Visiting academic: Uppsala University, Sweden

It's 8:30am, it's 3 degrees and I'm on a bike cycling. First day in my Visiting Academic position at the division for Teaching and Learning at Uppsala University.

The view from my desk for the next two months might look a bit bleak at the moment, with leafless trees, but I have a desk, and internet access and a door pass, and free tea and fruit and a lovely open staff lounge area. I've met several of my 'new' Uppsala University colleagues, who joined in on a short informal chat in the lounge area. Very welcoming. Hopefully I will attend their current 'Academic Teacher Training' course which they run about six/seven times a term and I've been asked to do a short little input at their informal seminar sessions. Overwise I will be allowed to get on and write at my neat little desk, with just a glimpse of Uppsala castle in the distance through the window.

Uppsala Castle - the pinkish circular building behind the leafless tree

is this it?

I've been contemplating writing this mail for the past two months. I haven't been able to bring myself to sit down and type my thoughts into the white block the blogger interface assigns to the task of writing/typing  blog posts. In order to blog regularly you need to constantly bring to the surface your reflective thoughts and ideas. You need to want to make these thoughts 'public' or at least visible to an audience - however small you might imagine that audience to be.

Most of my contemplations have been about whether I want to continue to make these thoughts I have, which have recently been about my now post-PhD life at a university in CT, visible, public. I just have too many doubts about the utility of it all. Of using this space to do what I've been doing since 2009? I think it served a purpose while I was in the UK, while I was doing the PhD - when I used the platform as a reflective space, a way to step back from the isolation and introversion that characterises the PhD. During that time it's so helpful to find some way of trying to make sense of the complex, contradictory, conflicting, shifting feelings that accompany and infect that special journey. But what happens when that journey ends? What happens when you move on, but continue to carry all that contradictory, critical and increasingly cynical feelings about academia (and your place in it), thrown about and exposed by the PhD experience? Can you continue to pour out, albeit carefully typed-out black text on this white-blocked background, stories of confusion, negativity, uncertainly, rejection and critique? Does it make sense to be that awkward bugger who just won't / can't fit in? I'm not sure. So it feels better to just stop. Maybe for a little while, maybe forever. Maybe the blog will be resurrected during a more grounded, happier time in my professional and personal live(s) or when I need this space again so I can make visible the unsaid observations, thoughts, impressions, contemplations, insights, views and opinions without fear that these reflections only reinforce a negative narrative.

me and mendeley

During my PhD, especially when I had to write the twice yearly progress reports, I would proudly boast that I had a 'good information management system for my expanding research resources and [was] maintaining my electronic bibliography via Endnote or Mendeley'.  And as I recall it took some discipline on my part to keep this 'dream alive'. I remember using my Fridays' to sit diligently and clean up my bibliography either in Endnote or in Mendeley, which I switched to in the first year of my PhD. But since submitting my thesis I haven't even clicked on the Mendeley icon on my desk top. I feel a bit guilty because this tardy behaviour highlights the lack of discipline and interest I have in doing all the good things, that good, publishable academics are meant to do. In fact the reason I'm been drawn to writing this blog, is the fact that I've resisted clicking on that icon for the past three or four days. I need to compile a reference list for something I'm writing. I know I should do it all in Mendeley. I know this is a good period to spend some quality time with the bibliography. To give it the love and attention it deserves. But. I also know it's in a mess and I will need to deal with that mess. Apparently the PhD process was meant to instill all these wonderful ways of doing things, that should set you up as a good, solid, independent researcher - the kinds of things that make for good academics in the long run. I used to take pride in, at least, partaking in these activities and rituals - signalling my immersion into this way of being. Now I just keep putting it off, discarding my old ways - almost in defiance. Knowing full well, that this superficial act of defiance, is like pissing in the wind. All the piss eventually ends up in your face.

reunions and wrong-side of the bed days

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday morning. I've learnt the hard way that there is nothing to be done on mornings, days like that. Best to just accept that the mood will not improve irrespective what comes at you during the day. Often on these kinds of days, if I can, by 12 or 1 o'clock I just get back into bed and sleep. But I didnt have this luxury yesterday. I spent the morning at UCT library, battling with paragraph and argument structures for the long-suffering paper I hoped I could have finished a long, long time ago. But never mind, I have a plan to get the paper into a presentable, proper draft 1 form by the end of the week. It's the holidays, but I'm going to alleviate my guilt doing at least an hour of writing work a day until Christmas. The plan is simple, 1 to 2 hours in the morning, rest of the afternoon on the beach or assigned to some or other Christmas chores. Perfect.

