Busy, Busy, Busy

I was going to call this post "The Beginning of the End", in honour of the gradual winding down that occurs as exhibitions and exams finish. So manic has this period been, however, that it has now wound down and, er, ended before I got round to pressing send. Such is blogging: there is an irony that when things are at their most interesting, you're too busy to blog. At times like this, micro-blogging through Twitter is a lifeline - a reminder that you haven't died, fallen off a cliff or fallen seriously ill (and it is now fully twelve months since I returned to work!).

But why have I been so busy? Exams, coursework, exhibitions, of course. Exam boards, too. This week has seen course and module reviews, not to mention planning for the summer, and the background chaos of our current politics, which is hard to avoid - especially as it increasingly resembles an episode of House of Cards or Game of Thrones. Truly, these are interesting times.

This week has been one of those liminal spaces that crop up in academic life. The exams rush suddenly over, you emerge into the summer - things that have been dropped must be picked up, new projects started. Planning is frustrating, and not very rewarding, but very necessary. I learned long ago that you can't just drop your teaching and work on the first (or most interesting) piece of research that comes along.

It hasn't all been planning. After much effort, we've finally got a multidisciplinary reading group together, which has now met three times, involving Stuart Murray from English and Sita Popat from Performing Arts. Its focus is on technology and the body, particularly in terms of post humanism. We've read and discussed Johnny Mnemonic, Tony Prescott's response to the EPSRC principles of robotics, and Louis Bucciarelli's Between Thought and Object in Engineering Design. Some great and varied pieces - I'll try to get my thoughts written up here at some point. It's been a great experience, very thought provoking, and good to get the views of other disciplines. It has also won us  small amount of funding from the University for a series of seminars on Augmenting the Body over the next academic year. It should be good.

I'm also part of an AHRC network on the Technical and Ethical challenges of Electronic Tagging, focusing on offenders, dementia patients and children with Anthea Hucksleby (Professor of Law), Kevin Macnish  (researcher on the ethics of surveillance), and Justin Keen (healthcare). You'll notice that I'm getting closer to a full house on my multidisciplinary bingo card...

Anyway, we're organising a series of workshops over the next academic year  (it's going go be a busy academic year...), and held our first proper meeting to plan it his week. We held on til after the referendum, in the hopes it would provide some clarity.  Much help that was!

So that's this week. Next week, it shifts to being all about delivery: I'm looking forward to it!