Karen and Kel are back from their summer hiatus, and they talk re-entry. Re-entry, that is, to a shitshow academic year in a pandemic that, in the US, has been mismanaged to a degree that almost defies belief. Academics are coming back to campuses that are for the most part totally unprepared and unwilling to deal with actual student and staff vulnerabilities to COVID-19, and confronting a level of lethal indifference from many administration and students both that has shocked even the most jaded among us (ie, Karen). Drawing from a re-entry model developed by an Australian academic, Karen and Kel talk about ways that administrators can improve re-entry processes, and ways that vulnerable and burnt out faculty and grad students can think about how best to proceed.
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Because of COVID19 and the economic fallout, 2020 academic hiring is dead in the water. Karen created a crowdsource list of hiring freezes in March, and it’s up to about 350 right now, and that doesn’t include all the campuses within state systems that are listed. Catastrophically bad conditions will certainly prevail for the 2020-2021 hiring season. What to do about it? Karen and Kel talk strategy, going postacademic, and starting the hard work of distancing yourself from the academic cult. ...
One of the peculiarities of academia is that you have to be able to explain your project before you’ve actually done it. And all projects have to start somewhere–at some level you are conjuring a new project out of the force of your imagination. So… how to do that? In this episode Kel and Karen talk about Ideation, Conceptualization, and Production and how important it is to keep the parts of the academic process separate. Ideation is the blue-sky thinking and things like mind maps and research journals are helpful; conceptualization is where the project starts to take form, and here outlining is a fantastic tool – and outlining allows for a generative oscillation between ideation and conceptualization. With these steps done, production–the actual clicky clacky typing of new words on the keyboard – becomes so much easier. In other words, if you’re driving from LA to New York, you don’t just start driving randomly–you need a map! Come for the advice, stay for the metaphors. And PLEASE, on this one, let us know if this was helpful and if so, why. Karen wants to know. [Become a subscribing member for just $3.99 a month and get access to our subscriber only goodies like free webinar recordings, AMAs, the chance to suggest topics, early access to the podcast video that we record in our house in Oregon, and — new from this week – live videos ...
Continuing from Part I last week, Karen and Kel continue sharing 12 strategies for confronting disappointment in a healthy and productive way, targeted to anybody confronting the hard reality that they didn’t get the jobs (or grants, or publication acceptances) that they’d been hoping for. ...
