The last year has found me fully immersed in the process of writing—a process that is constantly evolving as I experiment with new ways of thinking through words. I have been particularly interested in the ways that this blog might become part of that process. Beyond the more modest ambitions of opening a space to share work outside of academic paywall systems, encouraging me to develop a more regular writing practice, connecting with others in a more immediate way, and providing a place to assemble and test out ideas, I’m interested in the ways that blogging might push my thinking in new directions. Lauren Berlant, in reference to her blog Supervalent Thought, observes in an interview:

Supervalent Thought was an attempt for me to learn how to write, which is to say to learn better ways of mediating all the things I can bring to address a problem – in particular problems of seeing the subject constituted in non-sovereignty, in relationality, in the middle of the affective event. I think the practice of it has changed my writing a lot – one way I can tell this is that when I am writing I tend not to be blogging. I work on my entries, usually, for a long time. Because they really are thought by way of writing, and not just thought in writing, not just opinion.There was a little polemicism in the beginning, because I was writing during an intensively political season: but generally I see the blog entry as a staging area for feeling out the contours of a problem that was raised in an encounter. As for readers: I am really happy to be read, and occasionally the comment section induces interesting responses, but it’s also constrained, a little monologuish. I get lots of provocative email about entries, but I don’t write hoping to induce a response. I write hoping to move a problem somewhere, and in moving to open it up to different kinds of encounter with it, which changes its resonance and consequence and thereby its very structure.

Derek Gregory, who writes nearly everyday on his blog Geographical Imaginations, similarly reflects on his experience of blogging and its impact on his writing in a 2012 entry. In a more recent post, writing for a new book titled How We Write, blogging again is mentioned as an important part of his writing process.

And so begins this experiment in form, a public research notebook, really, which will contain and connect various issues in software, geography, politics, theory, visuality, and art, alongside the occasional bicycle.

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For more discussions on academic blogging, see Sam Kinsley’s blog post “Being a Sharing Academic,” which links to a lot of good resources, including Anne Galloway’s dissertation chapter on blogging.