Academic Troubles Talk: An Introduction to the Blog

To talk about the academic job market is frequently a form of what the sociolinguist Deborah Tannen refers to as “troubles talk,” a semi-ritualized performance of complaint in which participants in a conversation enact a kind of collective therapy by sharing their griefs and grievances (Tannen 22). Familiar to most of us in the realms of professional, familial, and romantic life, troubles talk concerning the academic job market has recognizable steps for anyone who has done the dance. Incredulous swapping of anecdotes, often accompanied by disheartening statistics; discussion of potential alternative career paths; occasionally, a flicker of hope let slip that one of the participants in the particular iteration of troubles talk then underway might beat the odds.

There is not always an objective relationship between this kind of talk and the things which prompt it; that is, between social phenomena and the ways in which they are discussed.

The sociologist Amy Kaler, conducting research in the 1990s in a region of southern Africa where divorce had long been common, was surprised to hear people say that marital strife and instability were new to their generation. So Kaler went back and looked at oral histories of the region collected fifty years earlier.

She found that the grandparents and great-grandparents of the people she was interviewing in the 1990s had also described their own marital relations as much worse than the marriages of their parents’ and grandparents’ days. Kaler concluded that “the invention of a past filled with good marriages” is one way in which people express discontent about other aspects of contemporary life (Kaler 547).

Such research as Kaler’s raises general philosophical questions about the extent to which ritualized complaints correspond to objectively bad states of affairs. I want to note in passing, though, that even if the objectively measured job prospects of PhD recipients were much rosier than most of us have been led to think, this would not necessarily undercut the legitimacy of feelings of ill-usage and institutional neglect experienced by so many in academia. At the same time, as I begin blogging about the academic job market, I would like to start with some objective considerations about data, and continue to bring such information to bear on my perspective as I continue writing. So the question then is: is the troubles talk which surrounds the academic job market a reflection of a troubling situation? A situation in which secure academic employment is incredibly scarce, and the number of applicants for such positions as are out there is huge? There is a short answer to this question and a long answer: I will attempt to give the long answer in my next post, and the short answer is, unfortunately, an emphatic “yes.”

Notes-

Kaler, Amy. “ ‘Many Divorces and Many Spinsters’: Marriage as an Invented Tradition in Southern Malawi, 1946–1999.” Journal of Family History, vol. 26, 2001.

Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men In Conversation. New York, Balantine Books, 1990.