Pandemic PhD: What sustains writing?
I wrote my dissertation during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and completed a first full draft on February 1, 2021. Hopefully, I will submit it soon and before the year is up, be awarded a DPhil by the ‘College on Knowledge Cultures and Digital Media’ at my university. I know that finishing a PhD is a uniquely challenging endeavour for anyone; hence, I am uncomfortable arguing that it was more challenging during a pandemic year. All kinds of things can happen while you’re in the final phase; for example, my friend Olu lost his mother, got married, had a baby, and submitted his PhD between January and June of the same year. And my own mother, Alka, gave birth to and cared for me in the six months leading up to her final MD exams. There is no good, appropriate or ideal time to be writing a dissertation; it is just the nature of the thing.
The old adage about there being no such thing as a good PhD, only a finished PhD haunted me. So I squared my shoulders and sat down to write on May 1, 2020. If I was clever and disciplined in “leaning in” to this time, then I would be done on schedule. I could take time off after October 1 to go see my family in India and decompress from the PhD, and then start something new with my life on January 1, 2021. Like many, I assumed that we would all wear masks, stay indoors, maintain distance, and ‘flatten the curve’ till we beat this thing. I was trying to be briskly efficient about it. A year later, the pandemic is still here, millions have died, and I finished writing a draft later than expected. I am not done yet. It has been a special and difficult year, but not because of the challenge of writing. It has been a challenge to know how to be in this changed world as a writer, researcher, and human.
2020 was always going to be my lockdown year. I had planned to suck up my FOMO and not submit abstracts to books and journals, and reluctantly turn down travel to conferences, workshops, and holidays. 2020 was going to be the year of the steady and disciplined writing life. So it came as a shock when the Covid-19 pandemic locked us all down. For weeks I received well-meaning messages from friends and family about how rapidly I would be done writing “now that there are no distractions.” It was as if writing a dissertation, or anything at all for that matter, involved just locking oneself up, or down in this case. Every writer knows this is true but only as far as the time dedicated to writing goes; we all need that uninterrupted time as much as we need the idea of it. I once attended a writing workshop by the writer and journalist, Nisha Susan, in which she hammered one thing into our heads: write everyday, any time, make it a habit, even ten minutes here or fifteen minutes there. It adds up; you have to keep showing up — for yourself — every day.
Women in particular struggle to make time to write around their various care responsibilities. As if on cue, studies showed that women were writing and publishing less during the pandemic (Viglione, 2020). I enjoy writing, I enjoy the struggle it presents. It is what I have always wanted to do, and I earn a tiny fraction of my annual income from heavily-sweated-over essays for think tanks and arts and cultural organisations. So I should have known that writing is sustained by the freedom to move into and out of our online or offline worlds. But I did not realise this as acutely as I did this past year. Why did I ever think that writing was merely the act of sitting down to get it done?
I surrendered my body and attention completely to the Pomodoro Technique. Outside my window, Berlin felt even more haunted, wicked, and beautiful in those Spring days, even as my digital world lit up. I missed out on a lot of early ‘pandemic culture’: memes, TikToks, the silly balcony operas and concerts across Europe, the Zoom cocktail hours (that, mercifully, not one of my friends ever proposes), the global solidarity that emerged from what Will Pearson refers to as the ‘Great Pause’. The enormous strain on academic colleagues who were teaching online was something I noticed a lot of on Twitter. A part of me missed out on following the conversations that exploded in my professional circles about the surveillance and data privacy disasters waiting to happen in contact tracing apps. There was some critical feminist writing about how the pandemic was amplifying the known, staggering gendered inequalities at work and home that could not be ignored any longer; I wish I had bookmarked those pieces. The internet has become an amoeboid monster that has grown around and off of our lives: there was just so much more to read, watch, listen to, and attend online.
