silly little me has a purpose
Feb. 18th, 2022 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howsmyenglishI'm suddenly overcome by a feeling of exhilaration, because I realized that I'm doing the right thing. I'll have to be extremely vague in this entry, because I am guarding my anonymity on DW, but I need to share this, as well as record it for my own future reference.
At uni, I studied an extremely marginal discipline. Our section had so few students that when I passed all my exams on schedule, head of section told me, I was singlehandedly improving our section's statistics. For my MA thesis, I picked a field that was extremely marginal in this particular discipline. I never had the need to be big, known, loud. I wanted to make that field of mine... those extremely oppressed people it had to do with - more visible to the world. I didn't really believe that I could do that through academic writing, but I was an academic through and through, and I did not have other ideas.
When CoVid started, and we started teaching via Zoom, I felt the world had not only become more closed, it had also become more open. We suddenly could invite people to our classes or to give talks - without the constraints of absence of funding, time and energy needed for organization and travel. So, I contacted two people I kind-of-knew and suggested organizing some sort of a webinar series. We started it together, it didn't go too well at first, I had no idea how and what to do, but now, after one and a half years - we have a YouTube channel with by now seven recorded webinars. And it was only today I realized that this is it. This is why I studied what I did. Yes, it doesn't bring me any credit. It's not part of my job, it's something I do completely voluntarily, I myself am hardly visible in all of this. But I am helping that marginal field, those people to be more visible in the world. That's sooooo cool. I think it's the first time in my life that I feel there actually is some purpose in my existence.
At uni, I studied an extremely marginal discipline. Our section had so few students that when I passed all my exams on schedule, head of section told me, I was singlehandedly improving our section's statistics. For my MA thesis, I picked a field that was extremely marginal in this particular discipline. I never had the need to be big, known, loud. I wanted to make that field of mine... those extremely oppressed people it had to do with - more visible to the world. I didn't really believe that I could do that through academic writing, but I was an academic through and through, and I did not have other ideas.
When CoVid started, and we started teaching via Zoom, I felt the world had not only become more closed, it had also become more open. We suddenly could invite people to our classes or to give talks - without the constraints of absence of funding, time and energy needed for organization and travel. So, I contacted two people I kind-of-knew and suggested organizing some sort of a webinar series. We started it together, it didn't go too well at first, I had no idea how and what to do, but now, after one and a half years - we have a YouTube channel with by now seven recorded webinars. And it was only today I realized that this is it. This is why I studied what I did. Yes, it doesn't bring me any credit. It's not part of my job, it's something I do completely voluntarily, I myself am hardly visible in all of this. But I am helping that marginal field, those people to be more visible in the world. That's sooooo cool. I think it's the first time in my life that I feel there actually is some purpose in my existence.
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Date: 2022-02-19 04:14 am (UTC)(Also, I'd love to see your YouTube channel! :)
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Date: 2022-02-19 04:22 pm (UTC)It's so great to hear that there are people who genuinely are interested in this sort of thing.
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