In late 2022, I wrote this blog post about whether an AI would soon be writing our PhD thesis. Since then, Bron Eager has written this thoughtful reflection on whether you should let an AI write your thesis, I wrote another post about what you would lose if an AI wrote your thesis, and Inger Mewburn and Jason Downs had a nuanced conversation about where they are up to right now on their most recent episode of On the Reg. The capacity of LLMs/AI has grown exponentially since I last wrote something, and is now turning up as an essential part of Google, Microsoft Office and other megalithic softw ..read more

This is the first in a new series of blog posts exploring what it means to be an embodied learner, or an embodied researcher. I’m currently thinking we’ll do the five senses… but we’ll see how it all goes. I’ve obviously been interested in researchers having bodies and looking after their bodies for ages. I talk about stretching, about rest, about breathing, about self-care, about disability, about food, about exercise, about gender, about travel, about posture, about elocution, about ergonomics. A lot of this ended up in my new book on Writing Well and Being Well. But I’ve just pitched a conf ..read more

One of the nice bright sparks at the end of this year (which has been full of bright sparks, including the publication of Writing Well and Being Well, and my PhD candidate hearing that they passed!), was publishing an article on reflexivity in writing through a lens of Foucault with the absolute supernova researchers David Bright and Amanda McKay. The article is open access (thank you Monash!) so anyone can read it. This article had a long and winding journey to publication. I would say the final article is much less the article any of us wanted to write as a series of responses to the many ti ..read more

It’s the time of the year when much of the southern hemisphere goes on summer holidays, and the northern hemisphere is taking some time off for Christmas and New Year. So you may have ‘relaxation’ on your to-do list coming up. One of the challenges for planning to relax, is that relaxation doesn’t ‘just happen’. If you’ve been wired or tired for months now, if you haven’t been sleeping, if your brain whirs like an exhausted hamster… then that’s not going to all disappear simply because you have booked some annual leave in the university’s HR system. Many of us have tried to get ourselves to re ..read more

It is now the season of gifts for a number of communities who live in the place I live. And so I’m pulling out this idea I’ve had sitting in the drafts drawer for a while (ahem, since June 2022), and finally wrapping it up in gift paper and tying a ribbon around it so I can gift it to you. I have previously written about reading with generosity (see also here). But I think I have not yet written about gift reading, an idea I’ve been bouncing around with my favourite radical librarian, Clare O’Hanlon. Here are the first thoughts towards something. Thank you for the gift of your reading, and you ..read more

Over on the Whisper Collective Podcast, I’ve just released a series of audio recordings from the new book, Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond. In this eighth and final practice, I get you to imagine wellbeing for everything around you as a way to frame your writing in positivity. Maybe add this to your writing playlist, or keep it for a tough time to help you remember that we are all in this with you. Mindfulness is about being present in the moment with your writing, but there may be difficult feelings there. It can help to move from rehearsing how badly you feel, to articula ..read more

Over on the Whisper Collective Podcast, I’ve just released a series of audio recordings from the new book, Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond. In this seventh practice, I just thought it would be nice to have something joyful in your ears for when it’s easy to see everything that it’s quite right, and would be good to be reminded of things that are good and kind and helpful. You will need to write an Acknowledgements section in your thesis, and you can have fun working out who you will thank and how you’ll include acknowledgements in your thesis. But you might also want to mak ..read more

Over on the Whisper Collective Podcast, I’ve just released a series of audio recordings from the new book, Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond. Here is another breathing practice. In this fifth practice, I walk you through the second of three breathing practices. This one is best if you need to feel fired up. It’s hard to read and count and breathe, but it’s easy to breathe if someone else keeps count for you, so let me help. Taking a deep breath often makes us think about calming down (and I gave you a practice for a calming breath here). But we can use our breathing to get fi ..read more

Over on the Whisper Collective Podcast, I’ve just released a series of audio recordings from the new book, Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond. In this fourth practice, I walk you through the first of three breathing practices. This one is best if you need to feel calmer. It’s hard to read and count and breathe, but it’s easy to breathe if someone else keeps count for you, so let me help you out. Breathing is amazing. Your brain checks in on your breathing to find out how things are going in the body, including to work out if it should help out by pumping out stress or calm rea ..read more

Over on the Whisper Collective Podcast, I’ve just released a series of audio recordings from the new book, Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond. In this third practice, I encourage you to close your eyes and imagine the big picture context for your research. It’s hard to read with your eyes shut, so we made it audible. The English-language proverb ‘they can’t see the forest for the trees’ means that someone is so involved in the details (the trees) that they can’t see the big picture (the forest). As a PhD researcher, you need to spend a lot of time looking at tiny details. Micr ..read more