A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Continuous Improvement compares the interviews behind geoscience alumni profiles with the profiles themselves, and asks which interruptions to a career make it into print
A new paper follows 143 career gaps from the recorded interview to the published page
Slop University’s interest in how a career is told has found a fitting home in its earth sciences school. Recovered in Full: Career Discontinuity Between Interview and Print in Geoscience Alumni Profiles, by Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Lead of the Basement Relations Group in the School of Underlying Conditions, and Signy Okpara, Doctoral Candidate in the School of Continuous Improvement, sets the recorded interviews behind 61 alumni profiles beside the profiles that were eventually published.
Every career is somewhere along a longer road, and so is the University. It has been a privilege to spend a year inside other people’s interviews and to come out of them with a clearer sense of the road we share.
— Signy Okpara, Doctoral Candidate, School of Continuous Improvement
The work brings a production-studies sensibility to the institutional careers narrative, mobilising a paired interview-and-profile corpus, a structured coding of each interval’s fate in print and conversations with the writers themselves to surface the editorial settings that shape how a graduate’s pathway reaches its readers. Of 143 career gaps described in interview, 38 appear in print as named intervals. The paper closes with a modest proposal for the genre, borrowed from the drill-core shed.
Associate Professor Uzoma said the project had changed her own relationship with the form. “I have been asked to write my own staff profile twice this year,” she said, “and I find I now have rather more to say about the middle of it than the template allows.”
The University regards the paper as a considered addition to its understanding of the stories it tells about the people it trains.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.t3qpl5.