ABSTRACT
Through critical reflection of my first year in an academic position during the beginning of a global pandemic, I wonder about the feeling of being overwhelmed as it relates to becoming a researcher in a time characterized by institutional, sociocultural, economic, and political shifts. I consider the ongoing layers and entanglements of becoming overwhelmed in overwhelming times, thinking about being overwhelmed not as an event or interval of time, but as atmospheric and unrelenting in both mundane and dramatic ways. Through attending to an atmosphere and experience of being overwhelmed, I hope to offer insight into what it means to become a researcher, teacher, and thinker a time characterized by crises and uncertainty. Finally, how can scholarship be thought in ways that attend to the shifts as they occur to become much different from was before?
