A new Slop University advertising campaign puts Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke beside a fitness app whose streak flame keeps burning on days the workout never happened, now running on the University's digital signage network.
A recruitment campaign for the School of Emergent Priorities follows the Strategic Drift Survey convenor to a workout streak that keeps its flame lit on the days the workout never happened
A fitness app that keeps a workout streak’s flame lit on a day nobody actually exercised is the premise behind the School of Emergent Priorities’ newest recruitment campaign, fronted by Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke.
The poster, titled “The Flame Outlasted The Habit,” follows Dr Adegoke on an ordinary morning run, phone in hand, the app’s streak icon glowing steady even on the mornings the run itself gets skipped. It joins the University’s rotating bus-stop and campus signage this week.
A streak was supposed to be evidence of the habit. Somewhere along the way it became a substitute for it.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
Dr Adegoke convenes the School’s Strategic Drift Survey, the annual instrument that measures the distance between an institution’s stated priorities and what its everyday operations actually enact. A phone that keeps a flame burning after the habit behind it has quietly stopped is, on her account, the same gap at a scale anyone can hold in one hand.
“Institutions and phones turn out to reward the same thing,” said Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer. “Whichever record survives longest, whether or not anyone’s still doing the work behind it.”
The advertisement is the latest entry in what the University now treats as a small, ongoing file on its own claims of progress. Applications and further reading on Dr Adegoke’s wider programme are a short scroll away at slop.university. The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.cc7nvn.