High jinx with Desiree. 

Then I found myself at my old high school in Silvertown at around 2pm. The school itself had a bit of a face lift so on the outside it didnt look anything like it did when I was a pupil there in the mid 80s. I bumped into people I knew, who went to school with me and as one would expect, the odd person who clearly knew me, but who I had absolutely NO CLUE who the hell they were - even after they gently, but enthusiastically provided some background information. I also managed to talk to two of my teachers, who at the time were very instrumental in supporting and nurturing me. We talked about the good grade I got for History (an A on the higher grade, thanks to the power of rote-learning) and that I was possibly the only person in my English  class that understood the matric Shakespeare play we were doing that year. They remembered my 17 year old-self better than I did. That fearlessness that once defined who I was. But these were two classes I really enjoyed because of the teachers who taught them. Today I'm off to another reunion of sorts, with my first cohort of technikon students. Some of them have managed to stay in touch with each other over the almost 15 years since they met, and they sort-of invite me to their get-togethers. Of course I'm deeply honoured and humbled that they still want to see me, and invite me into their lives. I'd like to think I'm that teacher that played a nurturing and supporting role at some stage of their learning lives

weary

It's that time of the year. Three more days to go before I am officially on leave. And I've taken to the departmental culture - so I've already downed-tools and been on a virtual go-slow since last week. No planning for 2015 - what needs to happen in 2015, can wait for 2015. I've tried to conjure up my energy and interest reserves, I've compiled lists of things to do, did some rudimentary weekly planning and made an attempt to clean my office, rearrange my filing and tell myself I need to write some reports, so that I can draw a neat line under 2014. But I'm not convinced that anyone will read the reports I write, so whenever the idea of writing the reports fills my consciousness, I quickly find something equally unproductive to do. All of this has significantly contributed to the weariness and general despondency filling me up. It doesn't help that my body-clock is also completely out of synch. I can't sleep at night, wake early, start to fade by lunch and can hardly keep my eyes open, let alone do anything that remotely requires some cognitive functions, then start to perk-up again by 3pm. Let the holidays come I say, because then if all of this is my daily reality (except of course the angst about writing a report), I can legitimacy say - its fine I'm on holiday, who cares.

learning spaces

I've always imaged studying at university was about learning new things, being challenged to consider differently, to shift and change how you think and act. This drive to learn more, understand better, became the impetus, driving my pursuit of learning until I got to the PhD - the pinnacle of academic learning. A year after been deemed successful at achieving this learning 'outcome' I wonder where the true learning spaces are in academia. Are they created in the conferences, symposia, colloquiums and seminars we are encouraged to attend and participate in? Are they found in the classrooms we facilitate and manage? Or maybe they are lurking in the corridors, staff common rooms, colleagues' offices or noisy coffee shops - the informal spaces were fellow academics, researchers or teachers combine personal catch-up stories with reflections and ideas about theories new and old. Increasingly I'm finding the formal university space rather barren and void of learning. While the informal, entanglements of the unlikely, often peripheral spaces where those imagined notions of learning, that brought me to where I now find myself, are becoming the real, the authentic sites.

and now on a more positive note

I haven't been a very active blogger these past few weeks. I'm conscious that a common thread in my narratives has been that of negativity – a discourse of ‘dooms and gloom’. There is some saying that goes something like 'if you don't have something good to say then don't speak'. This felt applicable to me. So I haven't used the blog.

