29- Dr Matthew Cheeseman- Dabbling for academic resistance and resilience

Matt talks about himself as someone who is “a Jack of all trades”. It’s true that I have known him involved in so many different types of projects that it could be hard from the outside to define exactly his research niche. As an interdisciplinary researcher and thinker, Matt acknowledges that both his stubbornness and his position of privilege have contributed to his continuing academic career. The need for academic freedom and his desire to understand the world have maintained his motivation to pursue a career in the university environment. The dissonance between institutional policies on wellbeing and the realities of workloads - what is actually needed to gain & retain academic position continue to puzzle him. About MattDr Matthew Cheeseman is Associate Professor of creative writing at the University of Derby (UK). With a background in history from his Bachelor, Matt entered the world of academia from a marginal area of study, a PhD in folklore, studying the history of what it’s like to be a student at the University of Sheffield. His work looked at students’ cultural behaviours and became an ethnography of contemporary students’ life. For example, Matt looked at the consumption of alcohol and how it is used as a product of university life to students. The transition to his current position took many turns: teaching Erasmus students in an English department, access to bits of funding on various projects, a senior lectureship position at the Solent University in Southampton, then an institutional move to a new lectureship in creative writing in Derby.  Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking·      Whether dabbling in lots of interests or keeping a sharp research focus is working for you in your research transition·      How the politics of your institution align or not with your values and the way you want to live your research life·      What resistance, persistence and resilience to academic pressures look like for youYou can also find the Podcast on my website: https://tesselledevelopment.com/podcastInterested in being a guest on the podcast, get in touch: [email protected]