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.

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