Research today consisted of receiving news that my abstract A was accepted to conference A. My word count for a different, difficult manuscript, now finished and ready to send, is 1466 in the last 24 hours. This was possible because I had been working on drafts of this text and conducting research for it since late January.
I had lunch with a colleague from here who says going to work for our institution is like going to work for Doctors Without Borders when you think you are going to a branch campus of the NIH. He informed me that the Peace Corps literally trains people to work in the Third World by sending them to agencies in nearby St. Landry Parish.
This of course explains why I do not talk as much as I might to faculty elsewhere. They do not have enough context to accept that our work situation is real. One must emulate our amazing colleagues in Third World countries, I said, who publish seminal works while working in unusual conditions.
Those colleagues are people with resources, like Jacques Roumain, my colleague said. And, does the institution want us to be him? will it allow that? It does and it will, I said, and I may not have resources but I now have enough experience to be able to work like Jacques Roumain.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Yes. Just the logistics of everyday life would defeat many. Congratulations on your good work.
So, what class are you?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973
Congratulations on both the abstract and finishing the other piece!
@ Hattie, thanks for the credit — one should really take it; Traveller, elite, it is because of education, in the old system I would have classified as upper middle class despite being broke; thank you for the test as it is quite fun; DEH thank you, although the other piece is just some legal work and does not count for the writing group … !!! 😉
I took the test and I am in the traditional working class. I might not be as educated and dont go for the gigs…..hahaha
Traditional working class is the only worthwhile class to be in besides elite because it has a robust culture. The ones in the middle are more boring and nobody wants to be part of the precariat.
I’m in the “technical middle class” which I thought was quite reasonable (not as in “technically . . . ” but as in doing tech work). I don’t think it’s boring but I like being around engineers!
I made a mistake the first time, listed before taxes income not after taxes. Doing it with the after taxes income I am a “new/young affluent worker.” This fits — I am a new assistant professor considering law school and coming up with my post dissertation research program.
Just a note of warning, this is an exteremelly British-skewed quiz, since so much of the class assignment relies on house ownership. It wouldn’t work anywhere else in Europe, where people rent much more frequently or own appartments, not houses (so basically you’ll have 90% of people in e.g. Germany in one of the two lowest classes automatically, without reference to their profession or anything else). So unless you are in UK, the results really don’t mean much.
It’s a game, who would you be in the famous British claaaass system! 🙂
🙂
I rent an appartment, since I only recently moved to UK from continental Europe and this makes me automatically to be precariat, supposedly coming from working-class origin. As an academic from a solid academic middle-class background, this is of course completely wrong! And the mistake is, as I said, due to completely different property ownership concepts in UK vs. the rest of Europe (where I would be high middle class). But the bizarre thing is that British people actually do take this class stuff very seriously and this new class calculator has risen a lot of attention everywhere!
Yes, it does not work for foreigners, and it becomes funny!
This British colleague I had hee decided most anyone who is faculty is upper middle or lower middle in the British system, due to values. Class is not income, it is values, although certain classes also tend to own certain things or not. But values wise if you are a professor, you are upper middle, and if you are a college educator without the PhD, lower middle. The administration tends to have middle-middle values and the new corporate model of the university is middle-middle.
In Brazil and elsewhere in South America, upper middle class means something else — I would call it affluent, rich, only middle class because these people have professions and do need their income. You can identify its mentality, for instance, but class isn’t a values outlook in the deep way it seems to be in Britain.