This essay/rant/note explores the ambivalent relationship between love, work and temporality within contemporary academia through the perspective of an early career scholar navigating fixed-term employment. Drawing on queer and Black feminist scholarship, the piece examines how universities sustain themselves through exhaustion and accelerated productivity. I consider the ambivalences and tensions between critique and participation, questioning what it means to remain devoted to an institution that does not reliably love me back. The piece asks how academic life might be reoriented away from individual survival and towards more solidaristic ways of being together within damaged institutions.
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