Yesterday I was giving a short talk to a group of early career researchers doing a two day workshop. I have good memories of doing the same workshop when I first began at my current workplace. I remember folks coming in and speaking to us and how actually, a couple of ideas I got from... Continue Reading →
It's the first lecture, and the bright or bleary eyed students will be turning up to hear what is in for them for the semester. But the work started long before. And I don't mean lecture preparation. Lecture preparation is one of the last things that happen in my course design process. Here is my... Continue Reading →
I have run five 'finish your dissertation' groups in my time as an academic, and it is such a privilege to get insight into the thesis process from a group of students who I am NOT supervising. One thing I hear from students is that they do 'everything' their supervisor tells them to, but the... Continue Reading →
Kelly Dombroski, University of Canterbury This year, the small Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu announced a plan to ban disposable nappies, as well as other throwaway items such as plastic bags. While some commentators praised the move, others worried about what the alternatives might be, and how this might affect household workloads, particularly for women.... Continue Reading →
We all have family rituals, whether we realise that is what they are or not. In a larger family these rituals start to take on a life of their own, becoming a sort of adhesive that binds the family together. They might take a little bit of effort to set up, but if the fit is right, I reckon they become the things kids grow up and remember as part of themselves, helping them feel they belong. They communicate a sense of collective belonging that is one of the key ingredients to intrinsic wellbeing.
Dr Kelly Dombroski Talk for UN Aotearoa International Women’s Day Brunch, 8 March 2020 Introduction International Women’s Day is a time to celebrate the women in your life, and it is great to see you all here doing that. The unspoken question here is why do we need a special day for women? Actually –... Continue Reading →
"Oh crap." I thought, for the six hundred millionth time since I had opened my overdue manuscript. Other common thoughts included: "This is total crap." "Did I write this crap?" "This isn't quite so crappy." "Oh crap, that needs a lot of work." And so on, for several hours a day, for almost the entire... Continue Reading →
I used to think routines are unnecessary. Now I can't live without them!
I am currently working on the introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies with the wonderful Katherine Gibson. It is the last chapter of our 58 chapter handbook, and, as is often the case with introductions, it is flowing out of our fingers and an amazing rate! What an immense privilege it has been to... Continue Reading →
Reblogging from 2015: Every time I publish an article based on my personal PhD experiences with fieldwork, I tell myself it will be the last. So far, I have four. Just last year, I was part of an awesome team and put out this one: Farrelly, T., Stewart-Withers, R., & Dombroski, K. (2014). ‘BEING THERE’:... Continue Reading →
Lately I have been feeling very disillusioned with the academic life. I mean, I've always intellectually known that our reach is often short, our work ignored and overlooked, and our lifestyles completely overrun by our work. But recently, I have been feeling it more, and feeling more dissatisfied about it. Then a few things happened... Continue Reading →
Recently in my Twitter circle, I've been part of a few conversations about academic workloads, work-life balance, and managing the pressure of early career researcher decision-making. It forced me to recall a post from January 2017, where I committed to putting some limits on the 'voluntary' parts of our job. But as you may recall... Continue Reading →
I recently read Elizabeth Emen's 2019 book The Art of Life Admin. Well, perhaps inhaled is a better verb to describe what I did with it. I got it out of the public library on OverDrive and read it while travelling with my four kids and husband during the Easter school holidays. This travel to... Continue Reading →
It is a milestone week. My baby is now past the six week mark. We saw our wonderful wise midwife for the last time professionally and were transferred into the care of our medical centre. I took my son for his vaccinations, somewhat more anxiously than with my older three: a Facebook friend had called... Continue Reading →
So Boochani wrote his award winning book on WhatsApp. And I have been blogging so irregularly: firstly because I have way too many writing deadlines and even when I have wanted to blog, I worry what people expecting writing from me will think if I am wasting time blogging! But the other reason that writing... Continue Reading →
In the last few years I have been choosing some focus words for each year, rather than a New Year's Resolution. In 2018, after reflecting on the words and things I learned in 2017, I decided on the word 'less', 'dwell' and 'write'. Of all the years I've been doing this, it feels like this... Continue Reading →
How do we become scholars that produce quality thinking and research, and stay sane in an academic environment where bringing in salary recovery dollars and churning out publication 'fluff' sometimes seems more important than deep and rigorous research and writing? Many New Zealand academics would have faced their CVs with some angst this year as... Continue Reading →
In a previous post reviewing Cal Newport's book Deep Work I promised I would write a post sharing more collective strategies for enabling deep work, in particular for people with heavy care-loads. I suggested that sometimes the consequences are different for women trying to draw a line around their deep work time, and I imagine... Continue Reading →
A book review of Cal Newport's Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, 2016, London: Little Brown. It's no secret that many of us find it difficult to find space to do the deep thinking that we need to push forward our work -- our paid work, but also our self-work, or... Continue Reading →
This entry appears on https://communityeconomiesasia.wordpress.com/. People can upload keywords or practices of community economy around Asia!
