The pursuit of new knowledge can be one of the most enthralling encounters but the more deeply embedded you are, the more you find yourself categorised, performing a role – the role of the “academic” – the Academie expects no less. Not if you are to be taken seriously. So what then for that part of you that may love Fashion? …Sport? …. Music?

Is that the secret alter ego that needs to be concealed if you are to be taken seriously?

Need your passions for life and all its vivid artistic components be replaced with a performance reflective of pre-dated unwritten and unspoken codes of acceptability?

Does such passion have to be mutually exclusive from the pursuit? Maybe not.

It is heartening to see a gradual paradigm shift within the Academie. The same shift that attempts to embrace and hold “the other” in aspirations for collegiate approaches in the pursuit….

Just as gender and ethnicity are now acknowledged within this framework – so is a step outside the ordinary and the traditional.

Dusty books can be supplemented with thick rimmed glasses, designer coffee and a Hoxton passtime. A new generation of academics slowly emerges, a product of a 70s and 80s childhood with different sensibilities and value systems. A generation that has experienced the worlds first media saturation and global exposure through less sophisticated means…. This generation promotes a different aesthetic. One where you can be a multidimensional being. One that doesn’t need to fit in to categories and perform a singular role.

And perhaps it is this generation that proves to be the Academies last hope in meeting knowledge needs(?) – as the academie keeps up with its newly acquired  supply and demand driven business model.

Author: J. Shah

First Published: September, 2018