I cut my hair last week. Short short. On the first day of school. Not MY first day of school, admittedly…I am on sabbatical, not teaching this year. But September is the fresh start season.
A drastic haircut can be breathtakingly freeing. At nineteen, I walked into a SuperCuts with a big 90s mane and walked out shorn. I felt unmoored and at the same time entirely myself, in a way I had no language for at the time. The sharp dopamine hit of having to confront the shape of my skull has lured me back to short hair at least once every decade since.
The dopamine is not necessarily – entirely – related to the actual end result. It’s the intentional shedding of form, the release, that triggers it.
Ten days on, I still look unfamiliar to myself. I don’t know what it means for a menopausal human to intentionally make the self LESS visible. But the haircut I’d been sporting for six+ years demanded a hair dryer. Hairspray. Time and cultivation and limited atmospheric humidity. And tomorrow – if the gods don’t toy with me – I take a smallish suitcase to Scotland for nearly a month, with student accommodation and rain in the forecast. In cutting off the pompadour, I was releasing a standard that was about to exceed my grasp. Vanity is a highly protective instinct.
I noted on Facebook that while I went in aiming for 90s Winona Ryder, I seem to have landed more in my elder Eliot Page era. Here I am. Fresh start.
***
The question of what era I’m in is less flippant than it seems on the surface. This is a season of shearing, hair and moorings both.
I am a teacher on my first sabbatical. I am a mother whose elder child – now eighteen – has grown and flown for college, while the younger turned sixteen on Tuesday and got her driver’s permit. I am an only child whose mother – four provinces away – is in a shifting stage in her own life. I am a partner whose spouse’s contract ends in December and who got an email from our mutual institution this week confirming an immediate hiring freeze. I am a higher education worker watching my field and sector grow increasingly enclosed by business jargon and Generative AI hype that fails utterly to address our existential crises. I am mortgaged to the hilt.
As befits the life arc and every stereotype of middle age, I am also solidly in my genealogy era. I spent a month this past summer in Prince Edward Island, still ‘home’ even after six years in Upper Canada. I dragged my cheerful mother through derelict cemeteries and church hall basements in search of an ancestor; her great-grandfather, my great-great. Donald McNiven came to PEI from an island off the west coast of Scotland in the 1840s, in what I was raised to think of as the Irish Potato Famine. That blight and much of the ensuing human devastation actually extended to the Highlands, if in slightly different political form.
In the Hebridean islands, where my mother’s people came from, the famine was the last gasp of a class of Gaels – the cottars – whose livelihoods had been squeezed into near oblivion by the rise of market capitalism and commodity boom/bust cycles as the ancient clan lands financialized. Some cottars were cleared – forced to emigrate – by landlords, along with the more aspirational economic migrant classes of their so-called betters. Others hung on, though as cottars held no land and lived on the edges of crofting families’ small and increasingly divided plots, their place in the order of things largely fades from record. Then the potatoes – which in two generations had come to form nearly 80% of Highland diets – rotted in the ground.
The grandparents of this ancestor of mine had sailed for PEI some thirty years before the famine, with their young adult children and – if baptism records on the Isle of Coll are accurate – all but seven of the McNiven name. But one of those adult children returned to Coll, perhaps unhappy as an emigrant. One sandbar island is not the same as another, and while Scots settlement communities in the early 1800s on PEI were largely Gaelic and populated by kinship networks, home and belonging are complicated things. This returning McNiven raised his family on Coll, amongst a drastically reduced extended family and dwindling economic prospects. Until the potatoes rotted. His son Donald then re-emigrated to Bonshaw, PEI in the late 1840s, settling not far from uncles, aunts, and cousins who had been there a generation.