Keywords of Community Economies in Asia
Indonesia
Ririn Haryani and Kelly Dombroski
Arisan is a rotating credit system that has been present in Indonesia for over one hundred years. In contemporary times, arisan involves a regular meeting of a consistent group whereby each member contributes an equal amount of money or goods each meeting, and whereby a draw is held allowing one member to receive the combined sum of contributions. This rotates around the group until everyone has won. It is customary that the winner from the last round will provide the venue and snacks for the coming arisan round.
The practice is believed to have originally come from China through trade activities with the Orang Asli (indigenous Indonesians), even before the era of Western colonialism. The practice went through an acculturation process with local traditions and customs of helping each other, known as gotong royong. This means that arisan is more than economic exchange…
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KELLY DOMBROSKI and STEPHEN HEALY describe a community economies approach to poverty which seeks to acknowledge what people are already doing in their communities to sustain themselves and then to act in solidarity with them. REPUBLISHED from Tui Motu Interislands Magazine. Many thanks to editor Ann Gilroy. How can we work to transform our... Continue Reading →
Prepare, deeper, joy. For 2017, these were my touchstone words, reminding me of the things I was to ponder and experiment with this year. Choosing a word for the year is something a little bit more open to the unknown, a little less goal-driven and anxiety producing than deciding how much weight to lose or... Continue Reading →
I am just so ridiculously pleased to finally have this article out. I first presented the material that became this article in July 2011 in Sydney, Australia. I have been on two writing retreats where I've worked at least in part on this article. I have rewritten it countless times into three or four... Continue Reading →
If you have been around Christian churches long enough, you will know there is often both subtle and not-so-subtle pressures to conform to a certain understanding of Christianity — whatever that might be in your tradition. There is no small amount of anxiety that one might not be a ‘proper’ Christian, believing the ‘right’ things... Continue Reading →
I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this. I’m thinking of when you have something important to do, to say, but become paralysed by your uncertainty about your ability — or your right — to do it, to even begin! What if what I have to say is not actually so important, if it is, in fact,... Continue Reading →
It has been some time now since I published the posts on writing your book proposal for an academic book coming out of your thesis (see also this and this). I promised at the time I would keep people updated with how that process went, but to be honest, just finding time to work on... Continue Reading →
This is re-post of a piece co-authored with Stephen Healy for The Daily Marinade , first published July 15th 2017. In a post circulating on facebook from 2016, a woman describes her struggle with giving up alcohol in a society that seems to require women to drink to just get through life. Giving up drinking... Continue Reading →
It seems to be thing. Couples who fall in love with each other, commit to a shared life together, then at some point discover their idea of home is -- well, if not incompatible then with a pretty darn small overlap. I don't mean here in terms of tidiness and mess (although, sure, that is... Continue Reading →
I'm guessing about the #9, actually. I'm pretty sure I've completely rewritten this paper more than nine times, it's just nine for this title. But for what it's worth, I'm sharing my daily progress because it's just so painful to still be working on this paper, and to be SO LATE to the editor (sorry,... Continue Reading →
I am about three chapters in to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. In the same way that Richard Rohr seems to express my thoughts before I even am conscious of having them in the area of spiritual practice and belief, Puig de la Bellacasa seems to... Continue Reading →
Another re-blog from The Daily Marinade, a daily devotional I contribute to regularly. This is the time of waiting, the time of not-knowing, the time of awkward looks and sniffles, and 'maybe we got it all wrong'. Jesus - the Messiah - dead and in a tomb. The scriptures don't say much about what happened... Continue Reading →
Reblogged from The Daily Marinade, a daily devotional by a collective of wonderful, thoughtful, spiritual people. Growing up in the Catholic tradition normally meant I at least knew when Lent was, even if I didn't always observe it any particular way. I do remember we got to order fish and chips on Fridays at school,... Continue Reading →
Every year, I choose three words and write them on a post-it note above my desk. They help me guide my decision-making for the year in a more intentional way. In 2016 one of my words was Complete. I actually chose that word based on my desire to finish a whole lot of work related... Continue Reading →
Every year I choose three words, put them on a post note above my desk, and use them to help me prioritise my day-to-day decision-making. In 2016, one of those words was Connect. We've had to move a lot in the last ten years, and we've lived in 3 different countries, 5 cities, in 8... Continue Reading →
Every year, I try and do some work on being more intentional about the things I say yes to.
