Once a wallflower

Emerging protea (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

I started this post wanting to write about the value of participating, and the context of not-participating.

It got a bit long.

When I was an undergraduate, meandering through my Arts degree and waiting for purpose to strike, I felt incapable of participating properly in tutorials. I hated them. I was happy to listen to the better lecturers and tutors discuss things about the subject, and I usually had no significant questions to ask during the smaller classes. If only there was more of an understanding of us introverted types (which seems all the vogue right now), and allowance for leveraging my listening skills as an introvert. Maybe I should’ve just faked it.

Dreading these forums for learning, and knowing that a percentage of marks were allocated to just showing up, my undergraduate years were conflicted. Being introduced to the scope of knowledge materials and the expert-led winnowing of topics (however biased) thrilled me, but the compulsory face-time that brought me very little insight and a lot of angst tempered my enthusiasm.

Conversely, I loved lectures. They required minimal engagement with the lecturer or your peers, and I could get excited or confused at my leisure. Excitement I’d channel through assignments and reading, confusion I’d address by visits to the library to read around topics or terms of which I was ignorant. This dynamic suited my learning style really well. Plus: double-bonus if there was no project work (yeah, not a fan of that either).

 

When is a career interruption not a career interruption?

One of these is not like the other (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

The issue of career interruptions is a difficult one in higher education. Particularly given the gendered nature of many ‘interruptions’ (i.e. maternity leave, and who often ends up as the carer for family), I think this is a facet of life that funding bodies – and promotion systems in universities in general – don’t handle particularly well.

Major funding bodies churn through a lot of applications and are most often desperately under-staffed. So, in writing this post, I’m not looking to blame them for not being incredibly considerate of every snowflake situation.

I do wish, though, that there were more effective overall systems in place to consider the nuances of people’s track-records. Or at least a smidge more honesty in what they’re really looking for: unproblematic high performers without ongoing (or potential for) negative issues/conditions.

It bothers (and angers) me that accommodating the interruptions that life sometimes throws at you is often inadequate and perfunctory in research and higher education. Because some basic processes are in place, it feels as if this is assumed to take care of things.

The opacity of how funding bodies decide what counts as an ‘eligibility exemption’ (whether your career interruption justification is accepted) is frustrating.

 

Networking an academic research network (unabridged)

This post is an unabridged version of the article written by Dr Indigo Willing and myself for The Social Interface. Many thanks to the editors, Sarah Lux and Lyria Bennett Moses, for their invitation, warm encouragement, and generosity in allowing us to cross-post this material. You can read the article as originally published on 10 November 2011 at The Social Interface HERE.

Thanks also to Julie Koh, who first suggested us for The Social Interface! 

In the final decade of the twentieth century, it was clear that the Internet had significantly changed the way we think about the world and actively try to reshape it. It was a time where Stanford and the West Coast saw an unexpected Wall Street-approved boom in innovation from computer scientists and geeks that turned Silicon Valley into a (temporary) city of gold. This was a period where terms such as computer-mediated communication (CMC) arose to describe everything from shell based emails to MUDs, and websites to e-groups. This wave of CMC at the dawn of the digital age also gave rise to some notable scholarly insights found in the work of Sherry Turkle in Life on The Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet Age and from Steve Jones who detached the idea of the ‘cyber society’ and emergence of ‘virtual cultures’ from science fiction novels to re-introduce them as serious topics in the field of communication studies. At the same time, Fink (1998) observed that the qualitative social scientists and other disciplines with similar leanings were only taking small steps and remained cautious – even sceptical – as to how the Internet and CMC might be used as research tools.

Since the twenty-first century has unfolded, it is clear that the arrival of various types of new media now rivals, and in some cases has surpassed, earlier forms of CMC (Flew 2005). Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have quickly transformed our lives again, and are used enthusiastically for social networking with friends, peers and colleagues; to maintain transnational and cross-border ties with family;  and most stunningly (and with astounding results) in the realms of politics and social protest movements. On his blog BuzzMachine, Jarvis (2011: 3 October) discusses an example of the latter: Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir suggested that Iceland develop a more democratic constitution via the use of Facebook. There have also been a number of protests that have gained worldwide attention for their use of social media, notably with the use of Facebook to spread news of protests and the eventual overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Egypt in January 2011 and, more widely, the ‘Arab Spring’ protests throughout the Middle East (cf. see Dixon 2001). Most recently, we have also seen digitally mediated activism like the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests, where a tweet in Canada on 13 July 2011 turned into a local protest in Zuccotti Park, New York City on 17 September 2011, before quickly escalating into an ongoing global movement.

