A common question: “what do you do?” An appropriate response is not to answer with what you actually do – “I police the streets”, “I fish at the weekend” – but with what you are professionally – “I’m a doctor”, “I’m a car mechanic”.
This implies a level of uniform stability – it suggests that ‘what you do’ has been the case for the past, is the case in the present and is likely to be the case in the future too.
This is becoming perhaps less appropriate these days. It has become more common for people to flit between workplaces, jobs, projects and professions, indeed darting around whichever continent they started out, or further afield as a matter of course. It can be increasingly difficult to answer the “what do you do” question, when it constricts answers to a single, professional identity, where you may have navigated a number of seas along the way.
What have you done?
An alternative is to consider things you have done, what you’re doing now, and ideas for what you would like to do in the future. This site serves as a personal hub, where some of the strands that have made up my working life are drawn together. It’s an archive of documents, a sum of parts where places, people and projects can be returned to, and where particular lines of thinking, or ways of doings things, can be revisited.
I work in research, teaching and the arts. In no particular order.
The site contains a selection of projects that I am or have been involved in.