Presenting Loveconomics

Behind the scenes at my guest lecture at Goldsmiths last night

I’m suffering from a sleep deficit today. Yesterday I gave my first academic presentation about the book I’m currently working on, Loveconomics. My two-year-old, Esmeralda, chose the night before not to sleep. She wasn’t ill. She didn’t have night terrors. She just didn’t sleep. At all. The whole night.

The lecture was at 5pm and I spent the entire day as a zombie — which might have actually been a good thing, because it meant that the nerves didn’t have as much of a chance to kick in as they usually do. No matter how experienced I get, no matter how many years — nay, decades — of giving countless conference papers, panels and guest lectures, I still get eaten by butterflies every time.

It’s not just on the day, or even starting the night before. It looms. The upcoming public performance is there, hovering over me, for weeks, getting in the way of my relaxation or even other work that I have to do. Squeezing me.

This is one reason why I didn’t pursue a conventional academic career. In many ways, I feel like academia is my true home. I love reading, thinking, writing and talking about ideas. But teaching at the intensity required is just too much pressure to perform for my shy little inner child. Like many writers, I’m an introvert at heart; I just want to hide in my bedroom and write.

I measure my emotional development by how many degrees less terrified I am at each public event than I was at the one before. How far has the therapy worked? How much more confident am I as a person and how much less is my self esteem based on external validation? How much more space do I feel entitled to take up?

The good news is, the terror level was relatively low this time, and not only because I was too zombified to care. Something about the combination of having my daughter, all the therapy of my late thirties, and just getting older, seems to be doing something.

I was presenting on a subject that I feel deeply connected to and think is profoundly important and true: offering a clear understanding of the deepest structures of our economic and social system and how these structures affect every aspect of our lives, down to our bodies, our identities and the ways we love. In fact, capitalism plays a major role in quite how lacking in confidence we are and quite how much we base our self esteem in external validation in the first place.

I was also thinking through, together with the other people in the room, a framework for getting out of the unbearable predicament that humanity has found itself in, and a way to have a new economy centred on the things that actually matter in life: care and love.

Feeling so connected to the topic definitely helped with the nerves. Another thing that helps is being in my forties and having been, for many years, a kind of anarchic, ‘undisciplined academic’ who reads whatever seems interesting regardless of discipline and whose brain is disposed to joining dots. I know I have a lot of valuable knowledge in this greying head.

Perhaps I’m slightly ashamed to admit this, but becoming a mother has also helped. My parallel universe me, who never had kids and never wanted one, would probably be furious at mum-me for saying this, but becoming a mother has grounded me in some way, has made me feel more connected to myself and, sorry, to the universe. At the very least, having a toddler has meant that I have infinitely less time or bandwidth to fret about a little guest lecture.

So I banged out my slides, I tried to use AI to lay them out nicely but the thing kept trying to rewrite them for me, so I ditched the AI, kept the groovy ‘Aurora’ background, and laid them out as best I could (which was closer to what you’d expect from the scatter-brained academic stereotype than the slick corporate types that make professor in their thirties these days). I rehearsed exactly the amount I needed to in order to know I had something coherent and not too rambling to say. I tried and failed to take a nap. I tried on a few outfits and eventually chose the one that wouldn’t show sweat patches too conspicuously. I sprayed perfume under my armpits and immediately regretted it but didn’t have time to change again. And I set off for South London.

My attempt to use AI to create my slide deck

There ended up being an interesting mix of academics and journalists in the audience. One was even writing a book about love herself. We had a lively conversation ranging from the links between anti-immigration politics, attacks on trans rights and the freefall of the capitalist economy, to how the younger generation feels about not being able to afford to start their own families while their elderly mums form communes with their female friends.

One of the most interesting things for me was how open this diverse group of people was to the idea that capitalism is broken beyond repair, or rather that it is working perfectly according to its design but that that design is wrecking all our lives as well as planet Earth itself.

These weren’t crusty academic Marxists. This was a group ranging in age from early twenties to late fifties. Some of the most engaged were young culture writers for one of Britain’s most conservative newspapers.

From this and other conversations I’ve been having, I get the sense that, while many who work in the field of politics or political publishing are still firmly closed to the idea that we can do better than capitalism, this idea is no longer taboo among those who generally sit in the mainstream but don’t really consider themselves as ‘political’.

For that, very large, latter group, the combination of the lunacy and absolute horror we see on the news every day, the grind of daily life that has become the norm, and the knowledge that we are now squarely in the midst of climate apocalypse, is enough for their common sense to tell them that, yeah, maybe this system isn’t exactly serving us and it might be time to try something else, maybe, like, yesterday.

One of the most rewarding — and nerve-calming — things about the lecture was having my colleague Natalie Fenton as an interlocutor. She challenged me and thought along with me, and helped all the different people in the room to meet on the same page, in her usual warm and welcoming way.

This was why I wanted to be a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths in the first place, because of colleagues like this. They’re the only group of academics I have ever known that can overcome the social anxiety and introversion I feel in spaces where I’m an outsider. They make everyone feel like an insider. They treat you like an old friend, even though they hardly know you.

For a long time, I couldn’t understand why they behaved this way. I was even slightly suspicious, thinking it was was a bit odd and cult-like. But lately, now Esmeralda is two, I’ve been slowly dipping my feet back into social activism, and I recognise the feeling. That’s what solidarity feels like.

This particular group at Goldsmiths are veteran organisers. Their intellectual work is completely bound up with their commitment to making a better world, and a better university. Their hospitality and warmth is a concerted part of their intellectual, professional and political practice. They are the perfect home for my work on Loveconomics because they are practicing a politics of love every day. And nothing soothes stage fright like a bit of love.