Originally, I had intended to write my first post for the project blog on “research impact.” Across two blog posts, my intention was to try to demystify what impact meant for early career researchers, in a Higher Education context, explain its importance, and detail how the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project, and my separate post-doctoral project, sought to achieve it. I have the first half of that blog in my drafts folder, and I intend to finish and publish them at some point in the future. In the current context, however – read *global pandemic* – it seemed superfluous, if not also a tad detached, to publish such a post. Indeed, as I have been procrastinating over the past few weeks, I have become convinced that the last thing the internet needed, at present, was a blog about impact. Thus, instead, I want to talk about the impact of COVID-19. My intention here is not to talk about how COVID has fundamentally reshaped the Higher Education landscape, nor to offer any advice on how to adapt to the emerging reality of remote teaching and learning (excellent examples offering such advice can be found here). Instead, I want to reflect upon my increasing, if not obvious, realisation that things – not least of all travel plans, research activities, job specs – can and do change, and that said change is okay.
Before I get into it, a little about me. My name is Jamie Banks. I am writing here as the Research Associate on the Alcohol Race, and Ethnicity project and have been in the role since December 2019. In this role, it is my job to assist the Principal Investigator, Deborah Toner, with archival research for the project, associated conferences (more on this later), impact-related work, and documenting the research process through blog posts like this one. Aside from this role, I am also starting a University of Leicester – Wellcome Trust funded Postdoctoral Fellowship. This project focuses upon cannabis use and mental illness in colonial Jamaica and post-colonial Britain. Finally, I had the recent (dis)pleasure of finishing off and submitting my PhD thesis, on opium use and indentured labour in Mauritius, British Guiana and Trinidad, during the current global predicament. So, now we know each other a little bit better, I want to get to the heart of what this blog post is about, namely how COVID has forced both positive and negatives changes to both my role on the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project and my own, post-doctoral research. More fundamentally, however, I want to illustrate how these changes, while not always appreciated, reflect one of the key skills of being an academic – adaptability.
Things change. This is perhaps one of the sagest pieces of advice I was ever offered as a PhD student, and thus it remains one of the key things I say to others looking at a project which looks nothing like their PhD applications. But while this might seem obvious enough, the conventional path of academic progression (if such an abstract concept exists) is often predicated upon making promises and demonstrating skills that have to seem immutable. For instance, my application to become the Research Associate on the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project had to clearly outline a wide variety of skills and competencies I was expected to possess – least of which was a PhD, though many of them were undoubtedly developed through doing doctoral research – as well as a series of duties and roles I was expected to perform.
Similarly, in applying for my Wellcome Trust fellowship, this sense of immutability seemed even more apparent. Not only did I have to write a comprehensive outline of my proposed project, and its importance for broader scholarship, I also had to send my project expenses to the finance department, to be forwarded as part of my application. While I was already used to budgeting my own finances, thanks to the generosity of my AHRC studentship, the minutiae of detail expected was more extensive, and thus seemingly more rigid, than any of the one or two week research trips I had planned during my PhD. All of this is to say that the process of applying for jobs and grants can perpetuate a sense that, as an academic, one should know what they are doing well before they do it, knowing our projects inside out and following them without deviation.
Of course, the reality couldn’t be more far from the truth. For instance, what I eventually submitted as my PhD looked nothing like the application I spent months writing to apply for it in the first place. Similarly, I increasingly write conference paper abstracts with the knowledge that no-one expects the paper I eventually present to fit the bill exactly. Thus, what I want to illustrate, in the rest of this blog, are some of the ad hoc changes to my work and responsibilities that have resulted from COVID, and how dealing with these changes represents a perhaps even more key skill than excellent research skills or amassing publications.
So, let’s start with COVID and my PhD. Honestly, I have been incredibly lucky given minimal the impact of the pandemic on the final months of competing my thesis. Sure, I had to complete my thesis from the confines of my flat, but I usually work from home anyway, so it was not great heart-ache. I also completed my overseas archival research in my second and third years, meaning that I, unlike so many unlucky others, was not faced with a desperate scramble to find alternative, online sources. Indeed, the only real issue for me, in practical terms, has been the inability to hold a post-thesis submission celebration in the pub and that my viva was held online.
With all this said, I am perhaps still not being all that honest about the parallel impact COVID has had upon my mental health. Completing a PhD is stressful, at the best of times, so the limited movement and cooping-up which has resulted from social distancing hasn’t done me any good. With this, I have also had to increasingly realise that I simply can’t work to the same extent as I have done previously. The days are punctuated by far more frequent and elongated pauses than there used to be. I also consider even small tasks, such as writing and editing this blog, as far greater victories than I might have done before. This has come with its own complications – not least an impending sense of guilt for “not doing enough” – but has nevertheless underscored the fact that I am not a machine, nor should I expect to be at times such as these.
