I am at Sydney Airport awaiting a flight to Melbourne for a few days of thinking and writing together with the Academic Identities project team. I am committing my waiting and commuting time to tasks that are never achieved at work. This list is far too ambitious for a 90 minute flight to Melbourne, but will serve as a reminder for the future.

• Watch Sara Ahmed’s lecture On Complaint:

What does it mean, and what does it cost, to make a complaint? In 2016 the acclaimed British-Australian academic resigned from her prestigious post as Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her resignation was in protest against the university’s failure to address the problem of sexual harassment. Ahmed – whose work embraces feminist, queer and race studies – has since embarked on a new research project, outside institutional academia, that was sparked by the bruising experience of trying to improve the university’s complaints process.

• Catch up on sessions I missed from Making shiFT happen, in particular a keynote from Trina Hamilton on ‘The life of slow scholarship’ and a panel by the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective on ‘Living slow scholarship’.
• Continue the Aboriginal Sydney online course I started last year (having reset my deadline for completion again).
• Read books. On my Kindle, I have Mindfulness in the Academy, Qualitative Inquiry in Neoliberal Times and Women Who Make a Fuss.

• Read articles and chapters. On my laptop, I have Biesta et al’s (2019) editorial ‘Why educational research should not just solve problems, but should cause them as well’ and the first chapter of Starting with Gender in International Higher Education Research (Henderson, 2018).
• Listen to podcasts: I have heard very few episodes of Changing Academic Life and those I have heard have been thought-provoking
• Watch Professor Michael McDaniel speak at the launch of Allens’ Reconciliation Action Plan, as discussed by Kate Bowles in a recent blog post on Music for Deckchairs.