Productive (adj)

Last time I talked about attending a conference with a baby. Many of you gave me great feedback about your own experiences. Unfortunately, some women shared stories of departments or committees which weren't supportive of students having babies during graduate school, or even talking about being parents. Frankly, that attitude is a symptom of dysfunctional PhD program culture, something Sarah Kendzior explores in an excellent piece in Vitae from this past summer. Perhaps all we can do through discussions like these is to share our experiences, support each other through the tough stuff, and  slowly change the culture of academia  together. Now there's a nice thought. In this post I'll be describing how you can hold a family-friendly conference. More and more conference committees are ensuring that parents of babies and young children can participate in their events. It's not difficult to make things much, much easier for parent attendees, and they'll really a...

Preamble: the title of this post officially "gives it away": I'm ABD with a B-A-B-Y. Most everyone I interact with professionally knows this, and I wasn't keeping it secret from the internet , but there's still a disadvantage to being a  mother in academia , and many hesitate to talk about being parents publicly. I think that's unreasonable, and I hope that this and similar posts can be helpful to other academic parents facing similar issues. Last week my family attended HSS / PSA in windy Chicago, and it was a great example of a conference that took families with babies into consideration. My next post will be about the good choices those conference organizers made, but this one is directed towards the parent(s) conferencing with a baby in tow (note: some of these tips may not apply to multiple/older children or other types of dependent care, areas in which I'm not experienced). 1. Be baby-travel savvy.   There are plenty of usefu...

Here are my tips for putting together a successful panel for an academic conference. Committees are happy to get panel applications rather than individual abstracts because it means less work for them. These are simple tips that have worked for me in the past. Your experiences may differ, of course, depending on your field of study and the particular conference, the vicissitudes of the conference committee, and the "trendiness" of the topics that year. -Find another person whose work and your own have the same broader subject matter or approach. It helps if they are from a different institution or department from your own, but it's not necessary. Don't be afraid to venture outside your own level: professors and postdocs and grad students can happily be housed together. I have found it best when you are at least acquainted beforehand. -Ask them to join your panel. If yes, you are now a twosome, and it gets easier. (If no, repeat step one.) -Brainstorm for ...

Last week I gave a talk at the annual meeting of 4S, the Society for Social Studies of Science , in Copenhagen. It was a great excuse to visit a city I'd never been to before, and a nice change of scenery from an autumn devoted to reading for my comprehensive exam (and in York's STS program, is it ever comprehensive !) After giving myself permission to enjoy my trip and not feel guilty for not keeping up the reading pace, I ended up doing much more work than I expected; mainly writing notes on pdf files of papers in my Documentary Film list. I use GoodReader to read and annotate files on my iPad, which was much easier than lugging stacks of printed papers or books on a transatlantic flight. The difficulty is that I find the iPad sluggish when I try to type notes and work off the pdf file at the same time, so I just wrote in my moleskin notebook and typed them up later. The conference itself was vibrant and well-designed, much like Copenhagen. Based on the theme of "De...

It's starting to be clear to me that I am no good at keeping this blog updated. My last post was from last November, and it wasn't a "real" post; instead it was advertising a conference I slightly helped to organize. It was a wonderful conference, mind you, but having recently heard all about the benefits of having online outlets for our thoughts and musings, academic and otherwise, for graduate students by the visiting postdoc at my department, Melinda Baldwin , I'm motivated to update more frequently. The last time I worked on my online presence, about 6 months ago, I maxed out my facebook privacy settings, started to tweet , and built an academia.edu page . The next step is probably to build my own academic website, and most universities offer their graduate students the resources to do just that. Some of my friends have blogs that integrate their professional lives (CV, publications, etc.) with some outside interests, and some run more research-nuggets type...

I'm part of the organizing team for Philopolis Guelph, a philosophy conference that engages with everyday topics and includes the whole community, not just the academics. Here is the call for activities! Daily life is full of interesting philosophical issues (How ethical are my eating practices? Why do I believe what I believe? What does it mean to be sexed or gendered?). However, academic philosophers these days could be doing a better job of engaging in dialogue with members of the broader public, including researchers in other academic fields, who are also interested in these questions. Philopolis is an event that aims to facilitate just such an exchange through panel discussions, workshops, and activities of many kinds. Philopolis welcomes and actively encourages the curious of mind from all backgrounds to take part, drawing on this diversity to enrich the whole. The event is generously supported by the University of Guelph, and offers free admission as well as light sna...

There have been some pretty exciting developments in the last few months, and my poor blogging skills mean you may not have heard about any of them. Get ready for a barrage of updates! February: I applied to York University's  Science & Technology Studies graduate program . It's an interdisciplinary field that looks at science and society through the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies. This program seemed like a better fit for my project on wildlife films and the public perception of animal behaviour. March: I was accepted (yay!) and began preparing for the transition from U of T to York. We also got an exciting new desk, courtesy of IKEA. April: Isaac proposed and I sad yes! (I told you this would get exciting!) May: Loads of travel. I attended the 6th European Spring School in History of Science and Popularization on Visual Representations in Science, which meant a week on the sunny island of Menorca, Spain. Then I flew home to Montreal...

I attended a conference this weekend on the strength of an abstract I sent in earlier in the summer. In between being accepted to the conference and now I had some significant feedback on the paper upon which the abstract was based (short version: write a better paper) and so the content of my intended presentation changed significantly during the last month. Arriving at this gorgeous facility the night before, then, my slides needed some work. In addition, I had to condense about 25 minutes of material to 20, then 15 once I found out that was the intended time, and psych myself up to explain my ideas to a room full of invited big-deal speakers. I want to point out some things I noticed while getting ready. First of all, under the stress of getting this talk ready over the last few weeks, I had been surprisingly good at devoting time and mental energy to it. Basically, the reason I was burning the midnight oil on my slides was not that I had been slacking off, since pretty much all I...