The Freelance Academic: Transform Your Creative Life and Career

We just have to start letting clients (including academic institutions) know what we need to get the job done.

We take our kids to play on the quads and tell them stories about the old buildings—and the slaveowners whom they’re named after. We’re proud to have attended school here. I’d be proud to have my kids attend school here—and, at the same time, I would hope those buildings would all have different names by then.

For those of us living alternative-academic, post-academic, and freelance academic lives, we don’t have set tracks that we must follow. Our tracks are, by necessity, only limited by our own creativity. They literally (there’s that word again) are what we make them.

Start pitching articles in your area of expertise that are “pegged” (tied) to current events. Turn your discerning academic eye outward. Those coffee-shop conversations about what’s wrong with the world? Write them down.

rewrite your research into popular articles.

Second, you have a right to post on public repositories a PDF of your own creation.

First, you can upload the PDF of the actual journal article to your own website along with some language the publishers require you to use about it being an “author posting.”

And then, I took that final step and starting writing my ideas for new audiences, for popular audiences. I did so by learning to pitch popular articles in my areas of expertise, and to write them, and, when appropriate, to get paid for them.

I’m telling this story because I want to encourage you to put yourself in a position to engage publicly with your research. Freelance academics are perfectly aligned with the work of public engagement—but too often we worry that we aren’t. We feel like imposter academics.