Academics are under enormous stress right now, raising the possibility of a rising rate of burnout. Longtime structural trends in higher education have increased pressures for demonstrable productivity. On top of that are a global pandemic, resistance and backlash to calls for racial justice, and unstable politics in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere. In this episode we discuss burnout in academia. We focus on an emerging perspective from the healthcare field that describes burnout as resulting from moral injury. How is this idea relevant to people working in academia? In what ways can we be hurt by being trapped between the ideals and values that brought us into the field and the demands of our working environments? What can we do about it? Plus: A letter about reviewing papers from the global south that do not fit into the usual discourse.

Links:

Andrew Wilson's Twitter thread about burnout
Moral Injury and Burnout in Medicine: A Year of Lessons Learned by Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot, Stat
Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People by Jennifer Moss, Harvard Business Review
Job Burnout by Christina Maslach, Wilmar Schaufeli, and Michael Leiter, Annual Review of Psychology

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/, and on instagram at @blackgoatpod. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license. Our logo was created by Jude Weaver.

This is episode 85. It was recorded on September 16/17 (US/AUS), 2020.