Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

(P Larkin 6 April 1954 TWW) 

 

-       Offering opportunities for upskilling and development in terms of developing future research projects and bid writing.  

-       Creating opportunities for networking and mentorship (important for me as an ECR). 

-        Hearing about opportunities and getting a sense of what is possible/attainable, also where there are gaps or areas in which I could bring new ideas and innovation.

-       Replicating ‘corridor conversations’ which germinate cooperative projects (in as much as is possible in the land of Zoom, to counter the distance imposed by WFH in light of Covid – I think today’s meeting was valuable in itself, as a new joiner to the university, I’ve seen a lot of new faces already as part of this process).

 

What will be success for me? 

 

-       Attaining funding, creating a more permanent role for myself.  

-       Feeling confident that what I do (arts based and ethnographic research methods) has value to other colleagues across disciplines 

-       seeing the arts and humanities represented within wider science / planning / engineering projects as part of the research process as well as outputs. 

 

What will ensure more support?

 

-       Tangible benefits to participation (ie. benefits to PGRs and ECRs of the opportunity to be part of joint publishing?).  

-       General celebratory, exciting, exploratory atmosphere!  Making the discussions and events enjoyable, for their own sake, which links into the discussion thread of how to keep such an endeavour ‘alive’ and not let it be crushed under the weight of its own bureaucratic aspects.

 

Barriers to entry for my peers.

 

-       Seniority/hierarchy.  I liked the focus in the breakout sessions on what ECRs could contribute and how they could lead.  I hope this is developed further!

 

 

Other thoughts

-       Concerned to escape/evade the process of solely forming teams to address ‘challenges’ in the sense of government or international development led agendas.  Although this is naturally important for funding etc, I’d like to contribute to creating space for more open ended forms of enquiry. I think this is a key benefit of arts based research, in that they can help to open up a wider field of enquiry or more imaginative scoping of research questions and possible directions (which may well turn out to yield instrumentally or practically beneficial results, but aren’t driven by the necessity to do so.