March 2022 round-up

March was supposed to be the month I settled into my study leave. But, then, a staffing emergency meant that I had to cover for a colleague, and I ended up teaching a number of lectures and workshops. Never a dull moment, right?!

At least, the weather was lovely for part of the month, and I even managed to work in the garden a few times. Tough, it turned really cold at the end, and it ended with snow showers. Crazy!

On the research front, I had a meeting with representatives from an organisation to try and unblock data collection for a project. No result so far, which reminds me that I need to follow up on that. I also had a meeting with two people about a potential grant proposal. It’s still very early days, but it could turn into something interesting. My main concern, here, is that we don’t have a hard deadline, and things that can be done at any time run the risk of being overtaken by others and never happening.

Writing was the thing that got derailed the most because of the last-minute teaching. I had several writing sessions planned, and I was hoping to finish the gender and money paper. Though, in the end, I only managed to make a little bit of progress on the paper and most of it was at the end of the month. I also did a little bit of prep work for another paper about AI (mostly, finding a good hook and a suitable theoretical lens). However, that is on stand-by, now, until some questions about authorship are sorted. The other writing that I worked on this month was an evidence paper for a parliamentary call about tourism in Wales. It was my colleague Dorothy Yen who spotted the call for evidence, and who challenged me and another colleague to submit a reply. It was a fun exercise, actually!

On the teaching front, there was the unexpected teaching that I mentioned before (covering for a colleague). In addition, I attended the group presentations from our MSc Corporate Branding students. I also joined other colleagues in sharing our experience of developing a research project – from initial idea to paper – with our masters’ students. Since this session was supposed to help our students with their dissertations, I decided to focus on the wearables paper, which resulted from a dissertation. Continuing on the dissertations theme, I reviewed and provided feedback to three masters’ students who were submitting at the start of the month, and, then, marked various dissertations. I also reviewed the literature chapter from one of my PhD students. But the main achievement this month has to be that one of my PhD students finished his revisions and submitted his final PhD manuscript. It’s done!