Monthly blog updating on the progress of my SCAR Fellowship project: “Setting an agenda for disability-focused research in Antarctic Humanities and Social Sciences”.
After a tortuously slow January, February has sped past and with it the first month of my Fellowship. There’s not much to report yet; this past month has all been about developing the project and gearing up to data collection. I’m also discovering first-hand how the peripheral elements of academic work can take up a lot of time! That said, I’m excited to finally be getting stuck in, so here’s a quick update on what has been happening…
I’ve been reading…
My specialism is Antarctica, so I’ve been starting to fill in the gaps on the other half of the literature: disability studies. Thanks to some generous people on social media (thank you especially to “the ADHD academic” on Bluesky) I’ve been collecting reading to get me up to speed with disability studies in general, as well as work on being disabled in academia. Here’s some of the recommendations I received (by no means an exhaustive list!):
I’ve been doing….
The big news this month is that the project has passed its ethics review! This has given me the green light to start working on data collection, which will mostly be via a public survey of people within the Antarctic research community. If you want to know when this goes out, you can now sign up to the project mailing list for instant updates (event of the year, obviously).
You can also follow the project on Bluesky, or if you’re not there yet, find me on X/Twitter.
To get things started, I've been meeting with various people and organisations working in EDI/Antarctic affairs, and I’m getting plenty of interesting insights that will help guide the project forward. As a PhD student in Antarctic humanities I’ve felt very lucky to be part of a community that is extremely welcoming and supportive of ECRs, and so far that’s holding true for this project too.
I've been enjoying...
To add a bit of joy to these blogs, here's something I've been enjoying in February: longer, lighter days! It's even stopped raining a few times in Cambridge in recent weeks, and the sunsets and sunrises have been lovely.
Image description: A landscape photograph of the sky at sunset. Along the bottom of the image is a line of silhouetted trees with some cranes visible in the right hand corner. The majority of the photograph is taken up by the sky, which is clouded over but lit by the sunset from below. The clouds nearest the bottom of the image are lit a subtle peach colour, fading to a dark lilac colour towards the top of the photograph. This is also the featured image for this blog post.
I can’t wait to start getting some community participation in this project, and hope to have some exciting things to share in my next update.
Comments