I just got done giving a pair of talks at UC Berkeley, which were (I think!) well-received and are definitely going to turn into 1-2 articles. Some thoughts on the experience of being here (at this campus and institution and time in my life and trajectory):
- Holy shit the scale. I’ve been at big public flagship schools before - I did my PhD at one - but Berkeley feels far bigger, and far more full of people. Maybe this has some basis in reality, or maybe it just reflects its status as a new site of observation for me: everything is overwhelming when you’re trying to drink in everything.
- Regardless, it’s definitely far more resourced than my institution: in general, but in the social sciences in particular. I spent a lot of time in the Sociology department, where the graduate student offices take up greater square footage than my entire department at UMass.
- This heightened resourcing translates to some obvious advantages and eases - but it doesn’t mean the problems that students and faculty are facing are any different in nature. Students using AI, epistemic voids in department coverage created by 30 year old fights people refuse to get over, tensions around faculty unionisation and administrative power: these are all things I heard about in my time at Berkeley, and all things I find at home, too.
- But at the same time, the money gives people more room to manouver, and more importantly more room to imagine that things might be different, and prototype new possibilities. Things that faculty find difficult to muster the resources to do at my institution are things that graduate students can drive and get done here.
- Being here - in sociology, particularly - is a very odd experience that was first alienating, and then highly validating. I’ve never been to UCB in general (or sociology in particular) before now, and I have never explicitly articulated myself as “a sociologist” to self-identified sociologists: usually I frame what I do as Science and Technology Studies, with a historicist or sociological inflection, because that is both legible and sidesteps the unease I feel at the idea of claiming to be “in” the many fields I occupy (which, were it true, would imply I was some kind of renaissance figure). Being in a big sociology department, then - the big sociology department! - and having to articulate my work and identity and relation to the field, was initially deeply uncomfortable: I’m not “in”, as far as I’m concerned.
- But at the same time: the department has a common room named after my great-great-grand-advisor, because he was their first chair. I got to have lunch with a sociological mentor and beloved friend who showed up in the area shortly after that, and has been embedded deeply in the culture of the Bay’s academic scenes, and he, at least, sees me as a sociologist. When I’ve chatted to faculty, it’s become clear we know (and have trained under or been influenced by) many of the same figures. The grad students I’ve spoken to seem to very much like picking up what I put down. And, of course, you’ll pry my 415 number from my cold dead hands. My apprehension of articulating myself as a part of this “scene” is not felt by the people who are unambiguously in it.
All in all: an amazing, disorienting, but ultimately validating trip. Many thanks to (in alphabetical order) Ozzie Chuba, Raphael Cohen, Sandra Eder, Jacob Gaboury, Elihu Gerson, Jeff Lockhart, Kate Metcalf, Jeff Nagy, Teddy Shusterman, Alex Torrez, Hannah Zeavin and many more for making it so.