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| A glimpse into the world of spider monkeys |
Last year I fell in love with Seanan McGuire’s Wayward
Children series. It’s about a school for teenagers who disappeared through doorways
to other worlds, where they finally found a place where they fit in, but then
found themselves back in our own boring, real world. The kids in the school
find comradery with other kids that are all strange and weird in their own unique
ways but are longing to get back to the place where they really fit. It made me
of El Zota, which has always been my Narnia.
When I left after 15 months of dissertation fieldwork in 2001, I needed a break
and switched to new project studying captive apes. But my goal was always to
either find a job that allow me to get back to field in the summers and take
students with me (or find one working with captive animals that had space for
me to get back to the field for applied conservation projects). Unfortunately, my Lack of Attaining a (Real)
Job made me put those plans on hold and it feels like a magical place from my dreams
that I just can’t find the doorway back too. I ended up moving on to research studying
woman of color scientists specifically to create space for myself and others in
academia, but in doing so I have become even more aware of all the doors that
keep slamming Because I Am Not Welcome.
But then in April I received an e-mail invitation to Science
Foo Camp. It looked a bit more like a random spam e-mail than a key to a new
door, but when You Get a Summons Inviting You In… the only obvious step seems
to follow it. But the invitation to Sci
Foo describes how they invite people doing “groundbreaking work,” and I was
worried that it was Another Place I Did Not Belong.
My career is a Total, Utter Failure. In six years, I haven’t
been able get the most important part of my dissertation published. In seven
years of interviewing for academic and non-academic jobs, I have failed, again
and again, to impress hiring directors and search committees. I have been knocking
on 280+ doors, and most of them have been slammed in my face. And I have also
been repeatedly reminded, in so many small and large ways, in which I Do Not
Belong unless I flatten and mold myself into something that is… not quite myself.
But Sci Foo also fell right in the middle of when a friend
was teaching a field course at El Zota. We
planned for me to come down and give a guest lecture in her course and was Finally Going Back. But there was that e-mail for an exclusive, invitation-only
conference that I may never get an invite to again, so I put my field plans on
hold and Said Yes to Sci Foo. I thought I could work around it go to El Zota
after, but my friend’s class was cancelled due to low enrollment. And the one
week that she would go down to Costa Rica was exactly when I would be at Sci Foo.
I would much rather visit the Beautiful Swampy Rainforest That Haunts My Dreams, instead of networking with a bunch of strangers who
probably think I Do Not Belong.
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| #fieldworkfail: The Swamp of Sorrows Where I Nearly Drowned of Failure |
But I went, and I was pleasantly surprised that the exclusive,
invitation-only had the peculiar effect of almost eliminating the normal forms
of gatekeeping and hierarchy academia has taught me to expect as normal.
Instead of the “Do you even go here” responses I expect, people treated me like
belonged. Until now, I had not consciously recognized how incredibly constant that
experience has been, and the ways in which it has paradoxically intensified after
receiving my PhD and Failing To Get a (Real) Job. So many of my experiences in
science, from applying to field positions to applying to graduate school to submitting
grants and manuscripts and 280+ job applications have been “You Can’t Sit With
Us.” When I have been offered a seat, it’s always been at the Academic Kids
Table (visiting, adjunct, postdoc positions), where it is impressed upon me
that I am Just a Trainee and Still Early Career with less potential than the
graduate students who *could* lived up to the potential I Failed to Achieve.
The best part about Sci Foo was being treated like an adult that
was welcome to sit with anyone and included in conversations on everything from
non-human language to protein-folding to the search for alien life and treated
like A Real Scientist With Valid Expertise.
I had some amazing conversations and met fantastic people. Of
course, there were sessions that were mostly old white men talking among themselves
and conversations where I still didn’t feel like I quite fit in. But there were
also fascinating conversations with people that made an intentional effort to
invite new people in and make sure that if you were talked over that you were
heard. Through those conversations I was reminded of the passions I have set on
the back burner. In a failure story
slam, I talked about the #fieldworkfail that reminded me how much I love The Swamp
of Sadness Where I Nearly Drowned of Failure. For years I have failed to get
back to my gorgeous, swampy, bullet-ant infested rainforest, and dreamed about
writing a fieldwork memoir interspersing my #fieldworkfails with stories of
spider monkeys. I want to share the social lives of these
enchanting, endangered animals, and how important it is to understand their world and conserve their forests before it becomes too late. That was plan,
back when I started Spider Monkey Tales, but I have kept getting further and
further away from that goal.
When I started studying them in 2005, Geoffroy's spider
monkey was not listed as Endangered. Now they are one of the 25 Most EndangeredPrimates. Now is getting precariously close to Its Too Late.
I have been getting caught up with fighting to get into the
gates slammed in my face instead of findings ways to create the doors back to where I really want to be.
I need to get my butt back down to that beautiful rainforest
and plunge right into The Swamp of Sadness Where I Nearly Drowned of Failure
and get cracking on Writing the Damn Book. And I think I’m done trying to fight
my way into places that don’t want me.
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| Who wouldn't want to read a book about these gorgeous creatures' lives? |
So anyway, if you get a strange e-mail inviting you to a
gather of Really Important People Where You Probably Don’t Belong, take it. It
might just be that magical key that leads you back to finding the door that’s always
been there, waiting for you to find it again.
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