One question project: Jackie Ashkin
How do you find the balance between working in academia and your creative expression?
I’m not sure there is a balance. I used to think about it as a juggling act, or hot potato - how long can you do one thing before you need to go back to the other? With time I’ve learnt it’s more like driving a carriage pulled by a team of horses: the challenge is in keeping them all going at the same time and, more importantly, at the same pace. Of course, each of the horses has their own wills and desires and gets tired at a different part of the journey, and you’re driving the whole thing thinking, well, this isn’t exactly how I thought this would go or where I thought I wanted to be. It’s usually where you need to be, though.
You’ve probably guessed by now that I’m a dedicated animal lover, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to talk about the kinds of lessons you learn from being around them. The obvious one is about patience. There is a myriad of other lessons tucked in between, about knowing when enough is enough, not asking too much before you are ready, and taking breaks.. That’s a big one, one that I’m not yet very good at. In many ways working with animals is a nice metaphor for the creative process because creating is an inherently relational practice. There are these enduring myths in pop culture that portray academics and artists as people who lock themselves in ivory towers or cabins in the woods, and after enduring hundreds of gruelling and lonely hours, emerge with some new genius revelation. That’s not been my experience at all.
One of the great insights of my academic field - anthropology - is about how we are all constantly creating, inventing, and performing, in our everyday lives and day-to-day interactions as a means for engaging and becoming with the world around us. (It’s a little old now, but if you’re curious to read more about understanding creativity in anthropology I still love this edited collection [available open access].
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that we as people are not only ever just one thing. Life is a whole lot more complex than that, and I find a lot of beauty emerges from leaning into multiplicity. Thinking in terms of addition rather than substitution: I am this and that, instead of I am this or that. There’s a lot of pressure these days, whether as academics or artists (or anyone in between), to “brand” or “market” ourselves in logical and coherent ways. It’s a trap! Maybe it’s a bit of a poet’s cliche, but I used to have a quote from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” on my wall back in college that read, ‘Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)’. To this day, I find his abject dismissal of contradiction to be deeply reassuring. I used to sit in bed and stare at the words until I felt like Whitman emerged from the page to give me permission to be many things at once: of course I contradict myself, of course I contain multitudes.
All of this is to say that balance - if we can call it that - is a lot more about thoughtfulness and consistency than it is about how you distribute your time. I’ve been called everything from a social justice warrior to a Marxist (in both academic and artistic spaces), and it prompted me to spend a lot of time being worried about coming across as too radical, too out there, too inaccessible, the list goes on. I was cutting off my nose to spite my face, because who was I kidding by trying to keep my politics to myself? I’ve found that balance emerges almost naturally the more I lean into my political commitments - my feminism, my anti-capitalism, my de-colonialism - regardless of the setting I am in. I’m not saying it’s going to be comfortable, but you will sleep a little easier at night.
About Jackie:
I am a PhD researcher by day and a spoken word artist by night. Half-Malaysian and half-American, I did my M.A.(Hons) in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. I then spent some time working with an indigenous community in Malaysia before making my way to the Netherlands. My research is all about how we know what we know about the coastal ocean in the context of the impending climate crisis, focusing especially on numerical modelling practices. When I’m not busy contemplating the apocalypse, I try to tackle lighter topics through my poetry, such as the apocalypse, sexism, colonialism, etc..
It can be hard to sum up, but I recently overheard someone at a gig say that spoken word is poetry for people who can’t write. And I was once told that anthropology is just professional gossip. So I guess in short that makes me a professional gossip who can’t write?