My previous post 'slow scholarship starts with slow reading' prompted some questions around slow reading. What do I really mean by slow reading, and how do we do it? It is, I acknowledge, much more than not being distracted. Although I blog, am an avid user of evernote, use Goodreads, and keep all my references... Continue Reading →
After submitting your proposal, it's time for the waiting game. It will go to peer review, then you will need to respond, then it might go before a board, all before it is time to organise the advance contract. 1. Peer Review For most good academic publishers, after your book proposal is received it is... Continue Reading →
Publishing an academic book is a bit different from publishing a novel, I'm told. All I can do is tell you the process I went through, and offer suggestions on how to make this smoother. I have written three book proposals for three different publishers, submitted two of them, and been accepted by one. Each... Continue Reading →
As I was racing to the submission finish line with my PhD thesis in August 2012, I constantly doubted whether certain sections were 'done' or 'good enough'. One of the most common pieces of feedback I'd get from my supervisor was 'save it for the book'. Well, now that moment has come. And I can't... Continue Reading →
I had a quiet weekend not feeling well a few weeks ago, so I decided to binge read Jo Walton's A Just City, chosen for me by my husband and daughter on their weekly library visit. My daughter wanted to read it immediately, after looking at the first few pages and realising it was a... Continue Reading →
Recently I was recommended Susan Cain's book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. My first reaction to the recommendation was 'but I'm not an introvert!' But I got the book out and read it anyway, since my entire immediate household is introverted and I thought it probably couldn't hurt. ... Continue Reading →
Many of you will know I am an avid amateur people reader - that is, I often try to work out people's temperaments and sometimes even full blown personality profiles out of interest. What you may not know is that before I discovered systematic personality profiling, I used to keep an imaginary collection of 'beautiful... Continue Reading →
Yesterday, I wrote about writing as a learned skill. Today we move on to thinking about writing as an iterative process. One of the biggest mistakes that graduate students make is thinking that writing their thesis or research paper is going to be like writing an undergraduate essay. That is, they will sit down with... Continue Reading →
I recently gave a class on writing for research to a wonderful group of health science postgraduate students. It was a great opportunity to gather some of my ideas about writing for research, and to offer a condensed version of what I try to teach my thesis students over their thesis writing period. My... Continue Reading →
Last week I posted on being a public intellectual, or someone who engages with communities and society outside of academia, communicating research directly and also being influenced by communities in choosing research topics. I stand by all that. But I want to think further about the more theoretical work that community-engaged, public intellectual researchers do,... Continue Reading →
Today I was interviewed by a PhD scholar researching 'public' geographers and public intellectuals more generally. I'm not sure if I was being researched as an actual public geographer, or as a group of people with views about public geography, but it did get me thinking about what we do and who we are aiming... Continue Reading →
I recently posted about writing emails to lecturers in New Zealand universities. I made some suggestions for appropriate email etiquette in NZ based on deconstructing a few representative emails and my own personal preferences. The flipside of the story is of course lecturers who email students in anger, frustration, annoyance and with little sensitivity to... Continue Reading →
My tongue-in-cheek clickbait title is meant to illustrate via awkward engagement how inappropriate the norms of social media are to academia. Nowhere is this more obvious than when students try to email me. Here's a recent example* I reproduce in full: Hi I missed my second lab and I think the Cencus data for completely assignment... Continue Reading →
Women still do the majority of household caring labour. But not only this, women's caring labour has expanded to include care not just for families and their needs but also for the environment and sustainability. Some studies frame this as a form of inequality, another example of how the 'dirty work' of society gets lumped... Continue Reading →
So most of you have probably worked this out well before me, but once your kids can read LISTS ARE AWESOME. My blogposts this time last year were about the emotional labour of managing a family and resentment at having to make sure everything that needed to be done got done. And the nagging. I... Continue Reading →
Throwntogetherness 