Reflections on life and work from Aotearoa New Zealand
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, 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 →
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 →
I normally avoid talking about toilet-training and elimination communication on my blog -- not because it is not interesting and worthwhile, but because it has become so much part of our everyday lives that I don't even think about it much any more. Until it all grinds to a halt, that is. We have practiced... Continue Reading →
As part of a new area of research, I'd love to share my new mini-doco with you all. It's about the new forms of 'commoning' that have arisen since the Christchurch earthquake sequence in 2010 and 2011. Of course, I wasn't here and don't know as much about it as all the amazing Christchurch people... Continue Reading →
So it has been quite a long time since I blogged -- mostly because the second half of 2015 was taken up with intense teaching and a return to fulltime work. Ironically, a lot of my research work is about how the home and domestic spaces are sites of enacting postcapitalist politics for different kinds... Continue Reading →
In her book The Logic of Care: Healthcare and the Problem of Patient Choice, Annemarie Mol relates a story that partially prompted her philosophical investigation into choice and care in the Dutch healthcare system: It is still the early 1990s. I am pregnant and 36. A national committee of experts in the Netherlands where I... Continue Reading →
The following is an 'interlude' that will appear between two chapters of my book, provisionally titled:Â Guarding Life: A Postcapitalist Politics of Hygiene. The excerpt focuses on the presence of an awkward object in the life of one Chinese Christian migrant worker. The awkward object was the controversial American parenting book 'Babywise', which had recently been... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
My friend and colleague Ann Hill has contributed a blog post for me today, inspired by the conversations we have had about managing our academic and mothering practices. Dr Ann Hill is a member of the Community Economies Collective, and has conducted research on food economies in the Phillipines. She is currently working on a... Continue Reading →
Last week I was chronically sleep deprived, and even when my son was managing to sleep at night, I was often lying awake thinking about work and relationships. This has been an issue for me at stressful times during my PhD and my academic career, and especially when each of my children are between 1... Continue Reading →
So, I am really tired. I am also coming down with something, or just struggling against a low-grade cold. My son is sleeping better this week, but even when he is asleep, I wake up after four hours or so. After all, that's how much sleep I have been accustomed to getting in the last... Continue Reading →
Well, you know it is a major Christian festival when the academic and social media sites I frequent put out yet another 'expose' of Christianity. I yawned at another article this morning exposing the fact that easter eggs are actually not Christian symbols! Are there any Christians out there that actually do not know this?... Continue Reading →
I have recently been working through a book with some PhD students in my department. The book is Alison B Miller's Finish Your Dissertation Once and For All! How to overcome psychological barriers, get results, and move on with your life., which I cannot recommend highly enough. One of the chapters in this book is... Continue Reading →
I am a frock cyclist. If I have to get changed to use my bike, I am unlikely to bother. I am actually more likely to cycle when I am dressed up, because I can wear heels and not have to walk far to the door of my office! Also, the cool breeze created by... Continue Reading →
When it comes to applying for jobs as a mother, there seems to be two approaches to explaining any gaps in your CV. The first approach is to maintain that 'My personal life is none of their business' and just not really deal with gaps at all, not mention your children or marital status or... Continue Reading →
Early career researchers are often applying for a limited number of jobs in a really competitive market. In New Zealand, this is compounded by the fact that universities are partly funded by what is called Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF), a system where every few years, all our 'outputs' are entered and ranked and labelled... Continue Reading →
Last year I bought a semester parking ticket because, even though I bike or walk in each day, my husband parks near my building and brings the baby up for a feed every day. This year, I was thinking about how much this cost us and how it was not really feasible for my husband... Continue Reading →
I have recently been reading David Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II, having read Please Understand Me in the first edition many years ago. He uses the Myer-Briggs personality categories to describe four basic temperaments and 16 role variants. His main point is that much of our differences in communication and the way we interact... Continue Reading →
So, I have been the primary income earner in all my 14 years of marriage. And in that time, I have had three children. I breastfed my first two for around two years each, and plan to do the same for my youngest. But my work requires travel. When I say 'require', I wouldn't lose... Continue Reading →
In a previous post about the parallels between education and maternity care I argued that although public health and public education are extremely important for equity reasons, informed homebirthing and homeschooling are probably the gold standard for maternity care and education respectively. After reading an article on 'short-term homeschooling' I wondered about short-term homeschooling for... Continue Reading →
In the previous posts 'Wife of a Stay-at-Home Husband' and 'How to get children to help around the house'Â I began to think about shifting out of the role of 'Household Organiser' that I seem to have acquired over the years. One of the commitments I made while writing the Wife of a Stay-at-Home Husband... Continue Reading →
I regularly update my profile on the Community Economies website. If you are interested in reading more of my work in this area, see my profile.
The wonderful Avalon Darnesh shares her grounded and compassionate strategies for getting children to help around the house. I need to do this. Want more help around the home? In this article you’ll learn how to nurture your young child's innate desire to contribute, and what to do if your older children don't give a... Continue Reading →
I have long been aware of the statistics that place planned homebirth on a par with public hospital births in terms of best outcomes for mothers and babies. For just as long, I have been aware that births in private hospitals have the worst outcomes generally. This did not really surprise me when I discovered... Continue Reading →
There seems to be a misconception out there that having a stay at home husband is some kind of pinnacle of feminist achievement. You go out, focus on your rewarding job, come home to slippers warmed, the paper and a brandy while your hubby gets dinner ready and bathes the kids. I don't want to... Continue Reading →
My life seems to be a juxtaposition of multiple contradictions, which I am constantly trying to reconcile. One such apparent contradiction is my commitments to both Christianity and feminism. Now, feminist theologians will say this isn't necessarily a contradiction, and I tend to agree. But the reality is, in both Christian and feminist circles you... Continue Reading →
'Throwntogetherness' is a term that feminist geographer Doreen Massey uses to describe a particular quality of space that she admires. And by space she means the site where a multiplicity of trajectories engage. I picked this as a title for my blog because sometimes that is what my life feels like -- throwntogether at the... Continue Reading →
Throwntogetherness 