Author: Pete

Academic librarian. Posts reflect only my views.

Of elevators and travel

Pete2 Comments

When putting a book together people often talk about the elevator pitch. In fact for pretty much any idea people recommend an elevator pitch. This is special treatment of your idea, something that could be delivered in the time you might have with somebody in an elevator or lift.

Leaving aside the social awkwardness of talking about your idea to a stranger in a lift, the idea has some value. It gets you to think about the core the essence of what you’re trying to say. You’ll have plenty of time to elaborate it in the book, but in talking with a colleague, a friend, or a book editor you often have a short window of time to get across what your book is about.

So if we were in lift what would I say to you about this book? I’ve thinking about this as I’ve been working on some of the basic aspects of the book, going through each chapter and adding in what I think are really important elements. I’ve been doing this largely from memory, with a plan to go back to through my research to add detail to some of these ideas.

So my imaginary lift companion. The book is about how universities can use public engagement to positively deal with the challenges they face in the current policy environment. They are expected to produce a return on social and economic investment, and from public engagement they can do this in a way which supports research and teaching, and which builds meaningful connections with the wider community; a wider community who support is increasingly important as universities are challenged.

If we were in a space elevator we’d have more time to elaborate on these things. But this is the general direction of travel of the book. Understanding universities as institutions with their own histories and presence, public engagement appears as a way in which various responses can be developed to these challenges, reflecting those differences. Public engagement is not presented as a singular response for a singular type of institution, but as a multiple response for institutions which share a core aspect of working with and disseminating knowledge, but work this out in various ways.

For the law school we can talk about public engagement with the law school, as an aspect of public engagement with the law. And law schools can offer various publics different ways of interacting with and understanding legal knowledge, or as the book will expand on legal knowledges, drawing on the work of various colleagues1 in how we can change legal education to reflect those different knowledges.

So, if we were only going one floor? Public engagement is a way for the law school to come to know itself, as it comes to know others, to the advantage of both.

  1. Such as Adebisi, Sandberg ↩︎

Inspiration

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In my last post I talked about momentum. One way you can get momentum is from an outside push, from a source of inspiration. It can be a post you read, a story in the news, a new book someone recommends.

For me, inspiration this week came in the form of a talk by Professor Foluke Adebisi, given to the Law and History Network.1 Professor Adebisi addressed the issue of decolonisation and legal knowledge, the topic of one of her recent books. In the talk she covered law’s coloniality, how it informed and is informed by the ‘logics’ of the colonial project- even as it obscures them. All this in the context of how the law school understands and teaches the law.

What inspired me?

The challenge to think differently about how law is taught, and about how the law school understands itself. 

The way in which discussions of the law school and knowledge show how engagement can be a way for the law school to not only share knowledge out, but find and understand other knowledges, other epistemologies (and ontologies…)

The connections I could draw with other scholarship I have read and used- on law and critique, on decentering the law, on law and time, law and the body…

The possibilities that engaging with Professor Adebisi’s work- and those she cites- creates.

So, next writing round will focus on getting those topics into the ‘skeleton’ draft- as headings and short paragraphs, so I don’t forget them. And use that as a launchpad- more momentum!

  1. Thanks to Russell Sandberg- https://bsky.app/profile/sandbergrlaw.bsky.social ↩︎

Momentum

Pete1 Comment

A big part of writing is momentum. It’s important to take breaks, of course, and writing when you don’t want to can be a quick road to demotivation. But it is important to write more often than not.

What can hold that back is worry about quality. The time you take to write can be considerable, and if at the end of it what you’ve produced is less than good… well, it can just put you off and drain that momentum.

So, what do I do? The big thing I learned in the PhD process- and something many writers I follow1 have said- is you can work to make bad writing good, but you’ve got to have that bad writing in the first place. As long as you start with an idea of what you want to write about, getting something down that’s even half good helps you feel like you’re moving forward. You’ve got something to edit, which gives a break from writing whilst keeping that forward movement.

With that in mind I fired up the dictation machine… ahem, opened Word… and got down some thoughts on Streetlaw in school. Definitions of Streetlaw, what it’s for, why schools are a common site for such works, the challenges of evaluation… It shook out some thoughts and reminded me of some things I want to follow up on, so it was a good session, and I feel happy to go onto the next bit where I’m going to cover School Tasking.2

  1. e.g Gareth L Powell (https://bsky.app/profile/garethlpowell.bsky.social) Tade Thompson (https://bsky.app/profile/tadethompson.bsky.social) Premee Mohammed (https://bsky.app/profile/premeemohamed.com) ↩︎
  2. https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/?newsItem=8a1785d88c5ec9b5018c6e5842731d62 ↩︎

Making a start

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The blank screen or sheet. How to fill it? I confess, I don’t find writing easy. To get past this I have at times used dictation, so I’m just speaking rather than writing, and speaking is something I’m not bad at.

But… you still need the ideas. And I have them of course. The book isn’t starting from nowhere after all. But how to organise those ideas? What is the narrative I want to present, what is the flow I want to establish?

A mixture of speaking and writing, just getting the ideas down at first- it worked in the thesis and so I’m going to keep using that approach. The ideas sometimes emerge as I write, or better ways of organising them become clear as I try to build the flow.

And so this afternoon I type and talked to make some sort of start, and I put together an outline of the chapters. I just wanted to get some ideas down and set out an idea of how the work will move from idea to idea. I’ve already got colleagues who’ve agreed to read such drafts. You can download the outline from here, in case any of you readers want to leave comments. Such comments, whoever from, will help me take that start and make it better!