5 weeks?! Crumbs - even by my standards, that's slow going! Peak Teach was more plateau than peak, and it's only now - a week past the end of term, that I have finally cleared my desk of marking (45 hours' worth!), open days and industrial placements, and have the chance to pause and take stock. It hasn't all been teaching and admin, though: indeed, one of the great ironies of academic blogging is that the things that are most interesting to blog about tend to keep you too busy to blog!
Anyway - I intend to produce exactly one more substantive blog post this year: my traditional "Year in Review" post. That's partly because it'll take me a while to write my thoughts up properly and I have other things that I need to get back on top of before the Christmas break; and partly because I've done quite well on the blogging front this year, and I want to save some good material for next year, rather than rushing it all out before Christmas.
Anyway, in no particular order, here's a summary of the highlights of the last five weeks:
1) The third of the "Augmenting the Body" seminars took place on the 5th of December, with Dan Goodley and Angharad Beckett presenting on Disability and the DISHuman - some really interesting thoughts on technology, vulnerability, disability, and the posthuman;
2) The first of our AHRC-funded "Tracking People" workshops on the ethical and technnical challenges around electronic monitoring went ahead on the 14th of December, bringing together a range of people from Law, Ethics, technology, medicine and criminal justice to discuss the landscape - a really interesting day, with some fascinating cross-overs with the issues raised in Augmenting the Body;
3) I attended a great Innovation Workshop on rehab technology and unmet patient needs, run by Translate, among others. It was very informative, and thought provoking. Apart from anything else, it convinced me of the need for much of the objective measures I spend my time developing with PACLab (which was nice), but it was also a good opportunity to get new perspectives, and I was really struck by the problem of deconditioning, and the fact that rehab is a 24/7 process. Again, much crossover with the Augmenting the Body and Tracking People networks in various places...
4) Work has continued apace on PSAT (the Postural Sway Assessment Tool), which has started its provisional field testing and is shaping up nicely. Plans are now afoot for the final stages of the project, and we are getting into some detail now.
5) Finally, the Wellcome Trust Seed Award that I am involved with (led by Stuart Murray) on continuing our Augmenting the Body work, has been funded! That bodes well for next year...
6) I've finally decided to bite the bullet and get stuck into some Deleuze - specifically, Deleuze and Guatarri's "Thousand Plateaus", where the "assemblage" concept that so struck me in Margrit Schildrick's talk. There's a whole blog post in that, since to discuss it one must necessarily take a detour into matters of communication and the philosophy of science.
Until next time!
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