The life and death of Jason Arday hit really close to home for me.
Both of us are Black scholars. Both of us were from nontraditional academic backgrounds and had unusual pathways into our professorships. A lot of Arday’s biographical claims were clearly fake, but I don’t think anyone disputes that he was born to working-class Ghanaian immigrants and grew up in South London, and then maneuvered his way into progressively more prestigious institutions and roles in the academy.
I was trained as a sociologist but was unable to get a job in that field. Arday was never trained in the discipline but nonetheless was able to secure a professorship in sociology at multiple prestigious universities. I’m still trying to figure out what this says about the discipline and myself — nothing good, I suppose, either way — but things worked out for me just fine in the end, too. I have a position at an R1 university (albeit in a different field), and I’m going up for tenure as we speak. Our broad trajectories, in short, have a lot of overlap.
There’s another thing Jason Arday and I have in common: We both remade ourselves in pretty radical ways.
