Daniel Tubb

Why I Suck at Email and Social Media

Daniel Tubb

As academics, we get a lot of emails. Sometimes, my response time can vary from a few seconds to a few months. I’m not a Luddite, but if I want to prioritize the most important work, such as writing articles, books, lectures, and supervising students, then email has to come last. To free myself from the tyranny of email, I try to follow a few rules—often, I fail.

I try not to read or reply in the morning, and I attempt to avoid checking emails on weekends. I schedule emails to be sent the next morning and access them only on my computer.

As I get older, I try to avoid social media.

No email or social media on mobile devices.

So, what do I do when I’m not writing or checking email? Sometimes, although not often enough, I play with my children. Other times, I work in the garden, run errands, repair a crumbling farmhouse, ski, or find other ways to avoid writing. Not enough, but still significant, is the time I spend reading, drafting, transcribing, revising, editing, or engaging in other writing-related activities.

Often, I try to walk.

Writing a book is a time-consuming endeavour. It requires years of fieldwork, thousands of pages of notes, and a considerable amount of cutting, polishing, revising, and editing. In my written work, I come across as thoughtful, articulate, and well-written. However, I am not as articulate over email or social media.

The same goes for social media.

If I can write a good sentence for every unwritten post and unliked tweet, I am happy. I do post sometimes, but my posts are mostly about the process rather than my work or current affairs. I have no hot takes or quick analyses.

I am a slow writer.

I spend a lot of time on the computer, but I struggle with email and social media. I want to focus on writing. I often fail.

So, by all means, get in touch. I may reply, and if I do, it’ll be late in the day.

Updated 29 April 2023.

Peak Conference? Let’s Hope So

Daniel Tubb

By Daniel Tubb, published in Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society.

We really have to stop meeting like this. The annual anthropology meetings will be in Vancouver from November 20 to 24, 2019, and while I am excited, I also know “we have to stop meeting like this.” At least, this is how mathematician Malabika Pramanik put the problem of academic conferences in her article in The Tyee. The article summarized a report by Seth Wynes and Simon D. Donner (Department of Geography, University of British Columbia) about the greenhouse gas emissions caused by academic travel by members of the UBC Vancouver campus.

The report makes for sober reading. The major finding is that greenhouse gas emissions from air travel make up between 63% and 73% of the total annual emissions from all operations of the UBC campus. The biggest culprit, representing over half of the total, is short duration trips of about five nights to travel in-person to attend conferences.

In short, the problem is professors, but also students and postdoctoral researchers, who fly to conferences like the 2019 CASCA/AAA meetings in Vancouver.

In fact, only a small fraction of people is responsible for the majority of emissions. Between 8 and 11% of the UBC population produces 50% of those emissions. On my own campus in Fredericton, I suspect I am one of that small number of people. 

I calculated my greenhouse gas emissions from travel (using an online calculator) and wrote about it in July. In the last 18 months, I took flights from Fredericton to Cuba via Toronto for a conference of anthropologists (emitting 675 kg of CO 2 for the journey); to San Francisco via Toronto for another conference (767 kg); to Washington D.C. via Montreal for a conference of geographers (337 kg); to Toronto for a conference of Latin Americanists (243 kg); and to Bogotá via Toronto for fieldwork (743 kg). If you add it all up, all these flights end up contributing about 2,750 kg in CO2 emissions.

Many of us are in the same position, but must spewing greenhouse gases be an occupational hazard of attending conferences?

Clearly, things have to change.

On the last weekend in September, 500,000 people marched in Montreal calling for tackling climate change and a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on global warming gives us until 2030 to reduce emissions by about 45% from 2010 levels.  

Let’s hope Vancouver 2019 is peak conference: The last time so many people travel so far for so little time.

Of course, there have long been calls for individuals to make changes to their behaviour. A colleague of mine made a decision a decade ago to stop travelling more than once a year for academic purposes. Vancouver will be the last time I fly so far just for a conference, because cutting back on flying is the biggest single thing I can to reduce my greenhouse gas emissions. 

But, individual choices to not attend a conference can only be part of the solution.

The UBC report suggests some ways to reduce flying: using local carbon offsets, requiring economy air travel because it produces far less emissions than business travel, developing behavioural incentives, creating a centralized system of tracking travel emissions, and improving access to teleconferencing and information and communications technology on campus.

Yet, a better video link or not going is not going to cut it, all of the time.

I work in a small city and province, and conferences feel important. Large conferences aren’t just opportunities to present one’s work, but are also a chance to meet new people, to see old friends, to hear about cutting-edge research, to discusses ideas, to continue collaborations, and to pitch new work. All of this is hard to do over video.

