Welcome to the Oracles of Academia podcast!

Create your most fascinating scholarship yet using the tools, puzzles, exercises, and thought experiments from the Oracles of Academia podcast. When you recognize the unique genius you bring to your academic writing, you can find your place in the future of scholarship. Hosted by Margy Thomas, Ph.D., founder of ScholarShape.

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Episode 0. Welcome to the Oracles of Academia Podcast!

TRANSCRIPT

Scholarly life often feels bewildering, like wandering through an unmapped realm, just hoping to get somewhere eventually.

How do we even frame the choices in front of us, much less decide what to do?

We're surrounded by information and advice on how to write, how to think, how to work, how to be -- but what we really need are sacred moments to connect with our own genius.

When the ancients needed a way to cut through the confusion and make a decision, they'd seek out oracles -- the cryptic speeches of a priestess in a mountain temple.

Today, an oracle can be any conceptual device that helps us perceive something of how the universe works, so that we can orient ourselves and discern what to do next.

A heuristic, a koan, a paradox, a parable, a thought experiment -- or even a mathematical pattern or scientific theory.

The magic of an oracle is that it is not a concrete, specific instruction telling you exactly and unambiguously what to do.

Its abstractness or obliqueness is what makes an oracle practically useful.

In the Oracles of Academia podcast, each episode will bring you a story or conversation from which we can distill a conceptual tool that helps you imagine your way into the future of scholarship.

You'll hear from a scholar who developed a powerful metaphor as a navigation device for her writing process and now shows other scholars how to use this technique.

You'll hear from a scholar who's leading a style revolution, helping us see how much agency we have to put our own voice on the page.

In some episodes, you'll hear directly from me. I'll share memories and learnings to inspire you on your scholarly journey.

The truth is, the Oracles of Academia are all of us who are imagining the future of scholarship into being.

I'm your host, Margy Thomas, founder of ScholarShape, an incubator where scholars gather to support each other in creating the most fascinating scholarship of tomorrow. Subscribe to the Oracles of Academia podcast to get every episode in your feed wherever you listen to your podcasts.