JPB Gerald, EdD, Momentus Capital, Long Island City, NY, USA

On my podcast, Unstandardized English, I say that I do the show to seek justice for the racially, linguistically, and neurologically minoritized, or I would say that if my ADHD ever allowed me to remember the script I wrote for myself. I bring this up because, for one reason or another, I’ve come to occupy a very, very small corner of the scholarly world, mostly by myself, not necessarily because of talent or quality – I think my work is good but it’s just not my point, and meritocracy isn’t real – but, because of the way academia forces most people to behave, my restlessness and curiosity mean my work just bounces around to different semi-related topics whenever I feel like it, and I’ve developed a little world as the scholar who writes about whiteness, language, ability, and education, usually all at the same time. I absolutely don’t claim expertise in very many topics – if I claim it in anything, it’s the way all of my chosen topics intertwine, and how to teach and talk about these interconnections; that is, a form of pattern recognition that’s tied to what I see as justice. But I absolutely know a fair bit about a lot of things, all loosely classified under the language umbrella, and I expect that those who are resistant to what I try to do see me as something of a dabbler rather than a legitimate scholar.

Academia would rather we all stick to our corners and never evolve, lest the entire system be forced to grow and change. Hiring, promotion, and prestige are still largely dependent on traditional/archaic measures of career success, metrics that place closed-access and barely-read journals on the top of the pyramid. I could understand this stubbornness if the most prestigious journals were consistently promoting work that was challenging the status quo, but if you’ve read any non-special-issue of most journals, you know quite well that this isn’t the case. Indeed, we are often trained less in how to sit with challenging ideas and more in how to ensure our ideas, whatever they may be, fit into a format that is likely to be approved of. I actually think that this insistence on form and structure is rather insulting to editors and readers, as it implies that they are unable to find innovation compelling and/or worthwhile. Additionally, this is hardly a two-way street, especially in the language world, as we make little effort to ensure accessibility – both in the sense of ability and also in our use of jargon – for anyone outside of our corners. In other words, it feels to me like we're just taking our data, dressing it up into an acceptable format, and attempting to get it published for our careers – for which I fault no one who needs a job – and to add our work to our CVs. Because few people can really understand what is written in journals, and even fewer have access to them, our findings are often misinterpreted if they are shared outside of journals at all, even if we are trying to convey something new, and we are not supported when we communicate differently. There are a lot of us who have podcasts and engage in other forms of public engagement, but you’re not getting a job off of that – we have to do this sort of extra work for fun.

It would be easy for me to say all this an embittered person who had struggled through the job market, and admittedly it didn’t go well for me when I half-tried last year, but I never really expected it to go well, and I really didn’t want to write “diversity” statements for white hiring committees as a scholar of color. But no, I got a different job since I’d been working through my degree, and it’s far more affirming, more stable, and more interesting than moving to a small, white town with a Black child would have been.

I sit here and I think that the fact that I have a very small but passionate fanbase, no real professional obligation to follow any particular rules, and an ADHD-derived restlessness pushes me to delve into subjects far afield from my formal training – my doctorate isn’t even in language, after all, though my MA is – and through this work I am realizing I have an opportunity to help us bust up some siloes in our field, siloes that prevent a solidarity we need to push back against the structures under which many of us live. Indeed, since I’m out of academia and have no plans to rely upon it for my primary income, this doesn’t even directly affect me, but I talk to a lot of academics who are struggling, usually scholars of color or other axes of oppression, and it’s all rather sad how many brilliant people are just having their passion and creativity sucked dry in service of what is needed to persist in an industry so dishonest it classifies everything else as “industry.”

I’m getting off-track here – I warned you! – and haven’t said much about language, but that’s fine, because much of my scholarship uses other concepts to touch on language ideologies, or vice versa. Staying tightly focused on one thing is, uh, not my strong suit, but people who are like me should absolutely have a place in academia (if they want one) and indeed I do what I do so that there may someday be more voices that rhyme with mine and grow in volume to the point that the archaic part of the field is finally drowned out. I’m not going to say it’s not pragmatically useful to learn Journal-Publication English and all it entails, if only so you can see through the nonsense and expose it for what it is, but outlets like this one, podcasts, books written with a different audience in mind, anything that allows humanity to shine through, is what we need to prioritize. I feel fortunate that my niche popularity has allowed me to take note of this and share it with you. Hope you find it useful.