Creativity and project management: a comic

Abstract

It’s a comic book, the clue’s in the title. The idea is to tell a story about how a research project took place focusing not on the data that was generated, or even so much on how we generated the data, but on the way we actually tried to manage the project. Generally the academy likes to draw a veil over the messy bits which make scholars look like idiots and allows outsiders to question whether or not projects should have been funded in the first place. But if you’re willing to sail your academic reputation out to sea on a long boat and set it on fire then you might illuminate the dark corners of the black box in which these processes normally reside. Project management can be a crucial, highly creative, part of the process of generating new academic knowledge. We argue that acknowledging these processes is every bit as important as acknowledging the research ‘position’ from which the field data were collected and analysed. Plus there’s a sex scene.