Ending 2023: Happy new 2024!

 2023 is the year when I have been fully integrated at Nord, all year, 100% position. Moving this far north was a challenge, and it is not immediately the best for my physical health. Mentally I am doing better though: I get to live with my husband all year, every day, we have bought a beautiful place to live that we both rejoice at every day, and working at Nord University means much healthier stress than the last few years at ITU. 

I am missing the social media and games research happening at ITU, Nord University leans more heavily towards traditional journalism. The great thing about Nord is that the only thing that stops me from doing the research I think is important is my lack of time. This has however been annoyingly present. We have not been able to hire all the people needed, and it is telling that when we had a few really good applicants, it took us a few hours of collecting data to be able to argue in favour of hiring two people rather than one, because we lacked that much time on our work sheets. On the plus side: When we could document that we lacked people for two positions, not just one, Nord was able to say "ok, we have several qualified applicant,s let's make two offers." That was awesome. 

Due to all of this, last year has been all about starting the new master in journalism and strategic communication at Nord. Starting a new study is a lot of detailed work, and I am currently working on the internship plans for the autumn 2024 (it's January). This includes creating all the routines around this kind of work, letter standards, checking legal standing of our offers, establishing the internship as part of the students' practice, writing descriptions of what we expect of the internship hosts, writing samples of letters from the students, creating a course around the internship - it's a lot more planning than for teaching, even if we are not the ones who will teach here. Instead, we will facilitate learning, which is a different kind of challenge.

So now I have to start putting all of the things I planned in 2023 into practice, and then I need to look for new things to study and write about. 

I have spent a lot of time with knitting - not just actually knitting, but also thinking of it as a playful practice within certain constraints, and the interface between a very traditional and tactile practice and online resources and use. I have spent too long - it was to be an article, but I have material for a book. I need to decide to cut down what I want to write about, and just do it. And then I need to play more. I didn't play enough in 2023.

So there it is: 2023 is over, 2024 should, like all academics believe at the start of a new year, be when I have time to do the real research and writing. It is after all a happy new year!