career

Oh hi, it’s been a while. ...

I’m about to meet a lot of new people in my Information Management course and online, so here’s a bit about myself, 2020 version. As a young Generation Xer (a ‘Xennial’?) I have grown up with modern society’s transition from lifelong careers to multiple careers. I first enrolled in the Master of Information Management at RMIT in 1999 when I was working as a library officer at the City of Boroondara, but was lured away by a career in public health and research data management. I eventually realised that working solely with science, technology, and data, while motivated by good, was not feeding my literary and humanistic background, so I moved to a data management and web development role with a medical historian and discovered the new field of digital humanities. After a few years I found myself tired of the challenges of working in a technical (‘professional’) role in an academic environment and moved to technology consulting, primarily working in web development, data management, and digital strategy for non-profit organisations and creative individuals. ...

tl;dr: I have withdrawn from my PhD and will start a Master of Information Management in February 2020. From mid-2017 to mid-2018, I was enrolled in a PhD at the University of Divinity, on the topic of queer Christian autobiographies as expressions of practical theology. At the time, it felt like synchronicity. In mid-2017 Australia was in the throes of the marriage equality postal survey and the diversity of Christian perspectives on sexuality was finally becoming more widely known. I still believe that what faithful Christians (and members of other faiths) need to hear is more stories of the lives and experiences of real queer people – including queer people of faith – rather than more dogmatic arguments based on abstract philosophy and ancient texts, as that ground has been covered well in forty years of queer theology. I hoped to foreground contemporary use of autobiography and memoir as spiritual practice in order to help re-orient the way we talk about sexuality and religion. ...