The Welcome Back: What is 'important work'?

To time manage or not to time manage, that is the question.

In the past couple of months I have not made-good on my promises to post bi-weekly on here. Between grad school applications, final-year sociology classes, my extracurricular school obligations, and my general sanity — I have been quite pre-occupied since launching this blog at the start of September.

While I haven’t been posting, though, I have been writing. In my metaphorical ‘vault’ (my Notion folder) there are the start of about 5 or 6 blogs that require a bit more work. Over the next few weeks, these will be released at random to make-up for missing content.

With this administrative talk aside, I want to use the rest of this piece to spell-out what I’ve been thinking about during these last few months, mostly to do with my venture of applying for graduate school. There have been certain big (and somewhat similar) questions I’ve found myself returning to repeatedly:

What is ‘important work’?

What is a worthwhile use of academic and personal privilege?

What is the biggest social/political/cultural problem of our time?

As you can imagine, considering these questions individually (and in tandem) isn’t exactly a relaxing task. While I might suffer from existential overthinking, I believe that there is also a valid reason behind why I keep coming back to these thoughts.

My philosophy for this blog, and my approach to education generally, has always come from a perspective of gratitude. I do my best to remind myself every day of all of the privileges and opportunities that I’ve been afforded in my life, from various sources, to be able to take a degree that I love and pursue a career of my choosing. While considering the next step of my path (a master’s degree) that sentiment remains. I often say to myself:

How lucky am I to be one of the few who can enact change through knowledge work and spend their life immersed in learning? How much more lucky am I that I can navigate all of the above with (enough of) the financial and social capital necessary to achieve a career in academia?

Maybe this all sounds a little self-righteous, and perhaps it is, but I can’t imagine how anyone in my position (or one similar) could not feel this same debt of gratitude to all that has opened the door(s) of opportunity for them in life.

With that said, who could possibly choose what to spend an entire academic career on? How do I spend this precious and rare chance I have earned, but also (in many ways), been handed?

These questions, in addition to all others above, are complicated for many reasons.

First, it is suffice to say that most sociology students would be apprehensive to pick a single topic or niche to guide their academic path. For example, my entry point into Sociology was shaped by my heavy interest in the dynamics of identity politics. Comparatively, during the last several years of my undergrad, I have amassed a deep fascination with gender and sexuality politics, capitalism, urban design and public transportation, political polarization, higher education (and education generally), as well as health equity, to name several. Anyone would be inclined to research something they have pre-existing passion for, but what happens when your interests are numerous and distinct (yet also interconnected)? In this, lies the first complication.

To add in a second complication, I return to my initial question(s). Choosing a path of research holds some — albeit, minor — but nonetheless real political and social significance. It matters what we direct our resources to as social scientists. Knowledge shapes action, and we are in many ways limited to act based on the available knowledge provided by academia (in addition to other venues).

Further, as a young person, my generation is bombarded with cultural messaging about our weight in the world’s future, in all of its complexity. I have then been forced to think about the ‘big fish’ looming over my choice of research. Climate change, class inequality, colonial structures, genocide (socio-political conflict, generally), and the struggle for human rights, are arguably the ‘big fish’ of our time.

The obvious follow-up is ‘what is the ‘biggest’ of the big fish?’

There is no right answer, but the question feels to be a natural one.

As any sociology student has been told throughout their degree, you cannot talk about any of these ‘fish’ without speaking to all of them. This means that climate change is as bound to colonialism as it is to capitalism, and class inequality, and all other structuring issues of our time. Even if there were a correct response to give — if there were, let’s say, a “#1 most pressing problem needed to be addressed by research” — does that mean that every social scientist should quit their original missions and pour their resources onto this target? If you could help to solve 'the biggest fish,' wouldn’t that be the most important work that a researcher could do? Wouldn’t an academic path become obvious?

While I could go on with more illustrative hypotheticals and rhetorical questions, I hope that you see my point; it would be easier to live in a world where we have a consensus about a single-issue that is most crucial to research and spend a career on. But alas, every issue we could name is but a single strand on a larger web of global problems that reinforce one another.

Therefore, it is impossible to attack the web all at once.

I have to trust that I am not the only one facing this dilemma and that I'm also not the only young (aspiring) researcher looking to make a change (in other words, ‘to take down the web’). This is my first point of defense to my opening questions.

A second point of contention simply comes from looking at my peers and mentors. All of the academics in my life — whether they be my undergrad peers, my professional colleagues, or my professors — are doing (what I consider to be) brilliant, important work. While their topics of research vary greatly from person to person, I know that each of them are producing work that will serve a larger societal benefit.

However, not all of these scholars (in fact very few of them) are attacking ‘the big fish.’ They are not delivering ground-breaking conclusions about the climate, nor are they devising some utopian plan to solve every existing geo-political tension.

Yet, they have my respect anyway.

This is because ‘important work’ (at least in my view) doesn’t have to be important to the whole world, but rather, just to those in the world that need it.

So perhaps that is my new question — not, ‘what is important work?’ — but instead, who will my work be important to?