The current pandemic has also resulted in some pretty significant changes to my responsibilities on the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project. Originally, a significant proportion of my time was allocated to helping to organise two one-day workshops and several panels at the Drinking Studies Network’s ten-year anniversary conference (DSN@10), originally planned for November 2020. These were roles which I had pushed for, in particular, in order to give me valuable networking and events organisation experience. However, as Deborah has discussed in an earlier blog, the pandemic resulted in the first of these workshops, held in May 2020, being moved to an online format. This move had its own challenges – not least time zones and zoom updates – but overall the workshop was a success and laid the foundations for an envisioned collaborative project between participants.
Nevertheless, the pandemic has had a longer term effect on my responsibilities for the project. With the decision being made to move the DSN@10 conference to November 2021, we were faced with the decision of how I would spend my hours on the project in the meantime. After some discussion, we came to an agreement that I should now direct my attention towards co-authoring a journal article with Deborah. If all goes to plan, the article will discuss the articulation and consolidation of competing ideas about “race,” as expressed by discussants and attendees at the International Anti-Alcohol conferences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were international forums in which politicians, medical personnel, and temperance activists, from across the globe, came together in order to discuss the political, social, and economic implications of alcohol consumption.
On the one hand, this change wasn’t bad at all. I am, by my own admission, a better historian than I am an organiser, so the change suits me well. It has also filled the last couple of months with hours of transcribing papers in French, German, and Italian, while listening to various True Crimes podcasts, as I have come across various interesting things about the sale of absinthe and brandy in various African colonies. Finally, the switch from conference organising to planning a journal article has afforded me with the opportunity to work even more closely with Deborah, whose work on alcohol history I first became interested in during the second year of my undergraduate degree. On the other hand, however, this change also has its implications. While I of course do not begrudge the change (how could I, given the circumstances?), it does mean that my responsibilities include a lesser focus on organisation and networking. I relish the opportunity to do some collaborative writing, of course, but I also appreciate that this is experience which is ever more vital in the increasingly competitive field that is post-doctoral funding.
The current pandemic is also likely to present difficulties for my own post-doctoral research fellowship. Before I go into this any further, I want to acknowledge that I know I am lucky to have such an issue at all, given how competitive post-doctoral opportunities were even before the pandemic. The most apparent of these is the implications which the pandemic poses for travel. Originally, it had been my intention to spend two weeks in Kingston, Jamaica, in order to consult records in the National Archives, as well as to peruse the various collections of the University of the West Indies. My hope, in doing so, would have been to find archival references to cannabis use amongst Indian indentured migrants in Jamaica, which haven’t been discussed in considerable detail in the existing scholarship. Currently, however, I have no idea if I will be able to travel to Kingston during the nine months of my Fellowship.
Not travelling to Kingston, of course, is certainly not the end of the world. For starters, I have alternative options to focus on instead, most notably the Colonial Office records held at The National Archives, Kew. Similarly, the fact I have funding which should allow me to travel to Jamaica at all is an advantage that I know many recently-submitted PhD students simply do not have. However, my hesitancy to travel now or in the immediate future nevertheless possesses its own issues. Firstly, not going to Kingston means not being able to access materials in archival collections. This means that I will be unable to assess these materials until an unknown time in the future, should I be lucky enough to get funding to do so. There is also the fact that not having access to these materials will, for the time being, likely result in a project which departs, to some extent, from what I had originally envisioned. Initially, I had hoped to contrast colonial and post-colonial discussions of cannabis and mental illness, but now I am much more likely to focus on the post-colonial discussions, in medical journals, for the time being.
So, what has been my point in writing this blog? I guess my first point, while obvious, has been that the current pandemic has resulted in all sorts of unanticipated changes to various aspects of my working life. From working less, to changing responsibilities, and finally to shifting the focus of my source base for my project, the pandemic has resulted in some fundamental changes. The other point that I wanted to stress is that times like these reveal the fact that academia is not a one and done process, in which people, at all times, know and can anticipate what they are going to do. While we can all make the best laid plans, be they job applications, grant applications, or travel agendas, those plans change and do so often, for a variety of reasons. Thus, it is important to stress that these changes do not constitute the end of the world (although it can often seem close). There are always thing you can do if you source basis evaporates, your job spec. changes, or the risk of dying prevents foreign travel and that, figuring out how to manage these issues is one of the key skills and day-to-day realities of being an academic, more so now than ever.