My 2016 Top Five

Here are the ten things from the past year that I want to revisit. These aren't necessarily my most popular posts, but they are the ten things I think have been the most importnat. Or fun.

1. Falling at the Last Hurdle (Dealing with Post-Interview Rejection), on the jobs.ac.uk Post-PhD Life blog.  This was a tough post for me to write, and at the time I wasn't in a great place. One of my biggest struggles in preparing job applications is imagining myself being part of a department - so it takes some adjusting to unimagine that. For interviews this is obviously greatly enhanced, and the job that I talk about in this post was one that really made me alter my idea of interdiciplinarity and how my work fits within an interdiciplinary framework. What I am saying is that preparing for this interview fundamentally changed my idea of my own place in the (academic) world for the better. I would have loved to get this job, and I was gutted that I didn't. That's a feeling that people go though all the time, and I wanted to be public about it.
2. A week in the Life of an un/underemployed academic. Not only was this my first venture into proper vlogging, but I also felt it was an importnat project to make for myself. Fundamentally, vlogging for me is about myself and showing what a normal person's life is like when they are in the situation that I am in (thus far being a unemployed academic, and being an hourly-paid academic). I will continue vlogging as my adventure continues, so hopefully I will be able to show something of the transition from being precarious to being less and less precarious.
3. The Humanities. I loved writing this, and thinking about what the Humanities mean to me. This begain as an exercise that I thought would help me write a specific job application and ended up being something far beyond that. I hope I can write or video more about what the Humanities is and are during 2017.
4. Self-Portraiture as Self-Care. I want to talk a lot more about self-care in teh coming year, and specifically about what self-care actually is in practice, for people with ongoing chronic illness (and especially mental illness). Self-care isn't a wishy-washy 'take a bath and feel your troubles melt away' thing for a lot of people but a serious, health-related activity that needs to be tailored to their specific needs. One of my needs is coporealisation. I had some interesting conversations about selfies and corporality after I posted this, which is why I've included it here.
5. How I Plan. Although only one of these posts is written by me, I'm really glad that I could start the How I Plan series this year, and I hope to grow it during 2017. Planning is something I really believe in, and can really make a difference in people's (academic and non-academic) lives. 

Bonus:

• My YouTube channel. I'm so pleased I started making videos this year, and as I get more confident and more experianced I hope they will just go from strenght to strength. Once I am more settled I will start putting a proper schedule together and posting a new vlog every Monday and a new research, pedagogy, planning, or something else video at least every fortnight. 
  

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Thanks for sticking around on my journey though academic precarity this year. I have done things this year I never thought I would be able to, including revealing my chronic illness to the world, and talking candidly about my situation and how I felt as a precarious academic. I hope to continue 2017 with some strong ideas, some more #AcademicKindness, a lot more solidarity, and hopefully a very large dose of happiness.

Let me know in the comments or on Twitter if there's anything specifc you'd like to see me cover in the next year, either here on on YouTube. 

Happy Holidays, all!