Returning to Academic Roots

This week I went back to my alma mater because my dissertation supervisor is retiring and they had a reception. It was the first time I had been back since I graduated with my PhD 15 years ago, and so of course with that brings a lot of thoughts and a lot of feelings (both of those things being my specialty apparently). 

I also was asked to give a brief speech, and even the process of figuring out what I would like to say in the under 5 minutes I was allotted required reflection on framing, word choice, emphasis; you know all of the things that interestingly enough have become part of how I think when I write because of working with him all those years ago. Part of that reflection was also bringing up that importance of citational justice and acknowledgment when we work with folk  for longer periods of time, but even in the short time you meet and know a person their thoughts and framing can become part of how you engage with texts, thoughts, and the world.

That acknowledgement comes up in different ways, not just in citational justice, but also if others acknowledge your presence, or even remember your presence. Being back made me reflect on who remembers others (there was a lot of "I don't know you if you remember me..." sentences being said in that room) and why some were remembered and some not. And it occurred that at the root of that remembering and acknowledgement can be impact. If you remember someone you haven't seen in more than a decade that is probably because they had an impact on you during that time, either positive or negative. And this made me think about presence.

We have been talking a lot about presence lately in HigherEd, but also in K-12 in the province where I live, where they want to allot 15% to student attendance. Just like conversations about engagement, presence often becomes stereotyped as a certain way of being- nodding of heads, responding to emails or texts, those kinds of things. But being back reinforced that there are so many other types of presence including presence that comes from the spaces we are in just by the nature of being in the space (I kind of talked about this in my dissertation in fact, in the tactile and haunting of architecture). It becomes distilled down to, how was presence shown? It can be an act, a word, a motion, but it can also just be a sharing of space, or a being in space.

That presence in turn becomes part of what you carry, in your thoughts, and who you are as person, and who you are in the communities you are a part of and build. The presence becomes part of your authentic engagement with space and others. Listening to others give speeches acknowledging the work Matthew has done over the years, they were all speeches about his presence in different ways, both big and small, both incredibly important. And it occurs to me that it is that authentic engagement (in whatever way that happens) that creates authentic scholarship if you happen to be a person who does scholarship, however you define that for yourself. This is also another point, which is that academic spaces like to define what scholarship is, and what scholarship is in academe is not the only kind of scholarship, and authenticity comes from knowing and living that truth as well.

So to circle back to where I started, about returning to a space, reflecting on what to say, the evening became a space that actively held acknowledgement. And of course to honour Matthew's research teachings, the etymology of acknowledgement is from Middle English, but as something referring to a token of recognition only came in the 1600's. Some acknowledgements delivered yesterday were known, but so many acknowledgments were not, because academe tends to be a space where folk rarely acknowledge how much someone else's thought or presence has impacted them. This of course is because academe, like the towers that most have as architecture, tends to reinforce the siloed nature of research and scholarship; it is solitary work. Acknowledgements come either at the beginning of a dissertation or book, or at the end in the form of a well researched bibliography. And if you forget something in the bibliography, that becomes a whole other different thing that I won't touch on here, because that is not the vibe I am going for with this blog this week.

What I want to emphasis here, and acknowledge, is that we all in some ways have roots, in the perspectives we have on topics and work, in the ways we collect and curate those ideas, and how those ideas come out in our writing, art, and community work. There was a lot of talk at that reception about the future (if there is one) of HigherEd. And sadly the way the systems are being set up, the systems are looking for less authentic presence, more empty bean counting, and a complete erasure of any system of acknowledgement. Holding space for conversations mostly focused on dissertation support and writing, gives one perspective, and on the train ride home I could not help but think about how dissertations as a structure have been pretty much their own generative intelligence. Nothing artificial about them, just dig deep into what has already been said, find the nugget that is your gem, your novelty, and polish it until it then becomes part of someone else's dissertation, someone else's way to their very own gem. 

I am probably going to spend the weekend thinking about how I have or have not shown authentic presence in the spaces I have been in over the last 22 years when I moved from industry to academe. But also thinking about the people whom I have never met in real life, who live miles and continents away, who have had a real impact on my thoughts, and the way I approach the world, through their digital presence, whom I cite and reference in papers and conversations, in the same way that my dissertation supervisor did 15 years ago with my research before we even knew what a Zoom was. So in times where polycrises mean it is so difficult to be present, it is probably a good exercise for folk, teaching teams, learners, community organizers, care providers, to see where we are showing up authentically and often, why that priority exists in your context right now, and if that priority has changed over time.

I spent a lot of time last night half-apologizing for Ruskin, which I often do on 19th century spaces, which is sort of hilarious because the apology is often needed because people have a vision of Ruskin as a thinker, artist, and scholar that is in some ways defined by "popular" culture representations (popular in scare quotes because I don't know how popular John Ruskin is to most folk in 2026).  Matthew said yesterday that working with me meant that he had to read more Ruskin that he had had before, and he meant it in a good way, and I was happy about that because honestly there are so many Ruskin things that folk could read that have real applicability to the world right now. I could link to many things I have written about this but maybe this one, Recovering a Ruskinian Tactile Ethics of Architecture (2019) or maybe if you like videos and not texts, this keynote I gave for RV University on Accessible Pedagogies in Design: Possibilities and Queries (2024) (you certainly don't have to watch the whole hour, the first 8 minutes will give you a good idea about why Ruskin matters to me).

As I end this week's blog I sit here chuckling to myself, because I started off this post wanting to talk about roots and origins and how others impact our thought, which I did, but I organically ended up at Ruskin, because of course I did. Often folk are curious how I got from being Ruskin Ann, to Accessibility Ann, without realizing they are the same Ann. So I guess I will leave you with this again from Ruskin "I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean, by humility, doubt of his own power, or hesitation in speaking his opinions; but a right understanding of the relation between what he can do and say, and the rest of the world’s sayings and doings" (Modern Painters IV, p. 331).