There’s two kinds of scholarship today: there’s Titanic studies and there’s deckchair studies.

— McKenzie Wark

And as the smart ship grew

            In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too

— Thomas Hardy

I’m an academic at an Australian university. I’ve led an educational design team through an institutional LMS transition, and during that time I thought and wrote about #edtech. I was shifted out of that job by a serious cancer diagnosis that took a year of treatment, and during that time I wrote about illness and precarity of work.

I’m currently Associate Dean International in our Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. My day job involves thinking and strategy writing in the field of internationalisation of higher education in all its forms, some of which are transformative, and some of which are retail. This is university governance as crucible: everything about higher education in general gets tested when it’s thrown into the bright hot bowl of internationalisation.

I write here about assumptions that regulate work, innovation, profit and risk in higher education; and in the way that the system shaped by these assumptions affects those of us working in universities.

As someone once put it in the search that led them to the deckchairs, this is a blog about:

“shared governance consensus bullshit.”

I’m not writing any of this in any official capacity, obviously.

My other day job is to teach and support PhD students. As a narrative researcher and educator, I’m committed to exploring open practices of teaching and learning amplified by hospitality rather than marketisation. Jesse Stommel’s proposals for a reflective hybrid pedagogy make sense to me.

The intellectual bravery we need right now is to believe that we can imaginatively rebuild something valuable in digital space, something that has what we value most about education: the protections, the safety, the excitement, the moments of ecstatic learning, the epiphanies, the collaborations, the debates, the discoveries, and the moments of quiet reflection.

blog design and hosting

For three years this blog had a banner image adapted from a famous photograph of a New York 3D cinema audience posing for photographer J R Eyerman in 1953; the version I used was taken from a pencil case, photographed by my friend R J Thompson in 2011. At the centre of the crowd, there’s a stern-faced woman, who put on her good hat to go out and meet the technological marvel of her age. She keeps me thinking about what it means to show up and watch, from inside the spectacle.

The new banner images in 2018 include a sketch report of the sinking made by John B “Jack” Thayer, Titanic survivor; some bits and pieces from surviving Titanic menus; a photograph of a wrought iron bench end still bolted to the deck of the Titanic; a photograph I took of a sign in a cafe where customers were invited to help themselves to hot sauce; words that were on a whiteboard when I walked in to a room to teach; and the detail from something I made at Mary Freer’s Compassion Lab workshop in 2017.

Music for Deckchairs is hosted by the wonderful Reclaim Hosting. I can’t recommend their care and support too highly.

update

In 2020, we all went home and in May 2020 I stopped writing. This stopping was sudden, unexpected and complete. In July 2022, I have come back to see what is here, to learn all over again what I think, and to try to thread the beads together on a string in a way that makes sense to me.

You’re warmly welcome to leave comments here or get in touch via Twitter: @KateMfD

or mastodon: @katebowles@mastodon.social

or email: kbowles@uow.edu.au

I’m not on Facebook.

Thanks for stopping by,

— Kate Bowles