The capacity to plan for the future is not simply an individual skill. Frequently we present it that way—in advice to students, or workshops for the low-income—implying that with a plan, life would be organized, stable, sustainable, and therefore good.
Pandemic life has thrown into sharp relief what was true all along: for any person, the strength of a plan depends on the conditions in which the plan lives. My annual schedule for 2020—a book chapter in February, a talk in March, an article by June, a mid-year trip to visit a BFF, conferences in July and November, field work all year—all this has gone out the window. But what is astonishing, what has always been exceptional, has never been my planning skills, but the stability and predictability of the life of a relatively well-off person in a relatively wealthy country in times of relative peace.
In the past four months, as I stewed in the discomfort of repeatedly cancelling and remaking plans, I have been reminded that the conditions I have taken for granted for years—conditions of predictability, stability, and excess—are in reality unusual, never universally accessible. Now more than ever, the different conditions of individual lives put distance between those who have and those who do not.
In a crisis that has such corporeal dimensions, and which so obviously requires urgent and material responses beyond what my pen can do, I feel intermittent waves of uselessness and despair. What is the purpose of scholarly labor? This is not a new feeling. I know of many others who struggle with being scholars in disciplinary traditions steeped in values of equality and social justice, but making careers in organizational and/or national contexts where this ethos is marginal rather than institutionalized.
Without mitigation strategies on a collective and large scale, the fallout of the COVID-19 crisis will be deeply devastating as well as profoundly unequal. Scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences can interrogate this problem, in order to articulate perspectives which would otherwise not be seen or heard, recognized or legitimized. Proposing analyses, tabling theoretical insights, offering vocabularies and mental frameworks–scholars in various disciplines work at different levels of abstraction, some more obviously problems-oriented and ‘applied’, others more ‘upstream’ and abstract. Taken as a whole, this knowledge diversifies and deepens the range of solutions that are conceivable; it expands the range of interests that must be represented. More than ever, scholars can and must contribute to public discourse about what comes after. With or without institutional support, we need more urgently to pursue scholarship that is attuned to society’s needs. Our scholarship ought to put us in solidarity with, rather than apart from, the society in which we are embedded.
Research can highlight necessary questions, analyses, and solutions. This is useful work but only if we do it—consciously, doggedly, collectively, and if necessary against the tide of approval and reward we habitually seek.
Teo You Yenn 