So I was privately relieved to not have to pay attention to any of it. But I suppose what I was trying to do was shut myself off from feeling the pandemic itself; the shock, grief, and worry that came with it. I thought I could insulate myself. Lol. I was lucky that my friends and family were safe; but I did have a constant nagging worry about my parents in India; both 70+ years old, medical doctors, and one of them, my dad, was still working, still operating on some cases. They reassured me they were not being heroes and were taking ‘measured risks’. I was giving my mother some grief about my dad being at risk, till one day she lightly scolded me saying: “why can’t you understand that it’s our mission! We have to do this for people who depend on us!” *Cue that meme about being on a plane with your actual doctor parents and having a degree in Media Studies…* And then in mid-May, I crashed. I woke up one day and found I did not care about the dissertation, and I could not read nor write. Maybe I needed to rethink the pace and the deadline. I was reminded of the value of ‘slow research’ (Adams, Burke, and Whitmarsh, 2014) and resolved to make time for myself; but I was not sure what I could make time for. I allowed myself a break for a few days. And then George Floyd was killed by the police, there was the incident in Central Park with Amy Cooper and Christoper Cooper, and the calls for justice for Breonna Taylor’s shooting were amplified.
After this it was impossible to not become part of the global grieving and shared anger. I spent a lot more time online now, talking and listening. There was a lot more content that I was paying attention to. There was awkwardness that set into some social relationships and interactions around race, and particularly given the limited and specific range of European reactions can be to this. (This is another essay for another time). Hence, there were more people and personal conversations I had to pay attention to. But I also felt exhausted at having to talk — about anything. The beautiful uprising of Indian citizens against the Modi government’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act from December 2019-February 2020 was arrested by the pandemic; I felt its anger flare up again in my consciousness. And it was in that spirit too that I attended #BLM protests here in Berlin. I felt simultaneously clear, angry, upset, defensive. At some level I did not want to process either the grief of millions, the backlash from Whiteness, or my own place in all this. I like to say that I “became a woman of colour” after moving to Germany. (Again, another essay for another time.) And I have my own Savarna privilege that I try to confront and address. #BLM has inspired discussions about caste apartheid in India.
[Edit 8/4/21: I mean: more mainstream and popular conversations about caste privilege in spaces where there were few before. Like, also, identifying Savarna support to #BLM in the US while not reflecting on their own Savarna Privilege. I did not intend to suggest that there had been no discussion of this till #BLM came along. A history of the epistemic, spiritual, and political connections and disjunctures between race and caste might be understood through recent reviews of Isabel Wilkerson’s new book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent such as by Suraj Yengde for The Baffler and Charisse Burden-Stelly for the Boston Review]
It all felt too like too much.
I kept returning to my commitment to finish at all costs.
I believe I got my writing mojo back after the summer of 2020. I had opened myself up to the #BLM protests, but with it came everything else that I tried to shut out. I started my research in 2016, and it is about the material-discursive shaping of the ethics in the co-constitutive shaping of AI and ‘autonomous’ technologies. Writing about the emergence of technology amidst infrastructural collapse, the outsize role of Big Tech, and the complex information ecosystem that sustains our relationship to Knowledge began to feel delicate and important. Before, the dissertation was just something to just finish on time. Now, I was having to think about it in terms of everything happening in the world, and I did not like that. It was not easy, and is now impossible to ignore. The Autumn was hard, stepping into the river of words everyday and really feeling the currents of the day, the moment, the world, and responding to those rhythms. I also re-started a project about AI Metaphors, because it was good work at a time when I needed it, and because I did not want to be alone in my work. (I gave a talk about it at the 13th Gwangju Biennale).
[ Edit 8/4/21. Should it appear that I was somehow so emotionally weighed down that I listlessly moved words around the pages of this dissertation and stared out of the window, as it sounds to me as I read it now: No. Actually, I was ridiculously productive last year: Two essays for arts organisations, three books chapters based on work from the previous two years, and a journal article.]
To finish writing meant to give up on time, in a sense. Or rather, the clock. It meant to be in and with time of my own making. Where was there to go? What mattered? I locked myself down again. I finished writing the whole thing, but I am not yet ‘done’. There are now comments to get through and the actual details of submitting it into the bureaucracy of the University. But between now and then, I am not hermetically sealed off from the world that is dealing with this tremendous event; and despite this isolation, I was, and still am, in the world.
Works cited
Adams, V, Burke, NJ & Whitmarsh, I (2014) Slow research: Thoughts for a movement in global health. Medical Anthropology, 33:3, 179–197, DOI: https://10.1080/01459740.2013.858335
Viglione, G (2020) Are women publishing less during the pandemic? Here’s what the data say. Nature 581, 365–366 (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01294-9
