A little while ago, I wrote my first public Medium post 6 months into my PhD at the University of Sussex, describing the experience of taking a crazy leap of faith, moving from Vancouver to London and leaving a full-time job in tech to do so. A whirlwind year later, I now find myself past my first doctoral upgrade as a somewhat official-feeling PhD candidate, many amazing conversations, eureka moments and unexpected travels(!) later. So, without further ado, here is a new piece on Medium about that first year. My hope is that posts like this will give others the extra encouragement they may need to take the plunge and dive into the research they’re passionate about. I know it helped me a great deal when I was considering my next move.

And in a word, it’s all been amazing. Highlights have included seeing Bruno Latour discuss his thoughts on gaia (and blow out a birthday cake!) after presenting a paper at this year’s Society for the History of Technology meeting in Singapore, where the ever-inspiring Sally Jane Norman and I also organized a digital artifact workshop in this glorious psychedelic rainbow room at the city’s new ArtScience Museum, heading to Santa Cruz with Sussex Humanities Lab colleagues for this digital media exchange to play with Arduinos while meeting a group of talented art/tech practitioners there, and generally getting to hang out back in the UK with fascinating humans (and libraries!) in Brighton, Oxford and London while learning everything I could about theories of spatiality, making and community.

I’m writing this today from beautiful, sunny Barcelona, where I’ve been lucky enough to attend this year’s excellent 4S/EASST “Science and Technology By Other Means” conference on scholarship from EASST and the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab. In addition to being a discussant about “careers by other means” at its Doctoral Day, I also presented a paper I’ve submitted to Digital Culture & Society with Tim Jordan which critically examines key technomyths about the maker movement as part of an excellent panel convened by Adrian Smith, Maxigas and other great thinkers in this space entitled “Digital Fabrications Amongst Hackers, Makers and Manufacturers: Whose Industrial Revolution?”.

While presenting to a packed room of STS scholars was one of the more intimidating(!) moments of my academic career so far, the resulting discussion and ideas I received from such an engaged (and thoughtful!) audience made all the stress 100% worth it. I’m very grateful to everyone who came to listen and provide advice. Moments like these, where you get to share your research with the makers, hackers and thinkers who have helped inspire it the first place, are especially wonderful ones. Here’s to more beautiful memories in the sun (and studio) for all of us!

http://blog.codekat.net/post/149843684469