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I too share a strong sense of keeping the personal and the academic separate. I think this separation is consistent with the third realm that came up in the meeting. This is because it seems to me that there are two senses of personal and two senses of academic at play:

• intimate-personal: my family and friends, hobbies, vacations, biographical details, etc.
• intellectual-personal: how intellectual ideas practically matter to me, how they excite, puzzle, challenge me, etc. in my life.

and

• emotional-academic: academic ideas and interactions which are emotionally sensitive for me.
• abstract-academic: academic ideas and habits which I feel at ease with and can engage without any emotional unclarity or confusion.

For me, I am happy to keep the intimate-personal and the abstract-academic completely separate. I don’t seek personal salvation and happiness through academia or my job, and there are aspects of academia I enjoy or try to enjoy just for its own sake without connecting it to me personally (following arguments, reading books, some forms of writing, etc.).

I also spend a great deal of my energies on the intellectual-personal and the emotional-academic. That is, I like thinking intellectually about my personal life, and I like being emotional about my academic life. And I like doing both even though they might not result in any practical products; that is, even if I can’t talk to most of my family about my reflections or if I can’t turn them into something academically useful like publications. Normally being too reflective with my family seems to undercut the relations which I value having with them, and likewise being too emotional in academia seems to undercut the relations with colleagues whom I value. So I keep my family reflections and my academic emotions mostly to myself. I used to resent this, but somehow now I don’t mind so much.

Perhaps the third realm involves the intellectual-personal and the emotional-academic. It wouldn’t involve the normal family or academic identities, but might involve the fuzzy identities we have which don’t fit into the traditional family or academic realms. In this way the third realm can reinforce the separation of family and academia because in it the traditional family and academic roles are not being merged; rather they are both being bracketed and set aside so that other identities which are normally submerged can surface and be more clearly articulated. Maybe this would be a kind of “thinking that feels and feeling that thinks” that can be shared over activites such as Chinese tea ceremonies.