I didn’t know all this til this past summer. There is much we still don’t know…likely never will. We do know my great-grandfather John was born in 1859, the eighth of Donald’s nine children. In the span of John’s seventy+ years, he and many of his generation of settlers assimilated into the emerging middle-class world of Anglo-Scots Canadians, unmooring themselves from both stigma and Highland identity. John moved the fifteen miles from Bonshaw to the capital, and became a businessman, an Oddfellow, a Masonic Grandmaster. No longer cottars or Gaels, our family line became generic Protestant Scots in the upright ascendancy sense. John’s obituary from the 1930s never mentions his parents. We never did find my great-great-grandfather’s grave…only a monument to the extended family, who in PEI morphed – almost to a one – from McNivens to MacNevins.
***
I looked, though, because I am headed to the Highlands tomorrow. As my sabbatical project, I will serve as a Visiting Fellow with the University of Highlands and Islands (UHI) this year. UHI is a distributed institution, spread across 12 campuses and 70 learning centres. It enables students to stay in rural, remote communities – or travel to new ones – and gain an education, often through an extensive infrastructure of digital practice. I have worked in institutions with similar mandates to UHI, both in the Maritimes and in the Canadian Arctic, early in my career. As my field careens toward Generative AI and credentialism, I want to look instead at belonging, in a place that fundamentally has to consider what it means.
I am interested in UHI’s potential as an exemplar for how we might build and foster educational opportunities that strengthen belonging, among students and higher education workers and communities, in an uncertain world. Sometimes the best exemplars are not the big dots on the map, the dominant centres of prestige. Sometimes, when looking for models, it is interesting to invert ideas of centrality and periphery and see what you turn up.
In the coming weeks, I will visit nine UHI campuses and talk to staff about digital practices and pedagogies, and the socio-material ideas and experiences that constitute what they understand as belonging. Later, I’ll hold an online focus group for students, as well, and will return next spring to hold up a small mirror of findings to the institutional community. I am incredibly grateful to UHI Dean of Learning & Teaching, Keith Smyth, for his enthusiasm and support in making this project possible.
I am also a little terrified. I am an outsider. I do not want to get it wrong. I like to think I understand peripheral places and sandbars…but I am acutely aware, at the same time, that I myself do not belong to the Highlands and Hebrides.
In PEI, I have a not-uncommon name, shared in full – first and last – by at least five others that I know of. In a province that into my childhood was still stratified entirely by the colonial settler identities of a century before, my name is an immediately legible marker of Scottish identity. But the first time I actually made it to Scotland and was asked my name in a bar, my “Hi, I’m Bonnie” was received with a laugh and an “Aye, ye are, lass, but what’s your NAME?” I was mortified.
It had never occurred to me that in Scotland, Bonnie – a literal adjective – is a bit of a ridiculous flex as a name.
Diasporic communities lean in, as a means of trying to hold on to the ephemera that is culture. We mark ourselves, often without recognizing that we are signalling belonging NOT to those in our spaces of origin – where and if they remain – but in our contemporary mosaic societies. bell hooks says this better than I in her reflection on belonging and identity and race in Kentucky (which will – as I get organized – soon be one of the core texts populating the ‘annotated bibliography’ section of this site)…
“Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian
than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do,
change your mind, utterly transform one’s perception of the world of home.”
― bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place
The dual purpose of this site is to be a space both for the academic work that grounds and emerges from this project, and for documenting my reflections on getting to DO that work, travel journal-style. Or old school blog style, really. If the Air Canada labour agreement announced in the middle of the night last night doesn’t implode in the next 24 hours, I get to explore belonging at an intersection of practices and throughlines that my career and cultural upbringing should make legible to me, but in a place still entirely unfamiliar and not my own. I feel like I’ve won the lottery.
Many years ago, I wrote myself through unmooring. I blogged, then, “to leave a mark in the snow,” as I framed it. It seems like hubris, now, in a sense. In a time when AI can write jaunty summaries of my research in a blink, the question of “why would I make the effort to write?” is one that haunts me, as an educator.
But when I do not write, there is only snow.
So I will write, on this sabbatical, to try to make meaning as I go. Maybe in order to keep going. In the personal sense, in the generational sense, in the sense of my cultural and professional contexts. These are what I have. And I carry them all, like awkward bundles in my arms, stumbling – shorn, my head high – into whatever is next. Fresh starts.
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