Some good news this week with the publication of a collection Reimagining the Academy edited by Ali Black and Rachael Dwyer. I am looking forward to reading the whole, with its focus on kindness, connection and an ethics of care. The editors describe the focus of the book as “the building of a kinder values-driven academy” which sounds like a palate cleanser!

With Catherine Manathunga, I have a chapter on remaking academic garments. It was written in response to a call to reimagine academia “like [the pleasure of wearing] a loose-fitting garment—finding liberating and enabling ways to wear an academic life.” We describe the ways in which we have let out the seams of academic life, lifted its hems, changed its colour, its shape and texture.

We share some of the work of others which shows that bodies, clothing and makeup in academia are worthy of intellectual attention in relation to ethics, performance, power, and identity politics. See, for example, Thesis Whisperer, Tenure, She Wrote, The Professor Is In’s Makeup Monday, Stylish Academic, and Women, Wardrobes and Leadership.

And in scholarship, Fran Kelly (2018) thoughtfully articulates an ‘academic life, in textiles’, sharing four vignettes of garments that represent points of transition in her academic life—being a PhD candidate (a neo-Victorian skirt), becoming a mother (a brown apron), teaching (a long dress with sleeves, fitted waist and full skirt) and promotion to senior lecturer (a blue woven shirt with threads of black and white). In an autoethnographic account as a Ghanaian-Cameroonian-American Black woman, Krys Osei (2019) shares “freedom rooted in the act of allowing myself as a young Black girl to exist out loud and boldly. With the handy assistance of glitter, sequins, and rhinestones, I was able to be without the imminent threat of behavioural discipline that followed me at school” (p. 734). Finally, Briony Lipton (2020) links women academics’ professional dress to career progression, noting the gendered, classed, raced and heteronormative impact of dress as “aesthetic labour” (p. 2).  

In the chapter, I articulate some of reasons I started this blog. I started blogging once I had secure work, when I had time and space and energy to write. I had been an avid blog reader for many years, and was searching for a blog that explored difficult questions about slow academia in relation to the politics of higher education, university governance, academic roles and identities, and academic activism. Activism, particularly in relation to the operations of the higher education sector and the organisation itself, has been nourishing to me. Much of it is ordinary work: participating in scholarship, academic governance, teaching and union activities, what Gill (2009) calls “small-scale micro-negotiations of power in the academy” (p. 231).

Several years on, blogging has provided an opportunity to think through writing and reflect-in-action (Schön, 1987). Thomson and Kamler (2010) call it ‘writing along the way’—“writing that is intended to sort out what we think, why, and what the implications of a line of thought might be” (p. 149). Blogging is incredibly freeing for an academic writer, constrained by the conventions, requirements and expectations of research and publishing. (All too often, I have to delete a sentence to appease a reviewer; I’ve learnt to hold words loosely, and let them go without regret). In a blog post, words follow my whims, and I can write about dystopian fiction, porridge, trees, and family outings. The pleasures of writing the quotidian run deep. Most of all, blogging has provided a means to resist a particular style of academia: idealised academic superheroes, quantified measures of productivity, contagious anxiety, a finite game.

Calling myself a slow academic is a way of wearing academia like a loose-fitting garment.

This is evident my working from home set-up last week (how good are these comfy black and gold polka dot flats from Rollie!)