes, like that unread book, are in my backpack too–and attempt to resume my progress on the bench press. And after a week of eating enough sugar to induce coma in a small army of toddlers, I am back to trying to eat healthy again. (Broccoli and sausages in a lunchbox in, you guessed it, my backpack.)

Over the past nine days, as I stumbled about, desperately conscious I was not on the straight or narrow, and neither sinner nor saint for being so, I thought about the metaphors that came to mind to describe my ‘fall’ and wondered how it had come to be. I had let myself get too tightly wound, I had become too anxious, I had not blown steam off; when release had presented itself, I had seized the opportunity. I found relief of a sort, but it came accompanied by anxiety and so was not terribly palliative in the end. Strangely enough, I had to return to the scene of my trials, to come full circle, before I could begin to find redressal from my newly acquired affliction.

If all goes well, over the next few days, I will experience a familiar sensation: the easy euphoria produced by making up easily made up (and lost) ground. And then, I will find myself in a familiar space, where progress slows, frustration builds, and the temptation to lose a wheel or two will become stronger than ever. This kind of work, this returning again to the written word, to pages in paper and electronic form, can and will do that to you. (Because a book manuscript completion and submission is at hand, I dread a familiar nausea that awaits me over the next few weeks.) Perhaps, then, I will return and read this post as fair warning of the misery that awaits me were I to succumb to the temptation to take another ‘break.’

The AllRounder Kickstarter

I don’t normally make fundraising pleas on this blog, but I’m going to make an exception to that rule today.

Very soon, I will be contributing articles to a new online sports journal The Allrounder, one to be marked by its thoughtfulness and breadth; it will feature the writing of some 60 different writers, who bring their in-depth knowledge on all facets of world sport:

What can a sociologist tell us about fan violence?

How does a legal scholar view the latest player scandal?

What are the real effects of doping, according to a biochemist?

And what do we learn from the journalist who sits back in the press box, looks around and asks: Why do we watch these games anyway?

The Allrounder will be distinct from existing sports media sites in covering the whole world of sport. The site will feature writers from different countries, whose expertise ranges from basketball, cricket, and hockey to all codes of football. And The Allrounder will aim for the global fan—for the Indian who is up in the middle of the night watching the Champions League, the American who follows Six Nations rugby, the Brit who cheers for the Maple Leafs, the Brazilian with a LeBron jersey, and the Aussie who loves baseball novels.

The Allrounder will also offer a different take on sport. Most of our contributors are academic researchers at universities around the world. The site will bring their insights out of the seminar room and make them available to educated, curious fans—without getting overly theoretical or ponderous. We’ll be smart without being stuffy or snide.

Here is a list of contributors (including some links to our work and latest scholarship; here is a digest of articles currently available on The Allrounder; it includes a piece of mine on American sports coaches) and here is a very good interview with Yago Colas that further explains what The Allrounder is attempting to accomplish.

If this sounds interesting to you, please consider donating to our Kickstarter.