An Ongoing Exploration: Sharing Academic Work on Substack
An Experiment in Sharing Academic Writing and Balancing Professional Projects
Greetings to new followers. This Substack is an ongoing experiment, and I am constantly adjusting. I think there is a lot of potential here, and I am pleased with much of what I see and read on this platform. However, as a professional academic, there are some clear drawbacks for us. The main one is the time commitment, which takes away from our more professional writing projects.
To address this, I am going to try something new with my Substack. I would appreciate it if you stick around for this experiment. I plan to post more of my professional writing here—excerpts, preprints, and works in progress. This way, Substack will be less of a distraction from my professional obligations and more of a tool to keep me working on those projects.
For those of you who don’t know, much of the writing that occurs in professional academia is “free labor.” What I mean by this is that, although one of my articles in a professional journal may cost the price of a paperback book to download, that money does not go to me as the author. Paywalled journal articles are part of the academic ecosystem, and though open-access journals are becoming more common, they are still relatively rare, depending on the field—and certainly in the humanities. And yet, if an intelligent lay audience has interest in, and the patience to carefully read academic writing, I don’t know any scholar who wouldn’t want that public to have access to their work.
So, all this to say: you can expect more preprints and technical work to appear here—not exclusively, but in particular, I plan to share excerpts from the book I’m currently working on. I’ll make some tweaks to make it more “Substackable,” but it will still retain the nature of academic writing. My book is about liberalism in the philosophical sense of the word—its justification and purpose in the context of preserving an intellectually and culturally pluralistic society, while guarding against the worst populist impulses of democracy. It will also explore where the “guardrails” of liberalism are most critically worth safeguarding. Once the book is finished, unlike with journal articles, I will indeed be compensated through a percentage of its sales. Sharing some of the work here gives me the flexibility to engage with readers directly, receive feedback, and perhaps most importantly, maintain a steady writing schedule with added incentive.
I hope this doesn’t scare anyone who is taking the time to read what I write away. Moreover, since some of it may be more technical, I hope you’ll feel comfortable replying if you’d like clarification or have something to say in relation to what you’ve read. If you’ve gotten this far in this meta-post about my posts, I thank you. I hope you’ll stick around, and I hope you have an appetite for philosophy that won’t always be quickly digestible—though I will always do my best not to be too obscure.
Stay tuned!