Slow Scholarship
Starting a conversation about changing our research and education culture
A documentary...? A film on a snail. With no commentary. No explanations. Nothing to explain. Just observe. An observational wildlife doc! Presenting my first film shot and edited on a smartphone. Filmed handheld. No gimbal or tripod. No additional lens. No external microphone. Simple shots. Straight cuts. Capturing a moment, a movement, a journey. From Trivandrum in Kerala, South India during lockdown (May 2021). When my world shrunk to a house and garden. When time detached itself from the days. When the unnoticed became noticeable. When life calmed down. Like its main protagonist, 'a snail's pace' moves at a snail's pace. Presenting a challenge to the audience to keep pace with the intrepid snail. To slow down.
Dr Ian McDonald is a Documentary Filmmaker and Reader in Film Practice at Newcastle University. He is also the founder of Film@CultureLab, the home of film practice at the University.
A Snail's Pace is his first smartphone documentary. It was nominated for Best Short Documentary at the London International Smartphone Film Festival and has also screened at festivals in the USA and Africa.
Slow Scholarship Series
How can we get off the academic treadmill and do things differently? How can we recover the time to think in a busy week, and the joy of doing longer, deeper, slower research? The pandemic may have been defined by the unprecedented imperative to expedite scientific research and development, but it has also presented new, longer-term societal challenges that require slow, deep and lateral thought.
Slow scholarship is an approach that values a more fluid and inclusive temporality. It seeks to create unmetered spaces for new ideas to emerge and grow. To this effect, it embraces methodological approaches such as productive digression, playful provocation, fruitful pause, thoughtful indecision, care and intellectual disobedience. Collaboration with partners and across disciplines is at the heart of slow research. Slow scholarship values both a situated and participatory approach, based on public engagement, alongside transnational perspectives that bring into account a multiplicity of knowledge systems.
Please join us as we continue our conversation around what we want to change about our culture of research and education, and how we can go about making changes.
Slow Research
Our first event in the Slow Scholarship Forum took place in October 2021. It brought together colleagues around the topic of Slow Research. This discussion forum was hosted by Jenny Richards, Director of the Humanities Research Institute and chaired by Annie Tindley, Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. The conversation was opened by a round of thoughtful provocations before moving into informal breakout discussions among participants and a final sharing of ideas around the topic of slow scholarship.
Opening Remarks
Jenny Richards, Director of the Humanities Research Institute, Slow Scholarship Forum Host
Why might we be able to talk about slowing down, and why might we want to?
We need to think about changes in our research culture not only because we need to do so for our own well-being, but because we can: the Research Excellence Framework has changed – e.g. we can really focus on fewer outputs.
Many of us need time to be creative, to ‘play’, and to learn about and join up with other disciplines. We want to find time to take part in cross-university conversations and explore new approaches.
Provocations
Candy Rowe, Faculty of Medical Sciences and the Newcastle University Dean for Research Culture and Strategy.
The Research Vision that Candy and her team are committed to growing aims to ensure everyone has the opportunity to succeed and enjoy their research. She has been busy exploring what a positive research culture would look like with the university community, and from these discussions she has learned 4 things: that colleagues value (1) collaboration and collegiality; (2) having the freedom to grow and explore, stretch their horizons, and work in new ways; (3) fairness and inclusion in both spaces and working practices; (4) research integrity, including in the way we work with each other.
Candy is in conversation across the university to think about how to release quality time for research and teaching. How does she also manage to find time for her research? She talked about how she tries to reduce the time she spends on things that add less value and think carefully about where and how she can make a difference. She is trying to choose what she says yes to, thinking about what interests her, and where she believes she can have an impact. She has shifted her focus to development rather than getting things ‘out there’. She is aware that the conversation we are having today is Humanities and Social Sciences-based, but the slow movement is relevant to the sciences too.
Kate De Rycker, Early Career Lecturer in Renaissance Literature, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics.
Kate began by noting she has had a fairly straightforward career: first a year of teaching; then a 3-year research assistantship; then a full-time lectureship on an open-ended contract. Nonetheless, no career is without its pressures. ECAs, Kate included, feel under huge pressure at the start of their careers because they need to keep an eye on the job market. ECAs work under the assumption that they need to accrue a lot, from teaching experience to publications, to have a chance in what is a highly competitive job market. The question of research strategy is different for ECAs – you can’t really go slowly because there is so much competition. Even when you get a job there is so much scrutiny of your teaching and research quality you can’t relax. At the start of your career, you are expected to keep innovating, to keep up with new pedagogy, to take on admin roles. All of this can leach away the creative energy you need for your own research. You become used to thinking about the ‘summer holidays’ as the time for research. There is a degree of acceptance of our unmanageable work culture. Like other careers – school teaching and medicine – academia is a vocation. Tackling our acceptance of high workloads is something Kate would like to see addressed as part of these conversations so we can find time to relax and wind down as well as create and think.
Jo Robinson, Head of School, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics (since February 2021).
