I'm resurrecting my account after a long hiatus. It looks like the community has grown so much over the last two years and I'm excited to connect with some new OPWs.

Interesting that the "inspiration" for today's post is the question, "What's your favorite country, other than your own?"  That's a tough question because countries have so many different beautiful things to offer.  The country I'm most connected to is Jamaica because that's where I do my research, which brings me to my next thought...

I am on research leave for the first time this semester.  This is a huge opportunity that rolls around once every 6 or 7 years based on merit. Truthfully, I'm a little burned out from working toward tenure in a contentious environment, trying to support and enrich my students, trying to maintain a research agenda without the time needed  as an ethnographer to truly conduct the kind of fieldwork I was able to while working on my dissertation research, and balancing family life, feeding myself, etc.

At the moment, I am technically still on January break and allowed myself time to do nothing guilt-free for the week after New Year. Now I'm trying to stave off the flood of thinking that leads me down the path of "you might squander this semester if you don't pay attention".

This is, in part, one of the reasons I'm rekindling my account.  It's a space of simplicity, whereas Facebook is a space of over-stimulation and Twitter is a space I only visit to witness users trolling The Donald. I think this might be a good space to think through and track life on research leave. To the other academics out there, this is my "low stakes writing assignment" where I can freely regroup and freely think outside of evaluative structure.  Here we go...

Goals for leave:

IRB

Revise and submit two conference papers as articles

Launch new research project by making contacts, preliminary interviews, sussing out who will be willing to participate and who might not be.

Based on the ease of the "launch" dig into deeper fieldwork or rethink strategy