ABSTRACT
I am currently supported by a small university. My colleagues like to joke, affectionately, how only serendipity can explain how I washed up all the way here, the southernmost tip of the globe, a year ago, now approaching two. Washed up is the right word, as I have no ties or reasons to be here. I can do my job – teaching and researching questions that interest me – anywhere but even for me, being in a small university with agricultural pragmatic roots and being part of a politics programme with no real political or academic agenda (other than to continue to exist as part of a ‘core’ social science discipline) is disorienting. But, here, finally, I feel like life has quieted down a bit and I can now hear myself think, hear myself be. Really, the ‘campus life’ and service required of me is a wholly different pitch than in my previous institutional home. At times I fear this quietness because now all that busywork of an academic feels optional, and this seems like a way to get left behind. It is a sickly sweet and disorienting feeling.