Jo is aware that she looks very privileged: she is a professor and a (new) Head of School: she has made it! She recognises that times have changed since she started her first job with a 6-month-old baby. She is well aware of the panicky feeling when ECAs feel compelled to say ‘yes’ to everything. She is also well aware that we all suffer from ‘imposter syndrome’ well beyond the early years of precarity; this distorts our experience of our careers long after we have found some stability. Her career has been accompanied by the drumbeat of caring, for children, for parents, and she asked if we are honest about all the competing demands on us. How did she manage? She looked back for us and recalled the help she has had to shape her research. She talked about the value of having a network of friends to guide and help. This led her to emphasise that research projects are valuable in and of themselves, and the importance of valuing the process of researching – collaborating – not just the outputs. We shouldn’t be afraid of failure; not only is this part and parcel of doing research, but it allows us to take risks and to explore; it allows for a better research experience. She asked us to think about what success/failure are in reality. How we see them depends very much on the measures applied: these can make us feel we have failed when we have in fact gained from the process of doing.
Shirley Jordon, Professor of French and acting Dean of Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
How might we recover the joy of doing longer, deeper research? This is the question asked by The Slow Professor. Shirley talked about the need for practical steps like not over-promising. She also recognised the need to do more than redistribute temporal resources. How should we think about research time, she asked? What emotions do we associate with academic time? (Mainly anxiety and stress currently, she suggested). The job propels us forward in a task and finish culture. She noted tensions that arise as a result, which we all experience daily, and invited us to think about how research time actually works. Non-instrumental, exploratory research is damaged by a short-termism focussed on outputs. We need to be able to lose track of time. We need to recognise and celebrate suspended and stuck time. Only then can we recalibrate our time to do less, not more, and create space for deeper research. She noted the opportunities for us to have these conversations, as well as the need. The pandemic has made us anxious about research again. The Research Excellence Framework now expects fewer, more mature outputs. And there are fantastic conversations happening about education across the HaSS faculty – about how teaching and research are mutually reinforcing, not in competition with one another.
General Discussion and Roundup of Ideas from Breakout Conversations
(Chaired by Annie Tindley, Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology)
Intersectional challenges are integral to how we experience these pressures.
We valued the honesty of colleagues talking about their careers, the lows as well as highs.
Might there be value in developing a maturity model, tracking a project from seed to ‘full-grown’ tree to see the years it takes to develop success (including lots of failure throughout the process)?
It was widely recognised how hard it is to change the habits formed by the experience of precarity.
There is a disjuncture between university rhetoric: e.g. promotions versus the value of slowness. Could examples of slow academics who have succeeded in being promoted be shared?
How can we break a habit of speeding and slow down especially as we approach mid-career?
We need to talk about the emotional aspects of our work, and again think different about how we measure success.
We need to recognise that there are as many careers as there are staff members.
We need to record all of our efforts – not just the end-points - and recognise that a range of activities, including ‘non-doing’ (and failure), are very valid pathways to success. We mustn’t be only outputs-focussed.
The pressure we talked about applies also to ECAs (and indeed anyone) with (apparently) lots of research time (i.e. someone employed as post-doc researchers) as well as those juggling research and teaching. There is a widespread sense of pressure of needing to be seen to excel as researchers.
There is sense of shame and/or guilt at doing all of the many things that don’t directly lead to an output. Browsing remains an essential part of the research process, but it takes an unpredictable amount of time.
We often think about time as individuals, but slowing time to create space and playfulness, pleasure and innovation, in teaching and research, is a collective endeavour.
We have visible spaces where students can rest, chat and mix, but do we have these for colleagues? Do we have the space to normalise slowing down and resting, where we can have serendipitous encounters that might give us pleasure, refresh our thinking, and enable innovation?
Slow Partnerships
Slow Scholarship Forum: Slow Partnership
Wednesday 11 May 2022 | 11:00-12:30 | online via Zoom
Slow scholarship fosters collaborative working and thinking. We can find solidarity when working collectively towards a shared purpose and inspiration when our ideas resonate in unexpected situations. The partnerships we build both within and outside academia have the potential to challenge, galvanise and nourish our work, often giving us the opportunity to step outside ourselves and find collective solutions to shared challenges. Partnerships are often the communities we choose to create.
Yet collaboration is not without its challenges, especially those arising from time pressures. For many, the Covid-19 pandemic has only accelerated the need to justify how we spend our time, eroding our capacity to nurture partnerships from a place of curiosity. For some, opportunities to work collectively towards a shared vision must be weighed against meeting individual objectives in a world that demands we keep moving. Many collaborative partners are also considering long term changes to their objectives and purpose, whilst concurrently rethinking their delivery models in response to urgent demands.
What spaces can collaborative partnerships occupy within a slow scholarship culture? How do we create partnerships that encourage creative exploration for all participants, where all experiences, ideas and desires can be voiced equitably and safely? How do we harmonise competing time scales, which often pitch essential modes of trust-building against the spiralling demand to quantify the ‘impact’ of our activities? How do we recognise, share, and dismantle the power inherent in the luxury of ‘having time’? How do we collaborate in a time of crisis?
Join us and sign up here!
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Programme Cat Button (Senior Lecturer; Architecture Planning and Landscape) Alice Cree (NuACT Fellow; Geography, Politics & Sociology) Rachel Pattinson (Strategic Cultural Partnerships Manager) Anne Whitehead (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature)
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Bibliography
Berg, Maggie and Seeber, Barbara (2016). Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
O'Neill, Maggie (2014). The Slow University: Work, Time and Well-Being [58 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 15(3), Art. 14,
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1403146.
Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, and Winifred Curran (2015). “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University”. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14 (4), 1235-59. https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058.