Free-range Academia
It's Tuesday, and that means it's my day to be a free-range academic. (The condition of having an office of my own was giving it up for tutor consultations one day per week). But I'm not only free-range in terms of physical location at the moment, I also get to roam intellectually. Tuesdays, as a non-teaching and thus Whitfeld day, let me exit the restricted focus of teaching and head out to pastures new.
At the moment I have an article sitting beside me that I have to finish a report on, a stack of print-outs and a DVD of Season 1 of Lost to reshape into a lecture, a few call for papers to look into and start playing with ideas for abstracts,and the very very rough beginnings of a draft for an article that I want to add at least a couple of paragraphs to by the end of the day. Also scheduled for today is a Communication Studies seminar and and IAS public lecture later in the evening. I have to admit to being a habitual seminar/lecture attendee, in part because as a postgrad I found they gave some structure to my day, and now, post-thesis, because hearing someone else thinking through and idea helps me jumpstart my own brain, even where the subject matter and/or theoretical framework it totally different to my area.
So I shall breathe in the fresh air, and get back to work.
I've recently submitted my PhD thesis, titled 'Discovering the Lost Race Story: Writing Science Fiction, Writing Temporality', for examination. In the meantime, I'm teaching in the discipline of Communication Studies at UWA and starting a new project on medievalism and media through a Whitfeld Fellowship.