Conferences are important, and while my plan is to travel less, to travel closer to home, and to stay on the ground, we need structural changes in how we organize conferences as well.

What might it mean to organize a CASCA conference differently? Could we promote and facilitate online attendance for those prefer to stay at home? What about hosting two small regional conferences in parallel with live-streaming of panels and events? Might only holding conferences in big hub cities with excellent public transport and a critical mass of people reduce emissions significantly? What about alternating annually between the West Coast and Central Canada? Might holding a conference every eighteen months or biannually be one way to cut emissions by a third? Might only holding conferences at the same time and place as a bigger conference result in significant greenhouse gas emission savings—should we only have CASCA at the same time as the AAA or Congress? Hopefully these and more questions will be discussed in the cosponsored roundtable addressing precisely this issue at the upcoming 2019 CASCA/AAA meetings.

While there are a lot of questions and no easy answers, Malabika Pramanik is right. We do have to stop meeting like this. We need to figure out how to do conferences differently, because eleven years is not that long to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 45%, and at least for universities, conferences are one of the biggest emitters.

Cite as: Tubb. Daniel, 2019, “Peak conference? Let’s hope so.” *Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 13.2.

In Praise of Small Places

Daniel Tubb

Small towns can be a great place to get your head down and get things done.

By Daniel Tubb, published in Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 13.1.

There is a North American phenomenon of young people from rural areas and small towns and medium-sized cities moving to the Big City. In Canada, the destinations are Toronto or Montreal, Vancouver or Calgary. In the US, they are New York or Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco. But are big places so necessary for creative work?

Richard Florida suggested in 2004 that innovation is urban, and that the “creative class” requires cities. Dense populations and cafes and bars and restaurants and theatres and concerts and bookstores are the intoxicating fuel of creative people. Sarah Schulman, in a way, eviscerates this idea with her haunting critique of the gentrification of urban spaces and the mind, which occurred in New York after the AIDS crisis. Still, she celebrates the authentic artistic scene of urban spaces that she experienced moving to gritty and vibrant New York in the 1970s and 1980s.

Academia has its own narrative where urban places promote creativity and productivity. A class system of prestige accrues to the large, cosmopolitan, research-intensive universities. We seek them out as undergraduate students, as graduate students, and as faculty. They are intensely competitive. Getting in as a student is hard—as faculty well-nigh impossible. As with the trope of successful people in the Big City, if a scholar doesn’t go to a Top University, it is seen as they couldn’t, not as they didn’t want to.

Why such reticence to the small places and their small universities? One is what I’ve come to think of as prejudice against rurality—to echo Wendell Berry’s observation about the prejudice against country people. We need to blow up the academic and social prejudices against small towns and flyover states and the backwoods and their universities. This might need an intersectional perspective to consider people in place, but I digress. What I want to extend here is an invitation to the freedom one can find on the periphery.

My ticket out of a village in Eastern Ontario was a small university. Applying for graduate school and then jobs, I felt the prestige of the Big City and Big Centers. After several years, I finally found a job at the University of New Brunswick. I was lucky, and I didn’t even know it. I hadn’t yet realized the benefits of small places.

In March 2019, I was listening to CBC Radio host Tom Powers interview the Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter Emma Donaghue, who lives and works in the mid-sized Canadian city of London, Ontario.

“I understand one of the things you love about being here is how productive you get to be. Is that right?” Tom asked.

“If I were in some big glitzy international megacity of the 21st century, there’d be a lot to distract me,” Emma replied. “But, as it is, I’ve had twenty-one years here, and I’ve written quite a lot because there’s not so much getting in the way.”

“That’s a compliment, right?”

“I think so. I mean, London, do you want to be in a city where writers party, or where writers write award-winning screenplays?”

Do you want to be in a city where Anthropologists party, or a town where Anthropologists can get things done?

Fredericton is no 21st-century international megacity. Things shut down on a Sunday afternoon. I am one of a handful of sociocultural anthropologists in the entire province. It is not a city where anthropologists party, although we did host CASCA a few years before my time, and I’ve been to my fair share of parties. There are even more talks and lectures and events than I manage to attend.

Yet, Fredericton and the University of New Brunswick provide conditions more valuable than the so-called urban innovation engendered by Big Cities and their Universities.

Why?

The non-existent commute. Dropping my son and wife off is a ten-minute drive. It’s also walkable. A hike in the woods is a few minutes away. There is no traffic, except for a few minutes at five o’clock in the afternoon. The city has places to walk, bike, ski, swim, and do many kinds of things.

