Peace and Planning

It has been a good long while since I’ve posted and honestly I have been deliberating about whether or not I should return to blogging. There are several reasons why I am back at it (which I will get to shortly) but in the meantime, here’s a brief recap since I’ve been gone:

• I’ve had the good fortune to teach the past three semesters and it turns out I love being in the classroom 👩‍🏫 That said, thanks to a fellowship from my university I’m grateful for the break I have from teaching this year to focus on my research and writing (more news on this soon!).
• This summer was a blur, but highlights included: practicing my developing Tamil skills on a trip to see family in India, getting helpful feedback on my work from some fantastic doctoral students at the University of Toronto School of Cities Summer Workshop on Urban Mixed Methods across the Disciplines, some post-workshop Canadian travel (Montréal was marvelous!), and a dip down to Richmond (eager to go back for a proper urban explorer visit 🤓).
• I’m nearing the end of my doctoral program so am…on the JOB MARKET this fall (?!) 🫠 If you come across any neat faculty, post-doc, or fellowship opportunities you think I’d be a good fit for (or know of any folks I should connect with as I explore options for next steps in academia), I’d be grateful if you sent them my way 🙏🏻

Which brings me to the real focus of this post – my recommitment to blogging. I’ve read a few books this summer which really made me question whether I should – Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call and Jon Haidt’s The Anxious Generation continued my learning and thinking about how screens and our hyper-connected world are wreaking havoc on many facets of our society. At the same time, it is laughable to think that this little blog, with perhaps the tiniest readership on the web, is contributing to the “attention economy” – if it would, perhaps I wouldn’t be concerned about finding that sweet, sweet academic job. So, my hope is to try an experiment to get me back into blogging where I post once a week(-ish). Now that I’ve resolved the above-stated existential conundrum, here’s why I’m embarking on this experiment:

1. I’ve had a few people tell me they stumbled across my blog and read a post that introduced them to an idea they had never considered. On the off-chance that an open-mind is stuck in a scroll-fest, I wouldn’t mind if my writing catches their eye and invites them to look at the world through a different lens.
2. This is not news, of course, but academic publishing is not well-suited for public consumption. It takes months to get an article out into the world, and if you are successful at that, most normal people won’t read it because a) they find it boring and/or b) they don’t want to pay for it (you, dear reader, can’t be blamed for having either of these sentiments). I hope to be able to pay for future articles to be open access (oh, did I mention I recently/finally published my first article?!), but in the meantime I will take full advantage of technology that makes public scholarship possible.
3. I want to get more comfortable with having half-baked ideas and writing out in the world. I used to spend hours and hours researching, refining, and polishing my blog posts for fear that someone would find a fault. Well, it helps that no one really reads my blog but even if they did, they are likely to find many faults, and they would be with much more than a typo or missing citation. Plus, I’ve encountered many other PhD students hesitant to let any work – let alone drafty draft work – see the light of day and I’d love to normalize the process of crafting with all its imperfections.
4. It has been interesting to track my intellectual journey over the past few years’ worth of blog posts. As an early career researcher, the ability to see the trajectory between where I was and where I am now is so helpful and affirming as I chart my path forward.
5. I have so many tidbits that I’ve collected – observations while on a walk, experiences while on a bike ride, quotations from a podcast, snippets from a book – and no real place (or dedicated practice) to noodle on them. Who knows if they’ll ever grow from their seed or be harvested for my dissertation, but I want to plant them somewhere and see if they grow. 🌱
6. Writing is a skill that I want to continue to develop. What better way than to play with words on a page without the pressure of dissertation doom!

So there you have it – my North Star of sorts to remind me why I’m getting back into this practice. I welcome you to subscribe to the blog if you feel as uneasy about the attention economy as I do, or don’t want to take a chance that the algorithms will serve up the latest content offered here. In the meantime, I invite you to get curious – what comes to mind when you imagine a peaceful transportation system? ✌️🚸