On resistance

Hello world! It’s been a while.

I starting using this website as an academic portfolio of sorts while doing a PhD. It was a place to share the work that I was doing with the community that I was doing it for. Too much of the academic work that is produced is never shared with the people it most impacts. I wanted to rectify that in some way – to invert the ivory tower that never felt very inviting to me, even though I spent a long time navigating it.

I’ve been deliberating for some time, since submitting my PhD in December 2020, about how best to share the many, many words and ideas that made up my doctoral thesis. I’m still not quite sure how to tell the stories that I collected and who I should tell them to. I wanted to flip ideas about sexual violence on their head by investigating a well-loved, highly influential, and highly gendered space – community Australian Rules football.

Since submitting my PhD, something happened. I ran far away from the issues that I explored in my thesis headlong towards other ideas and passions. I wrapped myself in the embrace of something new and didn’t think of my thesis at all. I just didn’t want to. I was exhausted thinking about tackling and untangling those ideas to make them into something meaningful. This is not unique to me. It happens to many (maybe most) people who finish a PhD.

Instead, I’ve buried myself in community-based work – in itself another version of ‘inverting the ivory tower’. I’ve gone back to my roots – fervently challenging assumptions about people who have been deliberately disempowered by our political systems and structures – and I’ve been thinking about resistance.

Resistance is the common thread between the work that I did to receive a doctorate (ironic, I know) and the work that I do now. Maybe it will be what leads me back to working with the ideas within my thesis. I have a feeling it will. Stay tuned.