Do you ever feel like it is just so pointless to write academic articles, books, and commentaries?
What’s the point of academic writing and publications?
Caring for life: the book that is finally here
Wow! Thank you to those of you who have stuck with me for TEN years now. This blog is 10 years old and the BOOK that I have been working on for all that time is finally for real. The final stages of the book included spending August of 2022 recieving NO meetings zoom or... Continue Reading →
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Why academics should learn to meditate, and other things you can’t say on Twitter
I was a Twitter user for a decade. Like many people, I left a few months after Elon Musk bought it since it no longer seemed to connect me to the community I had formed there. I do miss it, but in hindsight, it was probably a good thing. One thing that annoyed me was... Continue Reading →
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University skills: Doing your first geography assessment
Beginning your first assessment in university human geography can be daunting. But here is a step-by-step guide to getting started.
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Editing: the most painful and most pleasurable writing task
Editing is the most painful and most pleasurable part of writing for me. In the book coming out of my PhD thesis, it was more pain than pleasure!
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Life Update!
Kia ora everyone. Just a quick post to update you on my institutional move to Massey University, and my physical relocation to Palmerston North, New Zealand. You can see a bit of my cycle commute in the image! This is a permanent move. For the first five years, I will be research only as part... Continue Reading →
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Travel: Six things I’ve re-learned this year
This year has been an explosion of travel for me, at this point still domestic. I kind of knew it would be hard to go back to, but was sort of excited about it. Now I'm kind of over it. When should we travel, and when is it important? That answer is different for everyone.... Continue Reading →
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Focus, interruption, and an overdue book
Writing a book is so hard. Well, drafting a book was relatively straightforward. But the post-review rewrite and edit has been brutal. It's not that I can't do it, it's finding the time and space to have uninterrupted writing and editing that allows me to retain the whole book in my head while I finish... Continue Reading →
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Getting your PhD (back) on track 2: other tasks
In my PhD workshops, there are also plenty of students who can do the deep work, but struggle to get all the other tasks done that ensure they can complete their PhD. This includes organising meetings, organising interviews or data collection, calling people on the phone, getting progress reports completed, organising childcare and assisting their... Continue Reading →
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Getting your PhD (back) on track 1: Deep work and focus
Recently I gave a workshop about getting your PhD on track -- or back on track, for those who have had some delays and detours due to COVID-19 and the usual crises and distractions that accompany PhDs. It seemed clear to me that I could not get anyone's PhD back on track in a mere... Continue Reading →
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WTF is the teaching-research nexus? Or, how my teaching load supports my research
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 →
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Check list process for university course planning and design
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 →
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How I held it together and reorganized my book manuscript without being reduced to an embarrassing mess (and other lies)
"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 →
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My new normal: reducing decision fatigue with four kids and fulltime work
I used to think routines are unnecessary. Now I can't live without them!
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Six things I wish I had known before editing my first collection
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 →
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Care-Work on Fieldwork
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 →
Making my own life-work manifesto
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 →
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Saying yes, saying no: 4 years tracking my voluntary academic activities
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 →
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The work of “Life Admin”
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 →
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Academic Maternity Leave : The shame game
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 →
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Blogging by phone
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 →
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Three Words 2018: Less, Dwell, Write
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 →
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Becoming a quality scholar through deep work
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 →
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Collective Strategies for Deep Work
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 →
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The Invisible Gender of Deep Work
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 →
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Three Words 2017: Prepare, Deeper, Joy
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 →
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An article six years in the making…
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 different... Continue Reading →
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Be gone, cruel voices
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 →
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Five things I learned while editing my thesis into a book
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 →
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I know, I’ll wait, I’m here
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 →
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On (the impossibility of?) settling down
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 →
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Slow, painful, rewrite #9
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 →
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Thinking-with, Dissenting-within
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 →
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Vulnerability and Learning to be Affected
I've been struggling with an article for a long time. This piece of writing has evolved through 5 or 6 complete revisions and framings (and many, many more versions), including being part of a thesis chapter and part of a book chapter. I've taken it to two retreats, I've had reviewer feedback, peer feedback, and... Continue Reading →
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How much is enough? Setting some limits on ‘voluntary’ academic work for the new year
Every year, I try and do some work on being more intentional about the things I say yes to.
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How to do slow reading
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 →
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Slow Scholarship starts with Slow Reading
I wonder if you know the feeling: You have a few hours, or a day, to get some writing done -- to get it finished, in fact! You have been longing for this for weeks, perhaps months. You sit in front of your computer, open your document and immediately find it hard to connect with... Continue Reading →
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Writing your Book Proposal II: What happens after submitting your proposal?
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 →
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Writing a book proposal I: From concept to submission
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 →
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Turning your PhD into a book
As I was racing to the submission finish line with my PhD thesis, 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 for the life... Continue Reading →
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Quiet: A book review
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 →
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Writing for Research II: Writing as an iterative process
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 →
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Writing for Research I: Writing is a learned skill
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 →
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Beyond public intellectualism: moving from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’ in research
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 →
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Being a Public Intellectual
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 →
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What I learned about emailing students… from my two-year-old.
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 →
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You Won’t Believe How These New Zealand Undergraduates Email Their Lecturers
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 →
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Domestic Activists?
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 →
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Insecurities as a mum-employee
Today I had a major work-fail moment. I was organising honours students presentations, and had already underorganised that normally-well-attended event. It was first thing in the morning following a public holiday (Queens Birthday), and I was incredibly late and missed the first two presentations despite being the person who was supposed to be hosting it.... Continue Reading →
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Writing First Year Geography Lectures
I've been very quiet in the blogosphere recently. Mostly because I have been preparing new lectures for a section of a first year course I am teaching. I taught first year almost exclusively in my first academic job at Macquarie University, and since I was starting at scratch with topics I had never lectured on... Continue Reading →
Throwntogetherness 