Posts

Resistance

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A few months ago, I submitted an application for my first academic promotion. The process was new to me, and the application fairly long and involved. It took me 2-3 months to produce the required 8 page case and a detailed CV. The promotion process feels a little like reapplying for your existing job at a higher level - it calls for honest and considered reflection on where you are in your career, what you've achieved so far, and where you're headed next. It requires you to explicitly identify yourself to others, and evaluate your achievements, as a researcher, teacher, mentor, leader and citizen of the university. Like job applications, I found producing the promotion application quite hard. My primary felt experience of the writing process was one of resistance - the feeling of not wanting to work on the application. More than being simply stuck or mired, I experienced a deep aversion to the task and all that it animated, a resistance that expressed itself in my mood, bo...
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The Well Academic Writing Retreat

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Last December, I was lucky to be part of the inaugural  Well Academic Writing Retreat  in Wentworth Falls, the Blue Mountains. Created for research students and ECRs, the retreat was conceived by  Dr Willo Drummond , a local Sydney poet and lecturer in creative writing at Macquarie University. Over several days, I delivered a number of workshops on mindful research and meditation as part of a broader program that integrated mind-body and self-care practices with the writing process. The following post offers reflections from Willo and myself on this wonderful event.  *** The Well Academic Writing Retreat was an intimate five day retreat for researchers interested in doing some intensive writing in a supportive environment. The pilot event was attended by seven participants, most of whom were Masters or PhD students, but diverse in age and discipline. As the name suggests, the retreat was designed with a strong focus on wellbeing and ge...
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Patience

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Earlier this month, I had two experiences that made me reflect on my relationship with time and the research process. These experiences - namely, patience and timeliness - felt qualitatively different from the sense of pressure and hurriedness that I and others often associate with academic publishing. In the next two posts, I share some first thoughts about what happened. *** A few weeks ago, I met with a colleague to discuss what to do about an article of ours that had been recently rejected by a journal. I wasn't looking forward to the meeting, mostly because I felt quite unsure about what step to take next. To give a little context, my colleague and I first started writing the piece in early 2013. The idea came from a conference panel we did together in late 2012, after which we decided to develop the conversation between our papers into a broader argument. Today, it's a 6-7 year old draft. It has been peer-reviewed four times by readers at three different journals....
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Sitting with failure

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A few weeks ago, an old student of mine emailed to ask for an essay I'd written about failure. He explained that a friend of his was currently struggling with the Masters program and trying to decide whether or not to continue. He said that he remembered finding my reflections on failure helpful and hoped to pass them on. So I thought I would post it here for others interested in the topic. 'Sitting with failure' was originally a plenary address I gave at the NewMac Humanities Postgraduate Symposium in 2015 at Macquarie University, and has since been published in the conference's online journal   Humanity.   This reposting feels timely. The topic of failure seems to be coming up more frequently at the university. My colleague Florence Chiew is currently working on a new podcast called  Failure Allowed,  which will contain interviews with academic staff about their experiences with failure and creativity. More on this to come later in ...
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