(Self-) Promotion

A change of title feels like a big moment.  I was Dr Phil Jones for 21 years and I feel like it became central to my identity.  Now having finally been promoted to chair thus feels a little bittersweet as I have to let go of something familiar and adjust to a rebranding of sorts.  Plus, as Professor Jones, sadly the Aqua song is now no longer my unofficial theme tune.
 
From a young age I’d wanted to get a PhD – I think mostly I enjoyed the idea of being a Dr without really knowing what a PhD actually involved.  Once I finally secured a PhD place in 2000 and began work on my thesis I was, however, without any real plan about what to do next.  A couple of pieces of good luck created by people leaving at crucial moments secured me first a temporary and then a permanent contract here at Birmingham.  And here I have stayed ever since, broadly with the freedom to do whatever I wanted so long as I kept writing papers, secured the occasional grant, and did my teaching in such a way that none of the students really complained too much.
 
My handful of non-academic friends marvel at this kind of freedom and for all the ups and downs of university life, it has been a joy.  I love the unofficial mission statement of higher education ‘finding out interesting things and telling people about them’.  At its best, however, the university sector is a team game.  The image of the lone scholar, toiling away in their ivory tower to produce their latest tome was always a bit of a myth but today collaborative work is central to being an academic.  I’ve always tried to be the best colleague I can be, taking the view that a rising tide lifts all boats and the more that we can do to help each other out, the more that an institution can succeed.  Perhaps I’ve done this to the detriment of faster career progress, but I like that I’ve made chair on my own terms.
 
There have been a lot of changes since I started as an academic.  The proportion of women in my department, for example, though still far too low, has been radically transformed in two decades.  We had two female chairs when I started and for a period in the early 2010s, none at all. Today we have eight with a whole stack of people just waiting to make the jump upward.  I think there’s much more of a culture of kindness than there used to be, with many colleagues genuinely looking out for eachother and their students.  We can always be better, of course, but it’s nice to take a step back now and again to marvel at just how far things have moved on.
 
Over the years my research interests have moved from social history, to urban studies, to creative economy, to greenspace and wellbeing, to digital geographies, all the while carving out a cross-cutting interest in methodologies along the way. I do know people who have followed the same path for decades, deepening their expertise and becoming the name on a particular topic but I’ve always found that antithetical to how I like to work.  I’m easily distracted by a new approach, or new idea and love chatting to people from different disciplines about what they’re working on, the techniques they use, the findings they can generate.  I find myself being inspired by the energy and enthusiasm of my students, both undergraduate and postgrads as they make new discoveries while striving to make the world a better place.
 
The upshot of all this is that I owe my colleagues and students, past and present, a debt of thanks.  The people I’ve worked with both in Birmingham and beyond have made me the academic that I am.  I’m immensely proud to have been made Professor of Cultural Geography here at Birmingham, while getting away with a career consisting mostly of messing around with things that interest me.  Hopefully, I can pay this back by continuing to support students and colleagues to find their own path and realise their ambitions.