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— Written by Reece Barlow

Recently, a member of Scholar Square asked for advice about choosing a research topic with the aim of eventually applying to PhD positions. Feeling unsure if their day job would be able to give them the life they desired - "a life teaching texts I love and sharing them with likeminded individuals" - a PhD seemed like the next logical step. However, when it actually came down to choosing a topic, things were not going so well. They were either completely stuck, or jumping from one topic to another, unable to settle for an extended period on something that interested them. Did anyone, they wondered, have any advice?

I was moved to reply. Having been in their position not so long ago, I too had struggled to settle on a research topic that I could build my own "life of the mind" around. So I replied by sharing that I had only recently narrowed down my interest to a feasible research question after 9 months of working on it part time. However, before I had the faintest idea of what to focus on for those 9 months, I had spent an additional one and a half years flirting with various topics - and none of them especially seriously. These dalliances had played out in the pages of this very publication, in the shape of my regular contributions to The Scholarly Letter. Over time, I said, this regular writing habit forged my interest. In writing regularly on whatever had caught my fancy and attempting to make sense of the questions I had after dropping out of my PhD, I found myself gravitating towards essays, scientists and stories from a very particular time and place - early 20th century American science to be precise. To arrive at the research topic I am now working on had required the production of tens of thousands of words (perhaps, by now, well into the hundreds of thousands) happily and, for the most part, freely written. My advice then, was to be prolific in order to seek out and hone an interest with which they could begin to craft the "publicly intellectual life" they sought. To be productive.

Such advice, I realized with a small twinge of discomfort later that day, is antithetical to the position set out in The Scholar Manifesto, the publication of which transformed The Scholarly Letter and directly led to the establishment of Scholar Square, the very space which had made this interaction possible. The manifesto itself features the word "produce", or a derivative of it, forty nine times in total - and none of these instances make use of the word in a particularly positive light. It was the constant pressure to produce, we had written, which was straining the relationship that contemporary academics had to knowledge. Now I was forced to confront the fact that production has served an indispensable function in my own becoming as a scholar.