Waiting Is Part of the Job

Waiting

Waiting is part and parcel of academic life. A manuscript has been submitted. A grant proposal is gone. An editor has the book. A collaborator promised comments. An ethics application is somewhere in the system. There is nothing more you can do—or at least nothing you can do about that particular thing.

Academics spend an extraordinary amount of their professional lives waiting.

Looking back, however, I realize that I learned about waiting long before I became an academic. I grew up as an only child in communist Poland, where waiting was part of everyday life. Goods were scarce, and even having money did not necessarily mean that one could buy what one wanted. But my mother added her own lesson. She was determined that her only child would not become the proverbial spoiled only child, so she sometimes made me wait for things simply because I wanted them. Even little things like a candy or wafelek czekoladowy.

Apparently, the lesson worked only partially. While I learned how to wait, I never learned to be patient. My husband maintains that I am the most impatient person he has ever known. He may be right. A lifetime of learning how to wait has done absolutely nothing to make me patient.

Waiting for change

Waiting in communist Poland extended far beyond childhood lessons and scarce consumer goods. We were also waiting for things that could not be bought and whose arrival could not be predicted. For many of us, there was the much larger question of whether the political system itself would ever change.

But this was not passive waiting. The underground publications, dissident activities, informal networks, and small acts of resistance were all ways of working toward change without knowing whether we would ever see the results. We certainly did not know that the communist regime would collapse in 1989. History looks much more inevitable in retrospect than it ever does while one is living through it.

Waiting for recognition

My migration experiences introduced another kind of waiting. I arrived in the United States already highly educated and already an anthropologist. However, my credentials were not readily recognizable in the US academic world of the 1980s. There was no internet yet! Someone couldn't simply look up Adam Mickiewicz University, my department, professors, publications, and scholarly tradition.

I knew very little about how American academic life worked or how to present myself. Several interviews were total disasters. Then I met the director of the anthropology graduate program at American University. She was frank with me. She advised me to get a job, any job, so that I would have an American employer who could provide a reference. And so, for roughly a year, I worked in retail.

Her advice helped me understand something I had not fully grasped. Migration had not erased my education or experience, but it had changed the context in which they were evaluated. I had to learn how professional credibility was established in this new environment.

Working in a shopping mall, I wasn't waiting to become qualified. I was waiting for qualifications I already possessed to become recognizable.

W tak zwanym międzyczasie

There is a Polish expression I often use, w tak zwanym międzyczasie, literally “in the so-called meantime.” The English “meantime” has always seemed inadequate to me. It suggests an interval between more important events, a time one simply has to get through while waiting for something else to happen.

But międzyczas, at least as I think about it, is not an empty space between important events. It is where things happen.

While waiting for political change, we acted. While waiting to become professionally recognized, I worked, learned a new institutional culture, made contacts, and figured out the rules. I certainly learned how important networking is, especially in Washington, DC.

Eventually, I became professionally established in the United States. But that certainly did not mean I stopped waiting. If anything, academia provided an entirely new repertoire of things to wait for.

Academic Waiting

Manuscripts disappear into peer review. Grant proposals go off to funding agencies. Book manuscripts sit with editors and reviewers. Ethics applications make their way through institutional review. Collaborators promise to send comments. In each case, there comes a point when I have done what I can and the timetable belongs to someone else.

These forms of waiting are hardly comparable to waiting for political change or professional recognition as an immigrant. But they taught me something similar about control. I could do the work, meet the deadline, submit the manuscript, or write the proposal. I could not determine what happened next or when it would happen.

Six months of silence can mean rejection—or acceptance—or that Reviewer Two hasn't answered an email. While I cannot control these timetables, I can decide what happens in the międzyczas. I can begin another analysis, write another paper, mentor a student, go to the field, or read.

Waiting in the Field

Much of academic waiting is imposed on us by editors, reviewers, and colleagues. However, ethnographic fieldwork taught me that sometimes waiting is part of the method. Starting field research, we wait for potential interlocutors to trust us. We wait for people to stop treating us as visitors. Establishing rapport takes time! In the field, we wait instead of immediately asking the next question to allow the conversation to go somewhere we hadn't anticipated. We hang around and realize that what initially looked like wasted time was actually participant observation. This kind of waiting is part of a scholarly warsztat.

Some kinds of waiting are obstacles to the work. We wait for gatekeepers to grant access, for an ethics committee to approve a modification, for a school or organization to decide whether we can enter, or for someone to return the third email asking for permission to conduct an interview. Those delays can hinder fieldwork. Other kinds of waiting—sitting, listening, hanging around, allowing relationships to develop at their own pace—are the work.

Knowing When Not to Wait

Of course, waiting isn't inherently virtuous, especially for someone as impatient as I am. Sometimes I don't want to wait forever, so I nudge the editor. Sometimes I stop waiting for a collaborator and finish a task myself. Sometimes I change the research plan when waiting for access is getting me nowhere.

Knowing when to wait and when to act is equally important. That judgment comes with experience. We learn which silences simply require patience and which call for a reminder, a different approach, or a change of plans. Waiting does not mean surrendering agency.

The Meantime

After decades of projects, grants, publications, and deadlines, there's always been another anticipated event. I often thought: once this proposal is submitted, once this book is finished, once this project ends, life will settle down. Except that it never did! There was always another thing to attend to or wait for.

Perhaps the meantime was never merely the interval between the important things. It was where life was happening all along.