However, just as some disciplines in academia struggled with the idea of harnessing the potential of CMC for their research in the 1990s, it appears that many academics remain resistant to the opportunities to shift or expand their networking activities over into new media such as Facebook and Twitter.  From our experiences with the creation of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN & on Twitter @aasrn), which was initially formed from a Yahoogroup, we have found that the issue of using new technology – and social media, in particular – is one that creates conflicting rather than united or unanimously pro-new media discussions in academia.

 

AAI 4 panel – “Is Australian politics becoming less diverse?”

This panel is convened by AASRN member, Jen Tsen Kwok.

His blog is http://demoiaus.blogspot.com

 

AAI 4 – The programme + the poster!

Just had to blog about the AAI 4 conference programme, which is now ONLINE (.pdf)!

You can also now see the conference poster featuring artwork by Owen Leong. Owen’s stuff is fabulous, and we’ve been long-time fans of his work. Back in 2007, Owen was an invited keynote at the AAI 2 conference, and his work also features on the INDAAR website (launched 2009).

The programme lists all the speakers and their paper titles, times, venues, and other special events associated with the conference. It’s going to be a full-on few days, preceded on Wed 9 November by the ECR workshop that will be facilitated by Jacqueline Lo (ANU), Dean Chan (U of Wollongong), Christine Kim (Simon Fraser U, Canada) and Chris Lee (U of British Columbia, Canada). I’ll be taking the lead in the afternoon session about ‘the market’ (funding, jobs, CVs, etc). Seeing as this is what my day-job entails (advising researchers about their funding opportunities + research career planning), this should be kinda fun. The number of ECRs signed up for the workshop is fantastic! I can’t wait to meet everyone and hear about their work; being able to have all that energetic curiousity in one place is a rare treat, one I will probably not be experiencing after these events.

AFTER the ECR workshop, we’ll all be going out for a casual dinner with the workshop participants, stray AAI 4 delegates who are already in town and assorted AAers from around Melbourne. If you’re interested in coming along to that informal (pay-your-own-way) dinner, please drop me a line (or comment on this post if you don’t have my email addy). The venue is still being decided, but it’ll be CBD-ish and reasonably priced.

As for AAI 4 itself:

As well as the papers and keynotes we’ll all be enjoying, the evening programme for the 2 nights of AAI 4 is excellent. Thanks to Mikala Tai, the performance night (Thurs 10 Nov) features:

• Talks by Vipoo Srivilasa (see interview in PERIL), Megan Leckie (Director of Ausin Tung Gallery), and Nathan Beard (Project: Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere)
• Readings by Ben Law, Hanifa Deen, Tom Cho, and Alice Pung, and
• A performance by Xenia Hanusiak.

The second evening – Fri 11 Nov – is the conference dinner at Garage Cafe, just down the road from UniMelb itself. I’ve been there a few times now, as that’s where we have our conference committee meetings. It’s a great place to have a group feed, and rendang is always a lovely way to end an evening.

The buzz that one can get from a focused, niche conference is incredible. If you haven’t already registered, you should do so now.

Straight after AAI 4 is AAFF 2011, and the programme and list of speakers for that is also amazing. Heaps of people I’ve been fangirling for ages, and they’re all going to be in town at the same event. Cool x 10.

Even though I’m panicking about my conference paper and having background anxiety 24/7 about various aspects of the events, I’m also ridiculously excited about the FIVE DAYS of Asian Australian culture, thinking, and talking. It’s the kind of stuff I only get in dribs + drabs in ‘normal’ life. If my euphoria after each of the AASRN events we’ve had in the recent past is any indication, the intense immersion will be ace.

