Up until my third year of doctoral studies, I’ve mostly considered how to read. But as we progress through our studies and head out into the wild, academic world, the task we’ll all increasingly confront is how to write. What do we want to say, and how do we want to say it?
In thinking about writing, I wondered, what does a writer owe their reader? And what have the writers I’ve read – from Karl Marx to Whitney Laster-Pirtle to Kathy Charmaz – believe they owe me? Well, to spoil the ending, the question is moot. There is no objective thing writers “owe” me or anyone, for that matter. We certainly can’t ask canonical sociological writers like Marx, Weber, and Durkheim what they believe they owe us, and we have no way of knowing if and how they considered this question of the reader.
As writers, we’ve all got choices to make, and those choices have an impact. Opting out of choosing by not considering your voice, your values, or the implications of your choice is a choice in and of itself. The default choice, or non-choice, has historically been one which overstates universality and ignores privilege. The degree to which “canonical” writers like Weber, Durkheim, and Marx overstated universality and ignored their privilege to foster and uphold the racism and sexism of their day profoundly impacted subsequent scholarship and the scores of sociology students forced to read them. Their decisions fundamentally shaped a field and have reverberated for decades, leaving contemporary scholars and students to do the hard work of grappling with their problematic legacy. Every writer has, in their way, shown us what they believe they owe us. Foucault writes densely; it’s evident that he’s not trying to show his reader an enjoyable time or an easy path toward comprehension. hooks writes with impassioned clarity; reading her work, the reader feels as if hooks wants to be understood. These are choices the writers have made, and given their highly distinctive styles, choices Foucault and hooks did not make lightly.
But, shifting our focus to the task at hand as burgeoning scholars, that of generating scholarship, we’ll be making those choices too. So what can we learn from the mistakes others have made? And, who will you be, and what will you prioritize?
As I move forward and hone my ability to make sound, theoretically-informed arguments through my dissertation years, this question of who I am and what I owe those who read my work will increasingly come to the fore. And when it does, I hope to rest my work on a solid foundation of cultivated and articulated values and priorities, including careful consideration of how my words, values, and privilege influence my writing and how others will read it. I can choose how I engage with the world, what words, and in what order I send them out into the world, and I don’t intend to make these choices lightly. I can, and do, choose to care. In discussing caring in art (an arena not so far from theory), Maggie Nelson offers a complex, beautiful notion of caring as:
"A negotiation of needs that involves assuming strength in the other, resisting the temptation to provide all the answers, inevitable failure, and disappointment, allowing for the fact that our desires for others may chafe against what those others want for themselves, and making space for pain, individuation, and conflict without falling apart, or without losing an underlying conviction of fellowship and love."
I’m beginning to articulate what it means to care. Thus far, my intuition has led me to write openly and kindly, representing participants as fully and respectfully as I can. Finding a balance between what I believe in my gut to be intriguing, urgent, and kind (publishability be damned!) and what is most obviously grant-fundable or possible under inevitable time constraints will be the work of my lifetime. Thus, the question becomes one of application, and I’m yet to resolve the thorny issue of applying my evolving ideals to a structured, constrained world. Nonetheless, no matter the difficulty of maintaining an underlying conviction of fellowship and love throughout an academic career, it seems like a lovely place to start.
Kate LaForge is a doctoral student in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences at UCSF.
This blog is part of the series called Inquiring Minds: On Decolonizing the Sociological Canon. Students came together to write this series on harmful literature in the sociological canon, which features 5 blog posts.
- Confronting Canon and Empire by Kourtney Nham
- What Does the Writer Owe the Reader? by Kate LaForge
- Embodied Experiences Navigating Harmful Literature by Brittney Pond
- Institutions of Higher Learning Must Do More by Berty Arreguin
- Whose Class is it, Anyways? by Selam Kidane