Today I’m at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) in Finland. TIAS is a really interesting place that provides space for blue skies research and interdisciplinary collaboration in the arts and social sciences. It has been a privilege to be invited here to work for a week.

As part of my visit I’ve been asked to talk about career and in particular about academic careers. While I’ve not done a lot of formal research into academic careers, I have been conducting an ongoing action research project (aka my life) on working in and with universities for the last 20-30 years. I’m still not 100% sure what the findings of this project have been.

However, I’ve put together a presentation which draws on a range of career theories to try and uses my life and career as the object of study. Hopefully this will prove to be interesting to the researchers from TIAS.

This is what I plan to say…