I always thought the UK was a train country. By that, I mean you always hear about how good the trains are there, how easy they are to take, and how connected the country is. I also think the Victorian steam era of the UK heavily features the development of its rail network, so it’s […]
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the OOC AHRC DTP conference at Cambridge. If your first thought was “that’s a lot of acronyms!”, you are 100% right and it is a bit of a mouthful to write out or say. Essentially, the conference was for HDR candidates primarily at Oxford, Open, or Cambridge […]
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Indonesia Higher Degree Research student workshop. This is essentially a mini-conference with students studying Indonesia from all around Australia (most of the students were Indonesian and studying at Australian universities). Talks were quick, only 10 minutes, and then we got feedback from an experienced discussant (often […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of “fun” recently. For most of us, “fun” is a concept that is reserved for our relaxation time outside of work or study. The things that we do aren’t considered “fun”, that’s “work”, and work cannot be fun (or if it is, it is usually in the […]
You’re probably wondering what it is I’m doing in Indonesia (or maybe you just thought I was having a great holiday). The truth is that I am doing fieldwork here. To most people, you probably have a vision of some Indiana Jones-esque archeology expedition when I say that, but real fieldwork is nothing like that […]
This week I attended a two-day conference on health, gender, bodies, and sex at ANU. I was there because I have been working on a health humanities project as a research officer at ANU, under one of my PhD supervisors, Bonnie McConnell. The idea of health humanities is to examine this intersection between medical research […]
This year, I’ve thrown my hat in the ring to present at SXSW Sydney. SXSW is a big conference and festival that aims at sharing new research and industry info to other creatives and the general public. I’ve submitted my research in there in the hopes to meet some more people in this area, share […]
I watched all of Foundation on Apple TV+ recently, after reading the first 5 books years ago. Since then, I’ve been meaning to read some more Asimov, starting with the Robot series. Asimov was the first to coin the term “robotics”, by exploring the scientific principles that might underpin futuristic robots. Although the idea of […]
You’re probably familiar with the concept of bi-lingualism, which is where someoneone is fluent in 2 languages (for example, English and Indonesian, or Chinese and Japanese). But did you also know there’s a similar concept in music, called bi-musicality? This is where one person is fluent within 2 musical systems. You may have heard the […]
Recently, ANU announced it was closing the Art and Music library branch. Of course, they have been very tight-lipped on the details, so we don’t know exactly what that entails. What we know is: that the physical location of the library will be repurposed into study spaces for students; some materials will be moved into ANU’s main Chifley Library, and the rest will be stored in a repository and can be borrowed by request online. I was very disheartened by this news, so I went on a big borrowing spree last week before the doors closed and borrowed about 30 books. Anything that looked remotely relevant to my research, I borrowed. Yes, I probably should have done this earlier anyway – I have typically done most of my research online, which I suspect is a reason for this decision. But as I’ll go on to explain, I think this is a short-sighted reason to close a library.