L'Oreille Cassée

As Linnéa tells her kids that she is going to French Guiana over Christmas, the obvious question is: why? It is in situations like these that one wishes to be Tintin, with an artefact having gone missing from the Museum of Ethnography in Brussels or Professor Calculus having been kidnapped, either of which would immediately provide a perfectly good reason to set off on an adventure.

But in our case, I guess it was more of a spur-of-the-moment thing, something about rockets launching into space, French cheese, and rivers winding through the jungle. A blank spot on my mental map, somewhere without templates or fixed expectations. And, of course, the fact that Linnéa speaks French (and I aspire to one day).

Against certainty

With the taxi booked for 04:45 tomorrow morning, I am happy to have packed everything I need for Umeå, except perhaps the faintest idea of how I am going to make it back alive. Looking through the conference programme, it is once again obvious that I am the only one on “Team Abundance”, and I seriously wonder why I keep putting myself through these kinds of situations. While a psychologist might suspect a tendency towards self-harm, I guess it is because, deep down, I still believe in something resembling Habermasian communicative rationality: that we are not forever prisoners of our identities and worldviews.

Yet my own faith in those bright planetary futures has faltered considerably in recent years. As our digital overlords themselves were quick to point out, technological progress may not be as easily tamed as we once imagined:

“If you argue that environmental sufficientarianism is unrealistic because it assumes an implausible degree of moral discipline and international cooperation, someone might respond that safely managing transformative AI requires even more extraordinary coordination, institutional competence and restraint.”

This is a powerful objection, pointing directly towards the paradoxical implications of human fallibility in the Anthropocene, a topic that I hope to explore in some detail at WPSA in March (assuming my paper gets accepted).

Still, taking the long view of human history, I simply cannot believe in a future of ethical homogenisation where everyone is forced to act and think the same way. If we have learnt anything, surely it is that value change happens gradually by inspiring each other to be our better selves, not by forcing either “democracy” or “sustainability” down each other's throats, especially when we ourselves struggle to live up to our proclaimed ideals.

Bottlenecks

Having worked in academia for more than twenty years, I have come to the conclusion that few people complain as much as academics, which is particularly perplexing given that we remain among the most privileged groups in society.

While there are always individual stories that are genuinely horrifying, I find it incredibly frustrating how little attention is paid to the simple fact that when demand exceeds supply, as it clearly does for permanent academic positions, some mechanism of selection must exist. We can limit the number of doctoral students, postdocs, assistant professorships, or senior lectureships, but no matter how we arrange things, there will inevitably be a point at which not everyone can advance to the next level.

Over the last decade, Sweden has increasingly invested in assistant professorships (biträdande lektorat) as a pathway for relatively junior scholars to secure permanent positions as senior lecturers. Often restricted to applicants who earned their PhDs within the preceding five or seven years, these positions effectively exclude more experienced scholars (like me), creating a situation in which academic mobility becomes increasingly difficult, as noted in a recent article in Universitetsläraren.

What the article largely overlooks, however, is why universities have become so reluctant to advertise traditional senior lectureships in the first place. One important reason, I suspect, is that competition for such positions has become so intense that successful applicants would often already have been promoted to full professor elsewhere. From the university's perspective, there is little incentive to recruit someone at the senior lecturer level who is already qualified for a professorship, particularly when the latter comes with considerably greater financial commitments.

The result is something of a paradox. By creating a more predictable career path for younger academics, universities have simultaneously made it increasingly difficult for established scholars to move between institutions. And as everyone holds on to the positions they already have, fewer vacancies become available, further reinforcing the problem.

I am not sure there is any easy solution to this. Certainly, I would welcome greater opportunities for academic mobility, including for people like myself. But increasing the number of permanent academic positions comes at a cost, and I am far from convinced that this should be a priority given the many other pressing needs in society. In the end, moving the bottleneck from one career stage to another is unlikely to make it disappear.

Ostbewusst

Today, Svenska Dagbladet had a long-read article on the cultural legacy of East Germany, telling the story of how young Germans, born long after the fall of the Wall, have come to build their identities around a country that ceased to exist more than thirty years ago. As someone who travelled extensively to the GDR as a child, and whose imagination has never quite left the sand dunes of Rügen, I find this phenomenon of Ostdeutschwerdung fascinating on so many levels.

In part, I think it speaks to the poles of my own identity, to how I can appreciate both Spreewaldgurken and the modest pleasures of Good Bye, Lenin!, while also enjoying business class aboard Lufthansa across the Atlantic. As an outsider, it is of course easier not to take sides, but similar tensions play out in Sweden too, if less visibly, as the rural periphery finds itself at odds with Stockholm’s metropolitan centre. Here, too, I find myself belonging to both worlds and neither.

Children of Men

With the rain intensifying through the evening, William and I slowly dried off after our Ryde ride back to the hotel as we had dinner. Unwilling to venture out again, we opted for a quiet evening together in our hotel room, looking through old photographs of him growing up in Umeå. Though memories never tell the whole story, it was heartwarming to see all those photos of me and the boys, especially now that we have spent so much of this autumn apart.

