I’m delight­ed to be start­ing a new job this Sep­tem­ber at City, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don. I’ll be join­ing the live­ly Cen­tre for HCI Design (HCID). Both Steph and Simone, the centre’s co-direc­tors, have been amaz­ing­ly gen­er­ous in prepar­ing me for my new role and dis­cussing the direc­tions we might take things in. I’ve also begun to rough out new lines of research with my soon to be col­leagues and I eager­ly antic­i­pate set­ting things in motion. Nat­u­ral­ly my chal­lenge will be to keep a lid on my enthu­si­asm, leav­ing the ener­gy to improve my teach­ing and engage a stu­dent cohort in car­ing about the entan­gle­ments between tech­nol­o­gy and social life—and the thrills and spills that come with such a care.

Of course, a deci­sion like this, to leave a work­place I’ve been at for 14 years (almost to the day), comes with a sea of emo­tions. Many will know that over the years I’ve felt a lit­tle uneasy at Microsoft, most espe­cial­ly because of my posi­tion in an organ­i­sa­tion that stands as one of the suc­cess­es in a trou­bled time of cap­i­tal­ism. But why I joined Microsoft Research and why I stayed so long is for anoth­er time. Here, it is enough to say that for a time, quite a long time in fact, Microsoft Research felt a vibrant place to be. Sur­pris­ing to some, per­haps, it kept the door open to ideas and as I would like to think of it oth­er ways worlds might be made.
What I feel I do owe an expla­na­tion for is what at this moment leads me to ‘return to’ (as I like to think of it) an aca­d­e­m­ic life. I am for­tu­nate enough to have dear friends and col­leagues who would want to know what route I’m hop­ing to trace in leav­ing a rich­ly resourced cor­po­rate research envi­ron­ment to take on an aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tion full with the duties of teach­ing, fund­ing pro­pos­als, excel­lence frame­works, admin and—where the space can be made—a lit­tle research. Many close to me have exclaimed dis­be­lief in even the con­tem­pla­tion of such a move, espe­cial­ly now when acad­e­mia in the UK is more than ever dri­ven (and riv­en) by forces tuned to mea­sure­ment and mar­ket-place regimes. And of course, these log­ics and their accom­pa­ny­ing dis­may are not just per­va­sive in the UK, as Isabelle Stengers and Vin­ciane Despret write from their van­tage point in Belgium:

So, amidst all this, what draws me into the acad­e­my and attracts me to HCID at City? Well, it may sound too full of con­tra­dic­tions, but it is the promise, the charged-poten­tial it holds for an intel­lec­tu­al life, a life in which as Stengers and Despret exclaim, we are oblig­ed to think:
“think we must!” 
I’m under no illu­sion that life as an aca­d­e­m­ic retains much if any­thing of its monas­tic tra­di­tions, and I am hon­est­ly not at all inter­est­ed in repro­duc­ing the elit­ism that feels inher­ent in those tra­di­tions. The draw for me is the pos­si­bil­i­ty. With an aca­d­e­m­ic life, I want to believe in an aggre­gate of rhythms and rela­tion­ships that, no mat­ter how fraught and trou­ble-prone, have at their core the fos­ter­ing and nour­ish­ing of ideas, and the chance to think and to make a dif­fer­ence for the bet­ter. In this vein, there is so much to inspire me in Sarah Ahmed’s recent book, “Liv­ing a Fem­i­nist Life”; while I’m reluc­tant to water-down her pow­er­ful work­ing through of fem­i­nism, I’ve found many things that resonate:

I am, then, com­pelled by the pos­si­bil­i­ties the acad­e­my and my new cen­tre afford to open up spaces for think­ing, to seed schol­ar­ly com­mit­ments, and have bod­ies (of all kinds) become more capa­ble. In my stud­ies, writ­ing, teach­ing, men­tor­ing, and yes even in those plen­ti­ful admin­is­tra­tive duties I’ll have to wade through, I want to believe there remains the chance to wil­ful­ly “shake the foun­da­tions” , to resist a sin­gu­lar ver­sion of the world, with its “inescapable truths” ; I want to believe there is still the chance to have dif­fer­ent ideas mat­ter, dif­fer­ent val­ues mat­ter, dif­fer­ent bod­ies and voic­es mat­ter, dif­fer­ent mat­ters mat­ter. I like the way Bev Skeg­gs re-chan­nels the anger she feels into an expres­sion of hope and project of dif­fer­ence mak­ing, and it’s a sim­i­lar chan­nel­ing that I want to work with:

From this stand­point, it feels like there might be no bet­ter time to put one’s body into aca­d­e­m­ic life. Under­stand­ably many are tired of the con­di­tions, but for me it seems pos­si­bil­i­ties are being enlivened for more chances, more ways, more means to do otherwise.
So, I sup­pose I find myself embark­ing on a life in the academy—and what feels like com­ing home—because I want to put my weight behind the small but grow­ing call to resist, and at the same time—with one-step-at-a-time—work with those build­ing the con­di­tions for repa­ra­tion. HCID, with its focus on and involve­ment in design, fits in here because it pro­vides a space for mak­ing mat­ter to think with, and for invent­ing meth­ods that are not just respon­sive but respon­si­ble. To me, HCID feels open, open to think­ing imag­i­na­tive­ly with tech­nolo­gies and open to mak­ing a dif­fer­ence. It’s this “keep­ing open” that I see as the invitation.