ABSTRACT
Sonia Overall is an academic and writer who has centred walking as a method of research and creative practice, gaining accolades from higher education and writing communities. Sonia speaks of when and where she writes and how she juggles her busy academic and creative lives, how turning off the email and making room to play and take risks feeds her creativity and writing, which in turn informs her teaching. The author is reminded of her own experience of feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to balance her personal life and career and offers a story to show how her creative practice gives opportunities to capture the joy and resist the pressure to do more for less that the neoliberal agenda in higher education has exacerbated. With more lecturers than ever seeking alternative employment, the chapter argues that storytelling – image and text – and collaboration can provide tools for navigating academia and argues that autoethnography is a methodological approach that often details stories of pain and trauma but that actually produces what academia needs: stories of joy. The author argues that work valuing the human, diverse, vulnerable, playful in academic research can be part of essential decolonising work in HE, offering us time and space to do work that can sustain our careers, whilst also enhancing our well-being. They invite the reader to restore themselves as an animal in a poetry exercise using metaphor.
