ABSTRACT
This portrait uses permaculture as a metaphor for reimagining and enacting alternative ways of being an academic. Structured around selected permaculture principles, the portrait charts the author’s 20-year struggle, deploying small adaptive steps, to carve out a more sustainable niche and modus vivendi in what is becoming an increasingly stressful, competitive and alienating academic environment. The portrait describes how being in that uncomfortable space has made alternative types of ‘yield’ possible through ‘self-regulation’ – consciously cultivating certain types of activity and relationships and curtailing others. It also includes reflections, included as inspiration for younger scholars, on how to cultivate one’s own particular way of being an academic.