 
But on Sunday I had occasion to feel positive and affirmed about myself as academic, researcher and person. I went out to lunch with both my Masters and PhD supervisors. Two wonderful, thoughtful and supportive women academics and researchers, who have both played, in different ways, such influential roles in my academic becoming. What felt so affirming about sitting alongside both women, while we drank beautifully, blushed wine, and watched the waves in Kalk Bay crash violently and determinedly against the restaurant windows, causing us to respond instinctively as each wave thundered against the window panes - was that I could sit so, 'fretlessly' and talk about everyday things. Our relationships had shifted. A shift that had more significance for me with respect to one of my supervisors. A testament, I thought, to possibly, my capacity to survive and be deeply reflective about what had gone before, rightfully carrying new insights and reframed perspectives. I felt a sense of not being burdened by the past, even though it’s scars act as palpable reminders.

now you feel it, now you don't

It's amazing how quickly you readjust to 'normal' after being away from it for a while. It's like muscle memory or ingrained mental maps that allow you to go into almost automatic mode. Not thinking, not feeling. I've come to realise, this year, that any break from my normal work does wonders for my soul. But I'm just as susceptible to ingrained mental maps/muscle memory/intuitive responses irrespective of the positives associated with these breaks. So it's taken me almost a week to prioritise my writing. The plan is that it will stay my priority until the end of the academic year in early December.

Yesterday I stumbled back into the writing and was left feeling immensely frustrated and irritated at myself. It felt like I could not put two sentences together, let alone articulate my view on deficit discourse. After an hour or so of, what felt like, hammering my head against the wall I put the writing aside, deciding to come back to it later in the day and then to jot down in bullet point the salient points I wanted to make. Returning to my notes and bullet list today, it all came together. A totally different experience. Ok so I can write a few paragraphs about what deficit discourses are and how they manifest in the South African context. Not too bad actually. And so I move onto the next section...

thinking retreat in Uppsala

I've been in Sweden for just under a week. My visit was meant, amongst other things, to serve as a little writing retreat. I was hoping to refine the article I'm working on after getting some feedback on it last week. But things haven't really worked out as I hoped. I haven't done much writing. The process has been slow and I've been distracted with completing unrelated administrative 'stuff' linked to my day-job. But I have done a lot of thinking. I've had the time to mull over my ideas, do some supplemental reading, question the logic of my arguments. Think about how to say things differently. So I guess all is not lost. Oh, and I've made good progress in getting through series 1 & 2 of OITNB. 

wasted

Its getting close to that time of the year when things start to slow down - students are finishing off their final lectures and the department shifts into final exam mode. The final push to mark and submit marks and then, the academics in my department relax and wait for the year to pass. For me, this period is increasingly representing a time when I write in the open. When no one is watching me. When no one in very interested in doing anything much and I sneak-in my writing. Make it mainstream, instead of that thing I try to do on a Thursday away from the office or on Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons. But, unsettlingly, in plotting forward towards this period, I've had to take stock of the past year. It's depressing as I feel I've done so little intellectually engaging work. I have so little to show for the year past. My first post-PhD year. On my desk sits some of the books I bought over the past 10 or so months. Many haven't been touched, thumbed through. Some I've only managed to read a few pages, maybe a chapter. Reading is meant to be the lifeblood of what I do as an academic, what defines me, what I actually enjoy. And yet I feel as if I haven't even succeeded at it. It's easier to justify not having any writing outcomes, but no reading? Well that's another matter.

lots to say, not so much energy to say it

I haven't blogged in a while. I have lots to say, something practically everyday, but little energy to say it. In the mornings I rehearse what I want to say, write about, imagining that when I get home that evening I will sit quietly and write down these thoughts, ideas, reflections. But always by 9pm I'm spent. My brain can't function and all the wonderful, insightful thoughts floating around with such clarity in the morning have disappeared. I imagine making time during my working day - carving out a little reflective space - but, certainly over the last two weeks, my days have been consumed by rushing around trying to complete various administrative and organisational tasks. But I also attended a very interesting conference last week which really provoked some compelling and challenging questions about the types of conferences I go to, the egocentric nature of academia (and its personalities) and what value I gain from going to these events. Nevermind, maybe it will come back to me. I'll reclaim a Saturday morning at my happy place or a Sunday afternoon at my special cafe and capture those thought-provoking, insightful observations and perceptions worth sharing.