Measures of pleasure

Abstract

Can we measure academic pleasure? Should we? This serious-yet-playful session will report on findings from a four-year study in which more than 1,200 academics in 15 countries were asked to describe the main emotions that they associate with their academic writing. Rather than seeking to ‘measure pleasure’ in any one definitive way, our research team employed a variety of methodologies and perspectives in our coding and analysis of the data. It’s tempting to say that we sought to illustrate the adage, ‘There are many different ways to skin a cat’ – but what an unappealing metaphor! Instead, let’s say that we were guided by the structure and ethos of Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, which employs multiple perspectives to shift readers toward a deeper, more complex understanding of what they are ‘really’ seeing. Some of our methodological approaches were unashamedly quantitative: for example, having coded the data to establish the relative percentages of respondents expressing purely positive, purely negative or mixed emotions about their writing, we ran a regression analysis showing how those ratios varied across demographic groups. Some were qualitative, drawing on established research paradigms such as content analysis, cluster analysis and grounded theory. And some were inspired by critical and creative paradigms from beyond the social sciences, such as narratology, material textuality, graphic design (in particular, the work of McCandless [2000]) and the poetics of metaphor. In the spirit of anti-‘methodolatrists’ such as Feyerabend (1993), Law (2004) and Thrift (2008), our goal was not to produce a single, definitive set of ‘proven’ findings but to experiment with a multiplicity of approaches and see where they might lead us. The nation of Bhutan famously measures not just the Gross Domestic Product of its citizenry but their Gross National Happiness as well. What if the nation of Academia, likewise, were to value emotions such as satisfaction, passion and well-being alongside conventional performance metrics such as research outputs and citation rankings? Our session will interrogate the very notion of measuring pleasure even while indulging in the pleasures of measurement. We hope that participants will leave with a renewed confidence that the Measured University need not be a place devoid of playfulness and pleasure.