Akkkk, I am failing my week notes – with no weeknotes for February and a summary for January, and none for the first week of March. Weeknotes are becoming month notes. Perhaps such is the way.
This week was a teaching week, so Monday I gave a research informed lecture and facilitated group responses from students to my research agenda, Post Carbon Immersive Futures on the MA in VR and XR at UWE Bristol. It was super cool in this same week, that myself and colleagues signed a contract with Emerald Press, for a book series, so I can work on a book proposal of the same title. Grateful for amazing opportunities and collaborations.
In the lecture, I loved talking about the needs to consider the intersections within planetary boundaries, the limits of climate modelling and the collective and imaginative shift required for us to shift as a society from linearity to circularity, in terms of media, economies and time. But also the problem of netzero and its decarbonising frame, which needs to shift to consider life thriving in all its possibilities. The students are amazing, they hadn’t for the most part heard of or read about the science of climate change, but understood the anti-colonial stance we needed to take. It makes me feel good to have crossed the disciplinary boundaries from science into the arts to be here to say ‘okay we are going to learn a bit of maths, chemistry, physics and biology today, and you are going to mix it up with your arts practice and collective imaginings‘. That was the dream, when I started a Wellcome Engagement Fellowship in 2013, and I am living it, 10 years later. Amazing.
I was lucky enough the week before to visit Copenhagen, for my siblings birthday celebrations, and in the same visit to experience CopenHill, which arguably is an example of a Post Carbon Future experience, which could be used as an example in my lecture.
Whilst I haven’t done much writing this week, lots of previous writing of conference abstracts has paid off, with abstracts accepted for MeCCSA‘s annual conference which will be in Glasgow in September, to share insights from the arts case of Patterns in Practice research project. We also managed the week before to submit a paper on Generative AI and arts practice for a CHI workshop. Collaborative working works.
I’ve done a lot of research admin this week, and last, to get my grants onto our internal system, Worktribe, which we thankfully also used at MMU. So, soon, I can begin recruiting postdoctoral researchers. I am really feeling what we identified in our paper, that black academics, often don’t get enough money on grants to recruit postdocs, which means less research gets done. So I am glad to have advocated to for budgets to recruit postdocs on my grants. All the EDI research I did with good peeps (for free btw), is paying off. If you want to change the ecosystem, sometimes you have to put that work in to understand what is going on here, and then you try and do better.
I also finished up a piece of work on EDI and PhDs, with the UWE EDI data folk, to look at the gaps for black and minoritised researchers, so I know where the bar is set and how I can raise it.
I woke up this week feeling very thankful, I met up with some friends this week who left academia, so I end the week on a humble note knowing how lucky I am, but also aware of how much more can be done to improve it.
It’s stopped snowing, so Friday ends with a visit to an exhibition on Post Carbon Futures, in another discipline, and a much overdue visit to the gym!
everyoneandeverything 