The money. It may be gauche to say it, but rent is cheap, daycare is in the hundreds, not thousands, of dollars. If the time comes, house prices are affordable—some of the cheapest in the country.

A community. I see friends, and we can do things, planning hours not weeks in advance. Having time to meet friend and find a community and recharge, can paradoxically be much harder in a larger city.

The anonymity and lack of competition. I am a small fish in a small pond, yet there are no big fish to gobble me up. I can put my head down and get to work. The university, like any other, keeps me busy. Classes and service and committees and students and meetings and writing and research and grants and email. I run seminars and I teach too widely. But I know my students well, and they number in the dozens and not hundreds. I feel I can slow down a bit, as much as one can at the beginning of the tenure track.

The extra time is time to write, to think, to teach, to invent, to pursue new ideas, to meet, and to organize workshops and events. I’ve had time to write my dissertation into a book, publish some shorter articles, start another book, and successfully apply for a number of grants. My priority is to balance teaching and writing, and here I’ve had time for that and to think and perhaps reach a new public.

One new public, it seems to me, is defined by the places we live. I’m an ethnographer of mining in Colombia, and now of mining in rural New Brunswick.

I write in the morning for a bit, I go to class, I write in the afternoon for a bit. Or, I go to a coffee shop. Or, I walk across the river.

Sure, the grass is greener. I would like more doctoral and masters students, to teach less widely, more colleagues to talk ethnography with, and more scholars and people who care about Colombia and Latin America.

But would all that intellectual partying let me have so much time to think and write?

Cite as: Tubb. Daniel, 2019, “In Praise of Small Places.” Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 13.1.

It’s Anthropologies, not Anthropology

Daniel Tubb

By Daniel Tubb, published in Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 12 Special – Stories from Cuba / Échos de Cuba / Historias de Cuba.

There are many ways of doing anthropology.

A little auto-ethnography. Writing this, I look east over the white crested waves of the Saint John River through the girders of a bridge, once a railway now a footpath, and on towards the hillside campus of the University of New Brunswick Fredericton. Amongst the ubiquitous brick, there is a lone wooden building, also red. Once, rumour has it, the building housed prisoners during the Second World War. Now, it houses the Department of Anthropology and my office. All of this is a far cry from the bustling city of Santiago de Cuba and the annual meetings of the Canadian Anthropology Society in May 2018. Not least because the Saint John River was colder than the Caribbean, but also because there are far fewer anthropologists. And yet, I’m convinced my department is a microcosm for the part of a CASCA meeting I enjoy the most.

Our department is small and three-field: archeologists, biological anthropologists, and sociocultural anthropologists. I am probably one of a handful of faculty in New Brunswick who identifies as a sociocultural anthropologist. In my department, we each do anthropology, but we do it in different ways.

In Cuba, there was a concentration of anthropologists—faculty and students and practitioners—from across Canada, Cuba, and the Americas. Many doing anthropology differently, in their own ways. On the campus of the Universidad del Oriente, I regularly felt myself a humble eavesdropper on conversations new to me. Conversations about what anthropology is in Cuba, about what anthropology is in Latin America, and about what different anthropologists are doing for their research. The conversations were in Spanish and English and French.

I once thought such a large national conference was a place where everyone was participating in the same conversation. Conferences bring people together, after all. In our case, people with a commitment to this thing we call anthropology, and a peculiar way of understanding, thinking, researching, and writing about the world as anthropologists. While I suspect many of us have a shared commitment—fraught and conflicted as it may be—to this thing we call Anthropology, we do not share one vision of what anthropology is. And yet, still, we talk of ourselves in the singular: anthropology. A case can be made that it should be anthropologies.

What is anthropology, anyway? We debate it, we critique it, we deconstruct it, and sometimes we try to redefine it. Sometimes, we police our disciplinary boundaries of interlopers, or we lay claim to central concepts or methodological approaches. “They’re not really doing anthropology properly, all they do is ask questions?” I think to myself. In my department, we tell students that Anthropology is a holistic study of humanity across time and place. Yet, how we teach that, the questions we ask, and the answers and methods we accept as truth are different. I think this plurality is a good thing.

Even the way I self-identify as a sociocultural anthropologist is a plurality. The name has resonance in Canada, influenced both by British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology. In Quebec, where I trained as an undergrad briefly, the influences were the French school. In Colombia, where I do fieldwork, the influences are wider still. Indeed, Colombian anthropology has its own thriving history. All of this, of course, was a brought up by the debates around World Anthropologies. Yet, going to CASCA in Cuba, reminded me that there are many anthropologies, even within the settler state some call Canada. Cuba was humbling and exciting precisely because there were many good ideas to think with and about.

