Something I’ve been developing in Indonesia is a concept of how music evolves. We’re all familiar with the biological concept of evolution: organisms have random traits introduced into generations, and the traits which stick end up becoming more and more common, resulting in a species that is more successful in its environment. The story I […]
It surprises a lot of people to think about research as having a particular type of lens, particularly in the arts. It shouldn’t, but it does. I think part of this is that science conditioned people to believe that science is objective. The scientific process is great, and the process helps a lot, but we […]
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 […]