🔖 Read Wear Me This: Dark Academia could be the answer to the very problem it romanticizes.
I would venture that slipping on a tailored button-up and sitting in the library because Aesthetics Wiki told you “studying and reading” are “activities” of Dark Academia could be the impetus for a powerful academic pursuit or useful social connection.
Themes have emerged.
🔖 Read THE SCHOLARSHIP OF SEXY PRIVILEGE: WHY DO I LOVE DARK ACADEMIA BOOKS?
This ownership over dark academia gives me the courage to keep going with real academia; to forge a space again in the gaps and achieve immortality in the sharing of ideas without boundaries. This ‘dark academia’ reminds me not to take things so seriously, to see the rot in the foundations of an institution I can’t stay away from, and build my own school in defiance.
🔖 Read What’s Dark about Dark Academia
I think the real power of dark academia is the way it compresses—and thus preserves—humanistic study at a time when the humanities are under constant threat… Creating and emulating dark academia content offers students a way to fantasize about a world in which higher education isn’t instrumentalized, but rather self-sustaining and inherently valuable.
An aesthetic that evokes the academy is more flexible, more malleable, than the academy itself.
But if dark academia commodifies education, they learned how from the corporate university itself. Their commodification as style has far less insidious ends than the university’s spreadsheets of departmental deliverables.
Today in Pokemon Research Reflects Real Research: an early career researcher didn’t have access to a journal article she wanted to read, she posted about it online, and a senior faculty member sent her the article. ❤️
Took the Buzzfeed Inner Aesthetic Stranger Things Character quiz & got Will Byers and Cottagecore: “If you haven’t already, you should absolutely spend a day baking, gardening, or anything else that feels cozy and homey.” Like D&D and Nintendo?
Currently reading: Different Seasons: Four Novellas by Stephen King 📚
💬📚 “…a story’s as much a house or garden as song.” Jane Alison, _Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative _
💬📚 “The essential element in nurturing our creativity lies in nurturing ourselves.” Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
💬📚 “As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn’t. It makes us frustrated people.” Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