As I contemplate how to teach a theory course next semester, I’m struck at how difficult the task is. It can’t be enough to dwell on Western anthropology from elite US and British schools, too often white men from prestigious places have dominated those conversations over the last hundred years. That anthropology is tied up with colonial histories. That it is complicated and exacerbated by a tradition of writing about marginalized communities in non-Western (and now Western) contexts, is of course true. Conversations about anthropology as a handmaiden of colonialism and a discipline in need of decolonizing are vital conversation to keep having. In Santiago de Cuba, I was struck by the many other vibrant and urgent conversations already going on. This is the plurality that I found exciting.

There were challenges, of course. One is the academic class system, which was entirely on display—a cup of coffee at the conference hotel was almost a month’s wages for a Cuban worker. The lingua franca was, too often, English. None of this is unique to an anthropology conference, Canadian or otherwise, as attendees and organizers of all conferences face these challenges. I congratulate the organizers of CASCA in Santiago de Cuba for shifting the locales of conversation and opening up new spaces for discussion, even as money and language and prestige were elephants in the room.

There is a politics to who gets to define anthropology, of course. A jockeying for position. The attempt to define a discipline, can be a good move. “Anthropology should be this.” “It should be that.” Being in Santiago de Cuba reminded me there are so many conversations already going on in many places, and that such that is exciting. In broad left organizing, there are arguments about a “diversity of tactics.” While I do not condone all tactics employed at political demonstrations, I support the right of people to choose which tactics to adopt. I may not find all conversations in anthropology to be equally compelling, but a cacophony is more critical than attempts to discipline the discipline.

Annual conferences like CASCA serve many purposes, not least bringing people together. For me, from a small province and a small city where I am one of a small community, the conference was a much needed chance to recharge, to remind myself what I am doing and why I am doing it by connecting (and reconnecting) with colleagues, by learning to listen to what other people are doing and saying, and by dipping into many conversations. I met people whose work I appreciate, I thought about how to teach better, how to write better, and how to be a better mentor. While I’ve always been most attracted to evocative ethnographic writing and making ideas accessible by doing my best at being readable, this is just how I approach my discipline. There are other approaches. We need more spaces for more voices and for more conversations, as messy and imperfect and as human as these spaces may be. In support of this, we can embrace anthropologies as they are, a plurality in all of its messy glory.

Cite as: Tubb. Daniel, 2016. “Getting on the Tenure Track.” Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 10.2. https://cascacultureblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/17/its-anthropologies-not-anthropology/

Self Help for Writers

Daniel Tubb

By Daniel Tubb, published in Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 11.1

Anthropologist, ethnographer, writer? What am I? I spent seven years as a grad student (two in coursework, two and a half in both fieldwork and writing) and two as a postdoc. Only lately have I begun to identify as a writer. When did this happen? In the morning, I think.

The sun began to peek above the sea. I felt the air caress my face, inhaled the salty twang, listened to the waves rumble on the beach, and let my fingers patter on the keyboard. I had left my hotel room to sit on the beach after a conference in the Caribbean. My mood was meditative as an elderly woman stretched in a yoga pose, and I practiced my morning writing calisthenics on my keyboard: a holdover from fieldwork. In the mornings, I wrote questions to follow up on, first drafts, reflections on process, and notes for myself. I used to think the words were most important, now I’m not so sure. Julia Cameron (The Miracle of Morning Pages, 2013) calls what I was doing morning pages: a practice of both ethnographer and self-help guru. Do I write that last part with a cringe of cynicism? Perhaps, but, might the writing be as important as the words written?

Should we think of ourselves as writers? Yes. Prosaically, because our careers depend on it: finishing the PhD; getting the tenure track or alt-academic job; keeping that job; and advancing our careers. At each step, publish or perish. Aspirationally, because writing is a craft which requires both skill and practice. Learning to write is a kind of enskillment.

My cynical self asks why academics write so much that nobody reads? Anthropologists are as guilty as anyone. Michael Taussig (The Corn Wolf, 2015) laments this ‘agribusiness writing.’ Might one explanation be our training is, in fact, in agribusiness writing? I trained as an anthropologist, academic, scholar, and researcher, but not as a writer. Graduate school involved gleaning big ideas from convoluted, sometimes serpentine and labyrinthine and even tortuous scholarly prose. I read far more about my field site and ethnographic theories and methods than I ever did about writing. I was trained to think, but never in something so prosaic as how to write. The only university course I took on composition was in Spanish. If we read accessible and readable ethnography, it was on the side. We read the high priests of writing culture, but rarely the Stephen Kings of writing culture.

