As I threatened in the previous post, here is the timeline of my time in Australia, which I am also posting today because tomorrow I am getting on a plane back to Spain and, unless something truly unexpected happens in the next few hours, I think I can finally consider it finished.
I started making it a few weeks ago for a rather prosaic reason: I was —I am— writing the report for my research stay and needed to put some order into what I had done since arriving at the end of May because, after almost four months, although I had a fairly clear idea of what had happened, my relationship with exactly when it had happened was becoming considerably more problematic and, above all, so was working out how some things fitted with others.
So I started putting things on a timeline and, as tends to happen to me with these things, what was initially going to be a relatively quick way of sorting out dates ended up becoming something I spent considerably more time on than I had planned. The four Educational Optics seminars appeared first, because inevitably they have marked some of the key moments of the stay; then came the other talks and seminars, Brisbane, Melbourne and the visits to other universities; and then I realised that, if I left it at that, it looked as though these four months had consisted mainly of travelling around Australia giving talks, which is not exactly what I have been doing either.
So I started adding some of the work that has continued to happen while I was doing everything else: interviews, analysis, work with data, papers, projects, meetings, collaborations that have emerged along the way, and some of the many conversations that have been part of these months. Obviously, not everything is there —nor do I think there would be much point in trying to include everything— but there is enough that, when I saw it more or less finished (thanks to Gemi, I confess), something happened that I found rather funny: it turns out it looks as though I had a plan.
And not just any plan, but a wonderfully structured one. June was “immersion and reframing”; July, “the prism and epistemic friction”; August managed to fit in a lens, a mirror and fieldwork; and September arrives with the telescope and an extremely convenient “final synthesis”. Looking at it this way, you would think that I landed in Sydney on 30 May knowing perfectly well what the arc of these four months was going to be and simply had to execute it with discipline (spoiler: I didn’t).
The problem is that it is not untrue (even if it is not as precise as it would be, and many things are under and over included), because those things did happen and now, looking at them together, I completely understand why the timeline ended up being organised this way; but it is not exactly true either, because I did not arrive thinking that June would be the month of reframing, that in July I would enter a convenient phase of epistemic friction, or, even less, that September would be reserved for elegantly synthesising everything that came before. To begin with, Educational Optics, which now looks almost like the backbone of the whole stay, did not even exist when I arrived.
And perhaps that is why I find the timeline so curious now that it is finished, because it turns into a sequence things that I experienced in a considerably less sequential way. Some were planned before I came, others appeared while I was here; there were people I knew I wanted to talk to and others I ended up talking to because one thing led to another; some conversations fed directly into things I was already working on, others opened possibilities that were nowhere in the plan, and others were simply wonderful conversations I wanted to have. And, of course, many of the things that appear so politely arranged one after another in the image were actually happening simultaneously and competing for space in my head, in my calendar and, on more than one occasion, in my slides.
I suppose that is also why I am sharing all of this here. Not only the timeline, but also the previous posts about Educational Optics, the questions that have remained after the seminars and, really, quite a lot of the things I have been writing during these months. Writing them is part of how I think about what I do and, in this case, also part of how I am learning from the stay: trying to get things out of my head, give them some sort of shape, come back to them, find relationships I perhaps had not seen before —and discard others that looked wonderful until I actually tried to explain them—. Making all of this public also adds that slightly uncomfortable, but quite useful, requirement of having to make whatever I am thinking at least minimally explainable to someone who is not inside my head.
So these posts are not exactly an account of the stay, nor are they intended to be its conclusions. They are more like part of the stay itself, or at least part of the process I am following to try to make use of it, understand what has happened here and work out what I am going to do with it afterwards. That is why I am writing them now, when it is probably still far too early to know which parts of all this will stay with me, rather than waiting six months and constructing a much cleaner —and probably considerably less accurate— version of what these four months meant.
I do not know whether this timeline sums up the stay and, in fact, I suspect it does not; nor am I entirely sure that a four-month research stay can be particularly well summarised in this way. But I do like being able to see it all together, especially after spending a large part of these months looking mainly towards whatever came next: the next seminar, the next meeting, the trip the following week, the paper that needed finishing, the data that needed analysing, or the conversation I wanted to prepare for.
Now there is no next thing in Australia to add to the timeline. This is probably not the last post about this time, but the chronology is finished, thats for sure. Tomorrow I am going home.
This work is an outcome of research stay 22871/EE/25, funded by Fundación Séneca – Agencia de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Región de Murcia under the Regional Programme for Mobility, Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange “Jiménez de la Espada”.