Reflecting on Slow

Last week, I got together with an old buddy for dinner and he asked me to talk a bit more about the idea of slow especially in light of my post “Slow at 50.” Since I’m restarting the archaeological fieldwork aspect of my professional (albeit as a study season), it seemed like a reasonable time to write a little bit about slow more broadly.

When I started thinking about slow in archaeology, I imagined it as a tonic to a growing fixation on archaeological efficiency and its dependence on digital tools. Slow archaeology wasn’t so much a rejection of the benefits technology, but the critical engagement with how our tools shape the knowledge that we produce. As I thought more broadly about the implications of slow for archaeology or academia more broadly, I started to hope that an emphasis on slow might shift our emphasis from doing more to doing better and in this way, we might change the character of academic work.

For me, this would involve critical reflection on academic work and perhaps even an impulse to parse how modern, industrial practices have informed standards of professionalization in academia. I am particularly interested in unpacking the roots of certain academic work patterns in craft. For example, teaching practices associated explicitly with the hands-on learning or grounded in apprenticeship tend to cleave more closely to craft models of knowledge production than those informed by industrial practices. Industrial education, especially at the university level, seems to emphasize the fragmentation of learning into interchangeable chunks which over time produce a well-rounded student.

More broadly, I wonder whether how I started to think about slow some 6 or 8 years ago has now evolved into something wider, but still distinctly rooted no in the literal idea of slowing down, but in the notion of living more deliberately. This involves thinking more carefully about the things I do and making sure that they align with what I value rather than the various expectations foisted on me by colleagues, institutions, and situations.

I understand that this is a kind of privilege afforded to a very small number of tenured faculty who simultaneously find ways to operate at the fringes of the system and reap the benefits of the system, its resources, and its protections. That said, I do hope that reflecting deliberately on the opportunities that my position has allowed me ensures that I do more with what I have than rather than less.