I mean it. Despite this clumsy transition, we never read any Stephen King. This might be a shame, because the career of a fiction writer seems more the model for many an anthropology graduate student: underemployed precarious obscurity for most, with a good income for a few. I found Stephen King’s memoir (On Writing, 2002), with its descriptions of receiving hundreds of rejection slips while writing in a laundromat, comforting as my then failed job search grew into its third year. King’s daily writing inspired my own. His golden rule—keep reading—kept me, well, reading.

Is there one way to become a writer? Sure. To paraphrase Antony Johnston, a prolific graphic-novelist and writer: Write. How to write? Tautologically, do what works for you. How do you know what works for you? Try various techniques. I read the self-help for academic writers’ literature. Although my grad school self would have rolled his too-soon jaded eyes, here’s some of what I read.

For me, the Writing on Writing series started it all. Anna Tsing and Paulla Ebron reflect on the call and response rhythms of writing before dawn. Tsing references Dorothea Brande’s (Becoming a Writer, 1934) advice on developing a habit: “Write every day, first thing.” No time to write? Paul J. Silvia (How to Write a Lot, 2007) deconstructs every such excuse. Heavens, I logged my writing for a year. After all, Anthony Trollope famously woke, wrote for three hours, and then ran the British Postal service—he was nothing if not prolific. Wendy Belcher (Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, 2009) breaks down the Herculean task of preparing an article for publication: her workbook taught me how to revise. Deirdre McCloskey, the prolific, conservative economist, recommends William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White (The Elements of Style, 1999); Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (The Reader Over Your Shoulder, 1979), who have delightfully quirky insights; Joseph M. Williams (Style (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/900697.Style), 2002), who advises writing with characters and actions, putting subjects and actions at the beginning of the sentences, and cutting down on nominalizations; and Richard A. Lanham (Revising Prose, 1987), who describes how to edit out long prepositional phrases. We all have our tick-words, which Bruce Ross-Larson (Edit Yourself, 1996) lists alongside alternatives. Roy Peter Clark (How to Write Short, 2014) casts brevity as positive; then shows how it is done.

On writing books, William Germano’s (From Dissertation to Book, 2013) meta-commentary on turning a dissertation into a book shows why a dissertation is your last piece as a student, how a book has a thread pulling everything forward, and how a dissertation is written defensively with an audience of five: your committee. A book has a wider audience. Eleanor Harman, Ian Montanges, Siobhan McMenemy, and Chris Bucci (The Thesis and the Book, 2008) edit a volume on the difference between the two genres. William Germano (Getting It Published, 2008) and Anthony Haynes (Writing Successful Academic Books, 2010) describe how to write a book, select a publisher, decide between a university and a commercial press, craft a prospectus, and write the damn thing.

Ethnography is not journalism, but Kirin Narayan (Alive in the Writing, 2012) gives practical ethnographic exercises drawn from creative non-fiction—her bibliography is a gold mine. In a workshop I attended on turning a dissertation into a book, the facilitator recommended Jack Hart’s (Storycraft (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10140746-storycraft), 2012), whose advice on structure, story, character, point of view, scenic writing, analysis, and digression gave me a new vocabulary; Ursula K. Le Guin’s (Steering the Craft, 2015) advice on rhythm and sound applies as much to fiction as ethnography; and Mary Karr (The Art of Memoir, 2015) opens memoir as another body of literature to learn from. Ethnographers don’t write fiction, but Renni Browne and Dave King (Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, 2004) are invaluable on editing, dialogue, and techniques to show, not tell.

Feeling anxious? You’re not alone. Writers writing on writing might help: Virgina Woolf (A Writer’s Diary, 1973); Lafcadio Hearn (“On Composition,” Life and Literature, 1920, p. 53), who describes re-reading notes and a technique of composition I mirrored, accidentally; and Rosa Luxembourg (The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, 2013), whose early letters are on writing. I’ve found video inspiring too: Alan MacFarlane has many, but his videos on academic creativity and on writing come to mind.

Reading about writing as a craft has been inspirational. Maybe my morning notes won’t lead me to craft the next Great Ethnography. However, in my own way I have been implementing Ray Bradbury’s advice (http://thewritepractice.com/ray-bradbury/), “Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

Cite as: Tubb. Daniel, 2017. “Self Help for Writers.” Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 11.1, 11.1.