ABSTRACT
So Eva, here you have us, or me at least. My stomach is a little tight as I’m taken, by association with the stories in your essay, into anticipation of a meeting where I will attempt to work out—with my workload supervisor, who is, after all, sympathetic, but who is also caught in a network (a whirlpool, did you say?) of contradictory and competing claims—how I might claim the “right” to spend a little of my time on research. I’ll attempt to work this out without it impacting on my teaching load or that of my colleagues; without incurring the need to “buy in” teaching because then it has “budget implications”; without—and here’s the crunch—destabilizing the delicate balance by which the course in which I teach (a course that trains artists to be psychotherapists, of all things! 1 ) continues to survive within an environment of increasing pressure to move toward hard science and even harder cash.
