I promised a couple months back that I’d fill you in, dear readers, concerning certain changes of direction I and my family were about to undertake, and which will probably show up in my writing here. Most significantly, I made the determination late last year to shelve my increasingly quixotic attempt to secure a ‘proper’ academic job, which in my profession entails a tenure-track professorial position. If you are at all familiar with the state of the academic humanities in America you will probably be aware that the job market is not, to put it mildly, very great, even compared to the last few decades in which job applicants have almost always outnumbered actual offered positions. In my own field of Islamic history there was a prolonged boom in new positions after the September 11 attacks and subsequent American military actions, as colleges and universities scrambled to be ‘relevant.’ But of course times change and one way of signaling relevance fades away and new ones emerge. And so after several forays into the dreaded academic job market, I decided that enough was enough, it was time to reconfigure and to actively pursue a life that did not depend upon eventually properly getting my foot in the door of academia.
Fortunately, the job I have been doing for the last couple of years—work as a post-doctoral (of increasingly great ‘post-ness’!) researcher in Islamicate digital humanities, with a principle focus on optical character recognition and increasingly handwritten text recognition, both for Arabic script—is one that I can, God willing, continue to do in various capacities, and which can be done remotely. The work is interesting, more or less congruent with my historical training and very much with my voracious (or so I like to think—unfocused is a plausible if less charitable reading) intellectual appettite, and we are doing genuinely important work towards developing appropriate technological tools for the study of Islamicate textual culture and heritage. I hope to address some of the more theoretical implications of our work here in the future, particularly as I increase my focus on manuscript culture and the tools we are developing to better study and understand Arabic-script manuscripts and their cultural and material milieus.
Simultaneous to rethinking my realistic job prospects has been my deepening concern with the state of the world, our larger historical trajectory, and what if anything our family ought to be doing about it and within it. Some of our re-evaluation has been quite pragmatic: for almost a decade we have lived in the Washington DC metro area, first in order for me to complete my doctoral degree, followed by my post-doctoral work (some of which did, until quite recently, require physical presence in the area), with a view towards my securing an academic job elsewhere. To put it quite bluntly, we just can’t afford to live here any longer, given price trajectories in pretty much everything. We also really want to grow a greater percentage of our own food, and to be less reliant on the energy grid overall, neither of which are especially possible in our current situation. We’ve been able to do a bit of agricultural experimentation, as it were, here in the DC metro area, but our options are necessarily limited; our goal now is to expand our experimentation and to possibly transition into small-scale farming more properly.
So for those and other reasons we’ve decided to somewhat reluctantly take our leave of Maryland and relocate to just outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee, having purchased a house and one acre of land on the side of Missionary Ridge, across the line in Georgia, between Lookout Mountain to the west and the Chickamauga Battlefield immediately the east. I’d say we did a great deal of deliberation in finding and evaluating the land and its surroundings, but the nature of the real estate market and our budget precluded such. Still, the land looks promising, and allows us to be quite close to the city and the countryside, at the interface of rural and suburban.
My grand ambition is, among other things, to craft and practice a manner of life that unites in some fashion the intellectual labor that has occupied so much of my life this last decade or so with manual labor in the material world—hardly a novel or revolutionary goal, but rather a goal or dream (or delusion, some would no doubt argue!) that has animated projects and individual thinkers for centuries, from late antique monastics to twentieth century radical intellectuals of all stripes. Nor do we suppose that trimming our energy usage, composting as much of our refuse as possible, and cultivating our little acre are going to solve climate change, transform the industrialized order, or heal the social and cultural wounds that lie deep in the human landscape. But we hope it will be a start, hopefully in increasing collaboration with others who are working towards similar goals and ends.
We as humans are at a curious—if that is the right word!—inflection point of sorts: it is increasingly hard for even the most naive techno-optimist not to perceive where things are headed, that globalized industrial society is in very real danger of being neither globalized nor industrial nor much of a society. Yet if we are faced with the destructive outworkings of the heritage of the industrial revolution and many other transformations of the last two centuries, we also have tools and opportunities and resources with genuine potential for redirecting the trajectories we are upon. The future is not foreclosed upon, not yet.
And so we’ll see how things go—I will continue to explore the same sorts of themes already covered here, while also reflecting on our failures and successes in our new life back South (including navigating a cultural milieu that is at once intimately familiar—my wife and I are both children of the American South—and distant after years of living at the edge of that world but only sporadically immersed back in it).
A couple of other updates: while it will probably be of limited interet to most of my readers here, part of my history of the night series (which, I promise, I will conclude in the near future!) was recently printed in the Turkish-language cultural journal Sabah Ülkesi; I’m looking forward to future collaborations with the folks there (and if you’re a magazine editor looking for articles on Islamic history, deep time and theology, or any of the other matters with which I concern myself, do reach out!).
I am also working at present, with a view towards publication either this year or early next, on a popular press book featuring Islamic hagiography from Africa, ranging from the medieval period to the twentieth century. More details on that venture this summer.
Relatedly, please see this recent post on my blog, with a Maghribi saint’s life that is beautifully congruent, as it turns out, with what I’d like to do myself.