Embracing Craft in Academia: Reflections on Sabbatical

Academia, for all its bureaucratic scaffolding and metricisation (neither of which, in spite of what many would have us believe, is newly arrived on the scene), has always seemed to me less an outcome and more a craft. The language we use is linear and progressive—impact, output, key performance indicators—but the experience is slower and quieter. What looks from the outside like a trajectory of advancement often feels, from the inside, like the painstaking rhythms of practice: revisiting texts, refining an argument, shaping a paragraph until it carries its own weight.

Beginning a period of sabbatical this month has sharpened this distinction for me. Having the time to work on my next book, on liberal theology in early-20^th-century America, is an extraordinary privilege, of course, but also a perturbing reminder that the rhythms of academic life are neither fixed nor inevitable. After a six-year term as an associate dean, when my diary wasn’t my own and a truly uninterrupted hour for writing was out of the question, I now find myself in a space where mornings are less prescribed, afternoons more open, and evenings less weighed down by the day’s unanswered emails.

This shift has interrupted the treadmill to which I had grown accustomed: no more weekly meetings or administrative reports, fewer obligations to the tempo of the institution. The contrast is striking. Career logic dictates constant forward motion, progression, and visibility. Sabbatical interrupts that, slowing time to the pace of craft: immersion, attention, revision. After years of deliberately (and at times aggressively) climbing a ladder, it feels now like I am stepping back into the workshop of what I have actually been trained to do: pore over the historical record to better understand what modernist literature means, and, in doing so, cultivate my own scholarly sensibilities in order to train students to do the same.

The language of career encourages us to think in terms of advancement, but the language of craft invites us to think in terms of depth. Career implies a vertical climb: promotion, recognition, and external markers of success. Craft, by contrast, is iterative and circular: you return to the same problems with new tools, you revisit the same materials with a slightly steadier hand. In my ways, this sabbatical is feeling like an unmistakable return, and whether or not my hand is indeed steadier, it is at the very least different to when I began my career.

Pierre Bourdieu’s account of ‘academic capital’ in Homo Academicus explains much about why universities are structured to reward careerist accumulation: advancement depends on how well one plays the game, converting intellectual labour into recognisable forms of capital. But Richard Sennett’s celebration of craft in The Craftsman reminds us that the deeper meaning of scholarly work is found elsewhere: in the long hours of slow reading, the shaping of sentences, the iterative labour of interpretation. Bourdieu undoubtedly shows us the internal logic of the field, but to treat scholarship as craft is to resist the abstraction of labour into capital and to remain grounded in the work itself, the feel of words under the hand, the quiet satisfaction of making something well.

Craft is built not through dramatic leaps but through the slow accumulation of skill over time. Looking back, I see this clearly in my own trajectory. As an undergraduate, I was awkward but diligent; I once arrived late to an exam with an analogue alarm clock whose battery had died, holding it up as evidence. From those unpolished beginnings to my current role as teacher and writer, what has mattered is not sudden transformation but steady honing.

This accumulation resists the logic of outputs. Like any craft, academic practice is tethered to the materiality of tools, spaces, and habits. The scholar’s equivalents of the potter’s wheel or carpenter’s chisel are the library, the notebook, and the annotated text (I’ve also grown accustomed to my ReMarkable tablet but still feel uneasy when I see my disused notebooks glaring back at me from the shelf). 

My own sabbatical days so far have been marked by relocating books and rediscovering notes I had once scribbled in margins, while rearranging my desk into something that feels more like a workshop than an office. Bruno Latour reminds us in Reassembling the Social that tools are never neutral; they co-constitute practice. Academic work, though often presented as disembodied thought (the ‘output’, the ‘paper’, the ‘impact’), is always materially situated. The desk, the chair, the pen, the screen: they are part of the making.

The pressures of modern academia can make it dangerously easy to forget the craft beneath the career, but the dangers of modern academia can make it just as tempting to ignore the career beneath the craft, an evasion that only feeds the very thing we hoped to resist.

I know this from experience. Six years in middle leadership brought tremendous satisfaction but also a creeping drift away from the hands-on craft of my own research. Strategy and oversight are necessary, but they can displace the intimate contact with sources and sentences that drew me to academia in the first place. Sabbatical is, in that sense, a time to retool: to remember the making at the heart of the work. As Stefan Collini asked in What Are Universities For?, what are we serving if we forget the scholarly craft that justifies the institution itself?

My hope for this sabbatical is to deepen the craft. A book will come out of it, but as a tool rather than a product. I want to give myself permission to linger in primary texts, to sketch ideas without rushing to publication, to think slowly. Projects on attachment and literature, and on contemplative approaches to pedagogy beckon, but I want to approach them less as tasks to be completed than as materials to be worked with patiently.

To see scholarship as craft is to reclaim its artistry from the machinery of career. Universities will continue to speak the language of metrics, rankings, and progression, an essential role, because it is this machinery that maintains the workshop in which scholarship can take place. But we don’t have to speak in the same register. To resist or even repudiate the machine is not to undermine the institution but to create the very conditions in which scholarship can breathe: the space for slow thought, patient practice, and the kind of intellectual labour that no metric can capture.

The machinery of career will always hum in the background, but we needn’t let its clatter drown out the quieter sound of practice itself. If these reflections resonate, I explore them further in The Art of Academic Practice on Substack, a space for thinking together about how scholarship might remain both sustainable and alive.