2024 was a notable year for the Research Whisperers, in good ways for a change! As a result, we are looking forward to 2025.

Jonathan completed and passed his PhD so that’s Dr O’Donnell to you now. We both started new roles at the same university. While we’ve worked together on Research Whisperer for over 13 years and were in similar roles at one university when we first started Research Whisperer (in different faculties), this is the first time we’ve worked together in the same team in an everyday capacity. It’s kind of amazing and we still pinch ourselves every once in a while because we can’t quite believe that this has come to pass. It has been big, like the rubber duck on this post. The word that Tseen had for 2024 was ‘bouyant’ (even though she told just about no-one else about it) – it’s a word that describes how she has tried to approach work and life recently. Not to strive for ‘happiness’ as such but to stay afloat despite everything. Very much a striving towards buoyancy rather than necessarily achieving being buoyant! And it has been a necessary framing for the past year or so.

We were both caught up with shifting institutions last year and helping establish an entire new entity within the university. While our fearless leader has done a lot of the prepatory groundwork, there is much to do, which is equal parts daunting and exciting! Holding those elements in constant tension is a new thing we’re trying to get better with.

The notion of buoyancy does not extend to the global academic sector, however, as extremely harsh and disruptive academic staff cuts occurred in many places locally and around the world. Whole disciplines are getting shut down at various universitives, funding bodies are abrogating their responsibility to basic research (looking at you, Marsden Fund), and the threats to academic freedom are taking many forms. We are ever hopeful that the world will get better in 2025, but we also realise that we work within a broken system.

Jonathan: 

While I have a spring in my step post-PhD, the last part of the process was a stretch. I wrote about 15% of my PhD in my response to the examiners’ comments. It was good, critical feedback, and it made the whole document stronger. But still – not drowning, waving.  In November, I traipsed around the UK, meeting people that I only knew from academic Twitter. It was lovely. I was particularly buoyed by the emergence of BlueSky as a new home for academic discussion. I got to meet people as I travelled, and meet them online as well. This trip culminated in a conference about Shut Up and Write, run by the lovely people at Writing Partners. It was a gathering of the true believers, and I was so happy to be involved. Thanks, Writing Partners. I really enjoyed it.

Tseen:

Striving to stay buoyant in 2024 and into this year is a good, challenging exercise. We could all do with letting go of small irritations and frustrating things we can’t change. A lot of the time, I was doing what Oliver Burkeman suggested and stopping to ask myself, “Wait. Does this actually matter?”. The more tired I got through the year, the more I needed to lean on asking myself this. And it works. Because, most times, the thing doesn’t really matter, not in the bigger scheme of things. Being a life-long catastrophiser, this is a gradual shifting of my mindset rather than an instant new state of being.

However you have spent the holidays and are looking at the new year, we hope that you have chances to indulge in many of the joyful things in life, even if they’re #SmallJoys.

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Our organic posting schedule on the blog was quite relaxed this year. Thank you to our guest posters and the broader RW community! You make the work valuable to us in so many ways. We have learned so much, whether it’s through direct conversations and catch-ups over coffee (in Australia and around the world!), the social media updates and resources you share, or the projects you’re working on and the way you’re working on them.

Here are our guest posts on the Research Whisperer from 2024: 

• Who gets to be a doctoral researcher? (Annum Mahmood, Sophia Kier-Byfield, James Burford)
• Hosting unforgettable public events (Wade Kelly)
• Talking out of school: counting the cost of return-to-office mandates (Daniel Reeders)
• Can you publish too many papers? (Shaun Khoo)
• Perils of peer review (Shaun Khoo)
• How are research integrity complaints handled in Australia? (Shaun Khoo)
• How to avoid post-dissertation doldrums (Noelle Sterne)