Welcome to Reconcile Digest #4. I’m so glad you’re here.
I realise that academic research has a bad reputation. It can be seen as stuffy, a tick-box exercise, excluding, too far removed from reality, and most commonly, boring. Especially when we consider the spaces they are published in.
(think JSTOR, ScienceDirect and PubMed).
Downloadable version at the end.
Over the years, I’ve collected and annotated many research papers to support my work, writing, and problem-solving. I’m often drawn to papers with poetic, almost lyrical titles…the double-entendres that reveal something about the researcher’s identity and use our cultural capital to invite a moment of shared understanding (#3 reads like a juicy convo with a friend).
Below is a curation of 10 papers from my reference library, collected since I first started working in higher ed in 2016. The selection touches on themes of equity, the Black experience, mental health, the arts, and academia, and my hopes are that this list could be used as an idea-board: a way to expand the types of sources you draw on or spark new thinking about the kinds of insights research can offer. At the very least, it should be used as evidence that research doesn’t HAVE to be boring. Enjoy!
