Crystal Lee (she/她)

Does academic work really have to be new?

One of the biggest blockers I have when it comes to doing new research is the feeling of having nothing significant to say. "Someone else already wrote a fantastic paper on this," I think, "and this really isn't new knowledge, per se." The thing about being farther and farther along this academic journey is that you become woefully, painfully aware of just how insignificant your ideas are in the expansive universe of your own field, and how rare it is to truly happen on something new. (There's actual research that shows that while the total number of published papers has doubled every 12 years, truly "disruptive" new work has declined overall -- a slowing of new findings. We could talk about how this also means that AI could possibly slow down science, but that is another blog post for another time.)

Anyways, I go round and round with the idea that I will never create something new until I become bored with my own thoughts -- both tired of this torturous merry-go-round and with whatever shambles I have of a nascent idea. If it is not abundantly clear already, I'm in therapy to try and address this horrible state of affairs, and even that has not really abated the sheer anxiety and horror I have when I look at my own research. Sometimes, I wonder if this job really is for me, or if I simply am not sufficiently grateful for the freedoms I have to pursue projects that I find interesting.

This obsession with "new" work can be debilitating, especially if you are surrounded by peers who seem to be doing nothing but producing sparkling, groundbreaking work. Seth Mnookin, a cherished colleague of mine in my department, has helped me address this by introducing me to a new way of thinking: by seeing new work either as a scoop of events vs. a scoop of analysis. Scoops of events are the breaking news, the exclusives; not every book (or every article) has to be of that flavor. Scoops of analysis, by contrast, help recast existing knowledge and primary material -- all of which is accessible by anyone who's doing a good look -- where the thing that's new is simply that you have a world view on it. Re-organizing and synthesizing existing material is itself a new way of thinking about a set of ideas. Not necessarily the first, new, completely ground-breaking worldview, but a unique worldview or set of lessons that is worth writing down. While a "scoop" still has the connotation of being The First, the point is to reframe the situation such that you can breathe, begin anew, and start typing. A friend of mine, Lilly Chin, has told me that this job is about learning new things and writing them down to share. The fact that it's new to you is something worth considering after all.

This reframing, at least for me, can still be a difficult pill to swallow. I still feel like what I write has to be something worth saying, which is a fatal mistake not unlike being too afraid to write in a new journal because it's too pretty to be desecrated by unworthy scribbles. Still, it's something that I'm trying to push through -- something just has to be new to me. While the political economy of academia asks -- nay, demands -- that we be producing top tier, interesting work, I'm trying to reframe it all by remembering that the work just needs to be interesting enough to me. No one is telling me what I need or have to be working on (except for the format, which is a book and some articles), but the topic is completely up to me. I get to write a book on whatever I want -- which, in the words of "The Devil Wears Prada," is a job a million girls would kill for.