A view from the common room - some brief reflections on a week in Warsaw

 


One of the benefits of the project where I am currently working is that the collaboration across borders allows for some long-awaited travel. This week I was in Warsaw to work on an article that I am co-authoring with a friend and colleague, as well as to meet up with a few other colleagues at the university. Looking back, I realise it was quite a varied week with a lot of different tasks that required my attention and energy, but in the midst of the work itself, I was mostly focussed on the work pertaining to the article, namely the writing, the planning, the organising, the discussions, and the copious notes we took along the way, all carried out in daily meetings of varying length. Granted, since this article work was something that we dealt with each day, it is no wonder that it is at the heart of my recollections. However, there is also another reason why I think of this week mostly in terms of that particular workload.

On Monday, I went to the Warsaw University campus for the humanities together with another friend and colleague from Oslo who is also a part of the project. My co-author met us and showed us around in the department, and guided us into the department's own library, and to the library's common room which is often used as a workplace. Here, in this relatively small room with a very high ceiling tucked away in the bowels of the classicist department building - carefully rebuilt after World War II - the three of us sat down to our different tasks, the two of us writing and discussing together, the third working on his own. We sat like this for various periods throughout the week, sometimes talking through details of content and structure, sometimes quietly tending to our own immediate tasks. 

The view from the common room's high windows, the noticeable scents of spring - for instance by some wafts of flowering chestnut - and the sense of calm that pervaded the entire room infused these sessions with a sense of community that is the lifeblood of academia. This was not a grand, overpowering feeling, nothing bombastic or pathos-filled, but a simple description of what the three of us were quietly building in that common room, and what the entire project is building in the many different nodes of collaboration that comprise it. It was a reminder, a very useful reminder, that as an academic I am dependent on what community I manage to partake in and maintain, and when academia works as it should, it fosters these communities. While academia is in a very bad state in general - no matter which country or tradition you are talking about - it is also helpful to be reminded that despite the frailty of our general academic framework, we are at times able to create pockets of communal work. And it was a great relief to have that experience.