Evan Carton

Toward the Practice of the Humanities

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Labour, leisure and liminality: disciplinary work at play

Academics rank high among those groups of people who derive their sense of personal identity and meaning from their particular form of employment. Yet, part of what being a university academic means – and part of the satisfaction that academics obtain from their jobs – lies in being paid to engage in ‘absorbing play.’ This essay explores some ways in which concepts of work and play, labour and leisure, are at issue in the organisation, imagination and experience of professorial employment in general, and how, in particular, such concepts informed and were negotiated in the interdisciplinary space of the 2006‐7 Humanities Institute seminar at the University of Texas at Austin out of which the papers collected in this special issue emerged.