What I’ve always liked most about writing this column is the opportunity it gives me to take a step back from the mundane day-to-day. Every two months, I’m forced to ask myself: “What message do I have for my wider scholarly community—a group of colleagues and students who care nothing about the committees I sit in or the finer points of debate in my field? What bite-sized morsel of insight can I share with them that they don’t already know?” As I step back from this role due to time constraints, you’ll be a better judge of whether I have succeeded in this.
So now today I ask myself this question for the last time. It feels like an especially tricky one these days, when so many of our certainties are unsettled and even our most trusted institutions seem to be built on sand. Every now and then someone who has known me since I was an idealistic student asks me whether I still believe the world is becoming a better place. It surprises them to hear that my answer to that is still yes—although I might not proclaim or even believe it quite as confidently as before. It might be a cliché, but now it’s the energy and passion of my students that keeps me believing that. It’s also the enthusiastic book club readers I study, and the young Ethiopian interviewees who take up gruelling jobs behind sewing machines so that they can attend evening classes.
I could be wrong, of course. The problems I’ve discussed in these pages over the years—Trump and his cronies, GenAI and the decline of reading, the avalanche of make-work and economic competition in academia, the precarity of workers in the global South—could just be getting started. Either way, whether it’s to stem one tide or to help another along, my course of action will be the same: to support my union this week, to continue researching what I care about, and to keep talking to my students. And to keep writing, even if (for now) not in these pages.
Elsje Fourie, associate professor of Globalisation & Development Studies