I arrived at RITMO in October 2018 as a small part of the large process of bringing this long-imagined research centre into material existence. New people were arriving, buildings were still being furnished, and laboratories were being filled with expensive and (to my eyes) unrecognisable equipment. It was hard to tell who was who, and hard to discern what anyone was feeling about this novel formation. It was quite a while later that I started to appreciate the extent to which this moment was a rupture in the research culture of the three departments associated with RITMO – and also a significant internationalisation. Many of the new recruits had moved to Norway for the job, like me.
When I joined RITMO, I stopped being a PhD researcher and became a postdoctoral researcher. The most substantial change resulting from this was that I became part of a larger research team. My PhD supervisors had been helpful, supportive, and invested in my success, but ultimately, I was beholden to myself. Whereas on postdocs like mine, where the project goals are not individual but shared, the research you pursue is intended to fit into a bigger picture, which has already been sketched out by the project leader. I enjoyed that sense of responsibility. I also enjoyed working with scholars from other disciplines, and thinking through the challenge of how to triangulate our quite different approaches to our research questions.
I was also part of a still larger team – the RITMO Centre itself. I found this aspect more difficult. My colleagues were generous, friendly, and fun, but I didn’t feel a strong connection with the overall goals of the Centre. I found the majority of the research to be invested in notions of scientific progress that were at odds with my own approach. No doubt there was a lot of insecurity on my part. The musicologists, computer scientists, and psychologists at RITMO all have skills and techniques that I do not. With a greater tolerance for vulnerability, I could have learned a huge amount more than I did. My fellow MASHED postdoc Alan Hui arrived from Australia with an open mind and a convivial attitude and, I think, thrived accordingly.
I found it difficult to be in a new, unfamiliar city. About halfway through my time in Oslo I read Hunger by Knut Hamsun. That became an important way for me to understand my experience of Oslo. The roads I walked every day became part of this other city, the Kristiania of his day. The narrative of Hunger is set entirely in the present-tense. The protagonist’s need for food and shelter is so pressing that the past and future simply don’t come into it. This resonated with me. Of course, the book describes a much more desperate material situation than I have ever known. But it helped me understand my difficulty being a short-term worker in another country: your past isn’t there, and your future isn’t either. I was sad to learn that the book’s author, Knut Hamsun, was a Nazi-supporting fascist; I’m not sure I have successfully reconciled his grim political beliefs with my powerful experience of reading his novel.
I made my good friends in Oslo through music. I formed a band with three colleagues from the musicology department. Strangely enough, I don’t think it’s too common for staff to play music together, despite the immense concentration of technical skill (and, presumably, passion). I think I would have been very adrift without that communication.
As of February 2020, I am a RITMO alumni – having left my postdoc to start a new position as Associate Lecturer in Social Media and Society, at the University of York. I’m very pleased to have worked alongside dedicated colleagues at the Centre, and I’m looking forward to returning to Oslo as a visitor as soon as that’s feasible. I’m especially pleased to have collaborated closely with my project leader Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen on research outputs that I think have beneficially realised the interdisciplinary goals that Ragnhild set for her MASHED project.