A week in the life

Last week, I was struck by the sheer variety of work I get to undertake. I thought it might be interesting to share (that could be false; I'm aware). So, what did I do?

Monday: I spent all day at an 'Executive Leadership' training course. The long and the short of it is that, with taking on the role of Head of School in Humanities as of August 2020, it seemed advisable to do a bit of training to support that. I enrolled onto a course, and last Monday spent all day learning about leadership and management. For those cynically minded among you (!), I should say that this was both good and useful. It's easy to underplay the value of good leadership and management, but I learned a number of things that will, I expect, prove very helpful. So, all good.

Tuesday: I worked from home. The disadvantage of spending all of Monday at a training course is that all of Monday's other work had to go somewhere! And to Tuesday it went. I had a few bits and pieces of 'homework' from the course, which took an hour or so. I'm also quite involved with Quality Assurance here at UoN, and so spent several hours looking at cases and processes from across the University. There was time to send a few emails to co-authors of papers that I'm working on, before the end of the day.

Wednesday: mostly meetings! Well, an UG dissertation meeting at 9, and then meetings about all sorts of different things from 12 until 5. Included in there were meetings about Athena Swan and REF--I'm currently responsible for the Department's REF2021 return, though I'll be handing that off as I start to take over responsibility for the School.

Thursday: planning and admin took centre stage. In the week I had the good news that two papers had been accepted ('Grounding at a Distance', with Sam Baron and Kristie Miller (Phil Studies); 'Trust in Education', with Andy Fisher (Educational Philosophy and Theory)). Both acceptances require a little bit of form-filling and then for the papers to be deposited in our institutional repository. Web-pages need updating. All little things, but take a few minutes. Then some preparation. I had a talk to give on Friday (more of which anon) and a fairly significant Quality Assurance meeting in the afternoon that required me to take a look at, and understand, some 50-60 pages of documentation. There was also some follow up work required from the Wednesday meetings. There was also time for an hour or so looking at some parts of a book that I'm working on with Sam and Kristie.

Friday: another all-day event, this time at an NHS Leaders event. I very much enjoyed attending and learned a lot about internal process & structure in the local sphere of the NHS. I also had the privilege of giving a talk for around an hour on building trust (that was based on several recent papers of mine). I met some really interesting people and had a great time.

Saturday: in the afternoon I helped lead a funding-application writing workshop for the Midlands 4 Cities doctoral training partnership, in my role as one of the UoN site directors for the consortium.

This week is looking no less varied. I've a meeting with a local charity, PhD supervision, a chapter to finish for a book, two papers to send back to co-authors, and QA, REF and Athena Swan work to do. I'm also meeting a delegation from an overseas university to talk about Quality Assurance. There will also be some M4C bits and pieces to look after. It's hugely fun to have such variety in my work, but it's also very far from what I imagined I'd be doing when I set out down an academic career path. And I suppose, really, that's my reason for sharing this rather than just reflecting in my own time. Academia can make all manner of requirements that we don't normally expect and I think it can be really useful to surface and talk about some of them.

In the meantime, coffee.

Presentism and the spans of time

Dave and I got the good news that 'Presentism and the Spans of Time' has been accepted for publication at Philosophy and Phenomenological Research a while back. The paper itself tackles a specific problem: that presentists can’t employ their usual method for analysing tensed singular quantification, using primitive ‘slice’ tense operators, to analyse plurals. One option is to introduce a new theoretical primitive: a ‘span’-operator. But there are reasons to worry about this option. In this paper, we offer a strategy for presentists to address the problem that requires only slice-operators. I quite like the paper and, as ever, really enjoyed working with Dave on it. We have several other papers in progress, as well as another paper under review. There is also just the inkling of a book project. We shall have to see what comes of it all. 

Communicating Philosophy

A few years back, working with Andy Fisher, I set up a new module in Philosophy: Communicating Philosophy. The idea is to get students to communicate philosophical ideas through different modes of communication. We use things like: legal briefs, lesson plans, posters, funding applications, and so on. We ask external folks to come in and give talks on lots of these--especially where we've alumni in relevant areas.

Today, because of my involvement in the M4C, I got to go and give a guest lecture on how to apply for postgraduate funding. It was lovely to be back in the module. It's my favourite module that I've ever taught. It's a challenge for students, because the assignments come weekly and require them to pick up new skills each week. But the creativity and insight you see in that module is consistently beyond anything that I've seen elsewhere in the curriculum.

As well as being a nice chance to reminisce, it was nice to work closely with Andy Fisher who's teaching the module this year. I think he's the best teacher I've ever come across--as well as being a wonderful colleague. Great work from the students today, and a lovely excuse to work with Andy. A lot to like about my Monday afternoon.