Re: Performative Wokeness

[rynling]

God, writing all of this reminds me of this time back in 2017 when I was trying to set up a partnership with a Japanese university for a study abroad program, and the officer from the Global Education Office who I was working with was really confused about whether Japan is a European country.

I was like, Well, that's an interesting question, isn't it? I mean, for the past two hundred years or so, many prominent Japanese politicians and intellectuals have been arguing that Japan is more European than East Asian, and I suppose it's true that a lot of people in Japan feel more of an affinity with Germany and France than they do with, say, China or Korea. But that's extremely complicated, and I don't think I'm in a position to make an argument one way or the other.

It turned out that the guy just didn't know where Japan was on a map and didn't want to google it.

Comments

[lassarina]

*opens her mouth, closes it again* *looks at juxtaposition of "Global Education Office" and "didn't know where Japan was on a map"*

Fuck the wine, I'm going straight for whiskey.

[rynling]

He was very young, bless his sweet heart, but still.

One of the (many) problems with that particular institutional culture was the unspoken demand to reply to emails instantly, which led to an unfortunate phenomenon that I'm going to call "Men Do Not Think Before Hitting Reply." (And it's not that women didn't sometimes have this problem as well, but I call it like I see it.)

As an institution, UPenn is the sort of unapologetic neoliberal hellscape you'd expect to have produced the current POTUS. That being said, there has apparently been top-down action to prevent "24/7 access" online burnout during the past several years. The difference between institutional cultures in this specific regard is so strong that I can feel it in my physical body.

It's kind of nice, actually.

[lassarina]

That sounds really good.

I can't remember if I've told you this story before, but when I was interviewing for my current organization, the executive director sat me down at my final interview and told me, very earnestly, that he thought I was a wonderful candidate and would be a great contributor to the organization, but that he wanted me to know that this job would not be my life. He'd noticed that I went to a prestigious university and was concerned that I would not be okay with a job that was an eight-hours-a-day job and that, when the day was over, you went home and left it alone until the next work day.

He was apparently astonished when I told him that was exactly what I wanted: a job that was challenging, but that ended at the end of the day.

I still don't have work email or Teams or anything else on my phone, refuse to hold work conversations over texts (which is also partly self-defense against FOIA), and that's okay. And every time something goes stupid at work and I think about leaving, that fact gets added to the "reasons I'm ok with this actually" column. Which is a terrible indictment of the state of work in general.