Having reached the present in Google Photos, we debated which film to watch before settling on a true dystopian classic from 2006: Children of Men. Set in a decaying, fascist England in an alternative future where no children are being born, its extraordinary extended takes were as brutally realistic as ever, even if reality has not quite turned this dark (though sometimes, as with Gaza, one wonders).

Having won five of his seven rounds, William is now playing against an opponent with a much higher Elo rating, while I am recovering at Espresso House after a mad ten-kilometre run on the treadmill. With only a week having passed since Malmö Marathon, my legs were not really up to it, so I had to compensate by pushing my cardiovascular system harder, with my heart rate averaging 163 bpm.

Dysosmia

Having dropped William off at the chess tournament venue, I laced up my red Hoka Rincons and headed out for a short sunset run in Karlstad, a city I have not visited for almost twenty years to the day.

Located on the northern shore of Sweden’s largest lake, the city feels surprisingly coastal, with its large guest harbour. What stood out even more, though, was the strong smell of chocolate or coffee, making me briefly wonder whether I was experiencing dysosmia (I have lost much of my sense of smell over the last couple of years) before I stumbled upon the Löfbergs Lila coffee roastery.

Once back at the hotel, I indulged in the complimentary dinner included in Strawberry’s Home concept. While the value is more obvious in Norway, where everything else is outrageously expensive, it definitely saves a few bucks (if such Americanisms are allowed) when on the road. With heavy rain expected tomorrow, I am happy I got to explore at least the central parts of the city on my run, as I will probably be confined to the gym’s rowing machine.

Matcha latte

This morning, a young woman wearing a hijab spilled what looked like an entire cup of matcha latte across the floor of the train. Rather than telling anyone, she simply walked away. As the train attendant appeared with a roll of paper towels, I felt rather strange just sitting there behind my laptop, so I got up to help.

While we were cleaning up the mess, the attendant began complaining about “Arabs”. And just like that, a rather ordinary instance of inconsiderate behaviour had become something much bigger. Or, perhaps more accurately, something much smaller. What struck me was how readily the stereotype was available, as if it had been waiting all along for an opportunity to be confirmed. The young woman had behaved badly, no doubt, but somehow her behaviour was no longer her own. It had become evidence about an entire category of people, one to which the attendant had assigned her without knowing anything else about her.

Almost at the same time, I happened to come across an old promotional photograph from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, where I used to teach. It shows me surrounded by students in a classroom, a little snapshot of a time when my own world was expanding. Looking at that photograph now, I was reminded of how much larger the world is than the categories through which we ordinarily understand it. Of course, meeting people from different backgrounds does not mean that we will always like them, agree with them, or approve of their behaviour. But perhaps it can teach us to let people remain individuals, rather than immediately turning them into representatives of something else.

Listening to the wind

When told by the Swedish Academy that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Anne Carson apparently replied that she was in Iceland listening to the wind. Hard to match, but at least I grabbed the one book of hers I had on my shelf and jumped aboard a metallic Öresund train into the autumn rain.

Compared to Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, with its exploration of desire in classical literature and philosophy, I must admit that my own final edits to the När då då? manuscript feel rather flat. Still, I am happy to have finally submitted it for review, meaning that I can now turn my academic attention back to those elusive biogenic hydrocarbons, courtesy of the Swedish Energy Agency.

Beach runs

Moving north in less than a month, I am trying to maximize my beach running by chasing the morning light along Västra stranden. Yesterday, I was even able to squeeze in a lunch run as the waves kept rolling in.

Today, I attended that APT-turned-lecture on cognitive perspectives on education, which I greatly appreciated, with my only reservation being the insistence that learning science is not a “perspective” but rather an entirely inductive enterprise. In fact, claims that something is not theoretical or in any way ideological are often an indication of the exact opposite. Unsurprisingly, it did not take many minutes before someone in the audience took the content as a vindication of their own views on education, emphasizing “hard work” and the importance of homework.

While I prefer to remain on the sidelines of these pedagogical debates, I think it is important that we all recognize our own biases and preferred interpretations. Just as “evidence-based policy-making” often becomes “policy-based evidence-making” in practice, translating cognitive research into educational practice inevitably involves values and priorities of its own.

The president

On the train this morning, Linnéa and I came to reflect on the fact that Donald Trump first became president in 2016, and that for our younger kids, he is simply “The President”, in much the same way that Ronald Reagan was for our generation. Like yesterday, when we watched a rather disturbing documentary about Sweden’s minister for civil defence, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, it is difficult to fully grasp just how much political discourse has changed.

Considering the speech Trump recently gave at the United Nations, it is worth remembering that, for all his faults, Ronald Reagan told the 42nd session of the General Assembly in 1987:

“In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity […] I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

Science fiction, alright. But perspectives like that mattered. Democracy itself depends on something similar: losers’ consent, the willingness to accept temporary defeat because one remains committed to a political order larger than one’s immediate interests. The same is true internationally. Politics cannot function for long if every disagreement is reduced to the satisfaction of our basest instincts.

Perhaps that is what feels most different today: not simply the policies, but the shrinking of the horizon.