Colleagues and killjoys, It is with sadness that I announce that I have resigned from my post at Goldsmiths. It is not the time to give a full account of how I came to this decision. In a previous …
Source: Resignation
I recently met up with Hope Dickson Leach, a filmmaker on a mission! She is part of a group of female filmmakers, academics and writers who have launched the Raising Films initiative – set up to address the issue of inequality in the film industry by looking directly at issues of childcare and a working culture that makes it increasingly difficult for anyone with caring responsibilities to participate. I’ve written a blog for them which provides an introduction to my theoretical framing. Be great if you could have a read!
I was watching a long interview with Kazuo Ishiguro the other night – as you do if you live in the UK and still have some good (high) cultural television – and something he said leapt out at me. I can’t vouch for these being the exact words he uttered but they were something like …
“We are all unreliable narrators of our lives, particularly to ourselves. Whether it is in conversation, Facebook or a letter, we all need interpretation.”
Yes! Yes! I thought to myself. If only some thesis writers understood this. So I rushed to write Ishiguro’s words down before I lost them. But even if I don’t have the words down entirely accurately, I do think I’ve got the point he was making. And getting at what you think is the meaning, although not necessarily with 100% accuracy is not unrelated to the reason why…
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Guest blog by Heather Savigny, Bournemouth University
‘Perhaps men are just naturally better at research than women’ said a senior male colleague during a discussion about why so few women were returned to a University’s REF submission. On one level, you almost have to laugh that people might actually say these things out loud. Sadly, however on another level, this comment is also illustrative of an attitude, a mentality, a cultural discourse which often positions women as inferior in academic environments. Unpacking and making visible women’s experiences is the purpose of my article recently published in Gender and Education and featured in the Independent on Sunday. It is also something that I (and other colleagues that I know of) have been warned not to discuss as it ‘will damage our academic careers’. Maybe however, having been in this career for 10 years and in the fortunate position of…
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The past few months have seen me buried in a fog of writing. It’s not a process I particularly enjoy. I’ve discovered that I’m an excellent academic planner, my plans are exquisite, detailed, concise….there are charts etc. It’s only when I have to sit down and actually write the thing that it all falls apart. But that can rest for now and I’m on to the part that I really enjoy – talking to people! I carried out a series of interviews a couple of years back and it was the findings from those conversations that inspired the topic and framework of my PhD thesis. Now I need more stories to explore this unique relationship between creative labour and motherhood.
If you consider yourself to be a creative media worker so film, television, radio, gaming, post-production, distribution, animation or you used to work in one of those sectors and are a mother then I’d really like to talk to you. It doesn’t matter where you’re based (although it does have to be within the UK as this project is looking at its specific development) – I can talk to you using Skype and I can find a time that suits you. Most of the interviews have been taking place in the evening and they last up to an hour. All information that is shared to me remains confidential.
If you are interested in finding out more information and would be happy to participate in this research then you can email me at tamsyn@cemp.ac.uk.
Please do ask if you have any questions and send this post on to anyone who you think might be interested. I’m conducting interviews up until December 2014.
Interesting blogpost that I just came upon….
These days, I’m sure, all early–career researchers are advised to get themselves an academic mentor, someone who they can turn to for some support and guidance. Today’s assumption is that being a scholar is not sink-or-swim.
Many universities manage an academic mentoring process. They are reluctant to leave the provision of support to chance. The allocation of mentors has become a key institutional strategy for ensuring that some kind of personal-professional support is available to everyone. So, when new staff arrive in the institution, the appropriate adminstrator in their home school/faculty/centre is charged with allocating a mentor to them as part of their induction process. However, many institutions seem to forget temporary contracted staff in these arrangements – not OK!! But others are more inclusive, and their mentoring schemes are all encompassing – everyone who’s new gets a mentor.
The process of institutional matching – mentor and one-to-be-mentored – varies…
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tamsyndent
Tamsyn Dent 