 

Intellectual grazing

It has been nine months since I started this new job as a research developer and, along with it, my transition out of a research academic space.

I still think of myself as moving through a career transition, but it’s a transition that has no forseeable end.

Maybe I’ll persist with my research and become a ‘hobby researcher’ (Inger Mewburn [aka The Thesis Whisperer] coaxed me into writing some material for an article she’s leading on this very subject).

Maybe I’ll abandon my research pursuits altogether and live a totally other-hobby life. It might take me a while to remember what that looks like. Most of my recent life’s ‘leisure time’ has been used up with social media management (across three accounts), writing/editing/formatting material, updating website news, and occasional guilty bouts of playing PvZ (see previous entry) or similar.

 

Let there be zombies

Two posts in three days?

It may well be the apocalypse coming…or the fabulous publicity initiative by the Queensland Police Service and their tweets about World Zombie Day (which was a move that very cleverly and effectively promoted their disaster alert system, QLDAlert). Props on a catchy stunt that had a good purpose!

Readers of this blog and my twitter stream will know too well my family’s obsession with horror movies. We’re not fussy.

Creature features? Cheesy franchises? Movies starring Billy Zane (including Demon Knight - right)? We’ll watch them all and enjoy them.

I loved these movies so much that I even engineered my Honours thesis around them. I researched gender and contemporary sci-fi/fantasy films, comparing the representations of women in these genres. The full title is: “The Position of Woman in Recent American Science Fiction Film: The Representation of Women and the ‘Feminine’”. Yes, I’m cringing, too.

The films I managed to shoehorn into the dissertation included:

• ‘Hard’ scifi: Alien, Aliens, Leviathan, and Inseminoid (!).
• ‘Fantasy’: Legend, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Conqueror, Red Sonja, and Flesh and Blood.    

Don’t judge me too harshly about the divvying up of genres, or for the films themselves. I was young. It was 1991. I was constantly listening to the Hoodoo Gurus.

The nice thing is that our love of science fiction and fantasy material in general has already started rubbing off on the kids. The entire family is dead keen (hah) on Plants vs Zombies. Most of us have played the game through a couple of times, and E. regularly plays a screen or two. G. is a bit young to play properly, but he likes collecting suns.

My brother loved it so much that S. made a PvZ cake for him in 2009:

 

Time to book yourself those tickets!

Remember all those fantastic Asian Australian events that are happening in Melbourne in November this year?

They’re all open for registration and RSVPs!

I’ve brought them all together in this post for your convenience.

Make me proud and sign up for everything…OK, I know Dragon Tails and the AAFF 2011 are on at exactly the same time, but you’ve always wanted to try out that mini-you, right?

 

AA meetup – Melbourne – July 2011

I’ve been organising a few informal meetups for AASRN and former asian-australian_discuss folk around Melbourne this year. Now that I’m based in the the city for work, it’s much easier to get people together over a lunchtime and see them more regularly. I’m greatly enjoying the proximity to my colleagues that being CBD-based offers, and am particularly liking the monthly AAI 4 and AAFF ‘work’ meetings.

On Monday this week, long-time AASRN member and Sydney-sider, Francis Maravillas was in town in a leisure capacity, which is a much nicer term than we were using in face-to-face conversation…! It was envy speaking, pure and simple. You can find out more about Francis at his International Network for Diasporic Asian Art Research (INDAAR) profile. We met at RMIT’s Pearson & Murphy’s cafe, which was absolutely busting at the seams with customers. That’s what the first day of second semester will do to a place. I imagine it will go back to its buzzy but civilised self by next week. As well as Francis and me, several others from AASRN and the now defunct asian-australian_discuss group came along to the meetup: Caitlin Nunn (who I hadn’t seen for AGES, and who I’ll be seeing again on Friday at her seminar for the MMRN gig), Oanh Tran, Jen Kwok, May Ngo, and Chi Vu (who’s doing a play reading at VCA on 19 August). Even with a fairly cosy group, it’s hard to find the time to chat with everyone in a hurried, slightly harried lunch hour. I do miss my 3-hour lunch meetings from the research fellowship days! It’s always a good thing, though, to leave always wanting more, and the others stayed on when I had to scurry back to my desk.

