It has been quiet on the blog front. During a busy time at work and in life, not posting has been an act of self-preservation and radical self care:

Here are two extracts from Mindfulness in the Academy that explain what I mean (with thanks to the editors for sharing their work with me).

From Narelle Lemon and Sharon McDonough in a chapter entitled ‘Mindfully Living and Working in the Academy’:

Selfcare in the higher education context is often a dirty word; that is something we don’t talk about, it is something extra, often dropped in the fast-paced nature of work requirements (Berg & Seeber, 2016).

From Monica Taylor and Emily J. Klein’s chapter ‘Tending to Ourselves, Tending to Each
Other: Nurturing Feminist Friendships to Manage Academic Lives’:

We embrace the feminist ethic of care drawing from the work of Lorde (1988) and Ahmed (2014) and have adopted “self-care as warfare” as our mantra … Caring for ourselves, each other, and our colleagues and students is a politically disruptive activity within an academy which devalues such practices (Mountz et al. 2015). We understand that our own self care is part of the work of caring for others.

And a note to mindfulness skeptics, who hate the way in which self-care is co-opted by neoliberalism, I hear you. More on what self-care has looked like for me in a future post. In the meantime, look after yourself.