New Audiences

Since this is my first post in this location, I thought I’d take a few minutes to consider why I decided on a new website.  Even as I was setting this one up, I was confronted (and a little daunted) by how many other sites I had created and deleted in the past.  I kept a site for several years in the early 2000s.  I had a site with pretty good traffic at productivenerd.org that I recently deleted from the web.  I’ve had a number of WP sites as well, and cleaned all of them out as I created this one.

I recently presented at ACU’s workshop, “Sharing Your Voices: New Audiences for Teaching and Scholarship” on the podcast that Dr. Bennett and I are doing together.  While I was there, one of my colleagues presented on her own professional website, and how it had manifest a new way of integrating her professional life.

That’s where I began to realize why I’d had so many different sites running (and coming down).  I kept redesigning around specific topics, or facets of my professional self, rather than thinking of my work as a contiguous whole.  I tend to treat myself as silos that don’t interact: a husband, a scholar, a teacher, a productivity nerd.  But I don’t think of myself in those containers.  I don’t act as though I am a scholar in one room, and a husband in another.  I have always wanted to interact in ways where I am the same person in every room.

For example, I ask my students to call me Scott, rather than Dr. Self.  This is not my attempt to be “hip” or “relatable,” but rather my attempt to be the same person in the classroom as I am in the living room.  But for some reason, I’ve allowed myself to believe that these facets of my professional life should be presented – or branded – in isolation from one another.

So while I probably won’t use this space to share some of my best recipes for chili (and mind you, this is to your great loss), I will be using this space to explore the intersections of my academic, scholarly, non-scholarly, and avocational interests.  Because you really can’t understand any one of those without the context of the others.

Also, one website is cheaper than many 😉

J.