I was going to give up organising these events because I thought it was about time someone else did it – it has been me for the most part over the last 10 years, after all. What I’ve come to realise, and it’s even more true now that I’m in a non-academic role, is that I really want them to happen. I find them nourishing and fun. It keeps me in the loop about what people are doing, and it drives me to retain my interests in the field.

I’m very lucky in my work because it is academically focused all week, even though it may not be my academic work that’s under scrutiny. It keeps my focus on scholarly skills, the strategies in the university game, and reminds me constantly that I can’t stereotype people by the work they do.

I was asked – with some trepidation – by a colleague today: Why am I in the job I’m in, when I’ve done so much else in research and academia? It was strange trying to answer that question in a succinct way. I don’t think I did. My answer prompted him to chat about his career and life choices, as well as giving me valuable insight into how he might work with others and his research interests. It was a good conversation, all told. The most unfortunate aspect of it is that it took place in an open-plan office, which is very much the  wrong place for any meaningful discussion.

 

Living a life of sneak peeks

One of the best things about ‘having a name’ in an academic field is that I’m privy to quite a few things before they happen.

People want to ask my advice, or approach me for names of others who I’d recommend for a keynote, who would be good contributors or collaborators on projects, or potential postdoctoral appointments, or readers for manuscripts. These are all things I’m used to doing when I was in the thick of academia and very much promoting the AASRN. I’ve kept up with this kind of thing a bit with convening AAI 4 and AAFF at the moment, where sneak peeks are aplenty (knowing who’s invited, who’s presenting, etc – I think this explains my almost pathological habit of getting involved with conferences and edited publications).

Now that I’ve shifted gears, it feels occasionally like I’m a pretender. I feel that I’m not ‘useful’ to people in the way I used to be because I’m not building my career in academia anymore. I’m not scoping for the next project, event, or publication. I’ve taken my eye off many of the areas (diaspora studies, Asian Canadian and Asian American material) and dynamics (who’s working with whom) I used to track automatically.

It’s a relief, of course, to take a step back, to feel as if it’s OK not to know about the latest book by an Asian Australian author (or Asian diasporic authors, in general), and to feel no guilt for not ever intending to read it (that’s not a comment about the book, only about my motivations). That said, I was genuinely and gleefully excited when I reconnected with Canadian writer Hiromi Goto on Twitter, and found out about her most recent book through her website: Half World. It looks like excellent fun!

I’m still having a lot of fun being involved with the research network, even though I’m stepping back from that in many ways, too. My associations with people (and theirs with me) will take longer to fade away than I thought; if, indeed, it happens at all. I’m fast realising that much of the angst I’ve had stemmed from my own perceptions of what it meant to move away from academia, rather than how others might think of my move ‘sideways’ into university administration.

Ironic things that have happened since I stopped being employed as an academic:

• I’ve had more offers to collaborate than ever before, on writing various types of articles.
• My writing and editing skills are more constantly and immediately called upon in my everyday job, and in newer activities (such as “shut up and write”).
• The continuing networking effects of things I’ve done in past years are bringing me shiny offers of internationally significant proportions, which I decline, then maunder about for an hour, and move on.
• I’m assessing and valuing ‘quality’ research and researchers now, more than ever.
• I feel liberated about pursuing any research interest I might have, rather than those that might contribute to a coherent academic trajectory (I wasn’t very good at this when I was an academic as my lit.studies/cult.studies/heritage and sociology meanderings testify; at least now, I don’t even feel the underlying pressure to try and build a consistent research direction).

On a syntactically related note:

Speaking of ‘having a name’ in academia, I found out a while ago that I had won one of the “Writers on Rafts” prizes. My desire to be Tuckerized is going to be finally fulfilled, and by Tom Cho, no less! Tom has shared some of his new writing with me, and I can’t wait till it gets published. No-one does understated hilarity like Tom Cho.

Image credit: Photo used on this post taken by Dave King (http://www.flickr.com/photos/djking).