Author Mona Khalil offers a collection of reflective poetry rooted in love and telling the story of her life, from childhood through present day. I Write Letters in my Thoughts is a synoptic view into one person's journey through love, life, and ultimately towards liberation. Her poems are a testament to the power of storytelling as a historic healing method for communities who are often told to be quiet and patient. I Write Letters in my Thoughts allows us to realize that we are enough and that enough is enough; suffering is not our destiny, love is not impossible, and freedom is what we make it.
The popular TV series Game of Thrones has warned us for many years of the dark times ahead with its famous words “Winter is coming”. When we look at the current situation with Covid-19 and the fear across the planet, it feels as if “Winter is here”. Other apocalyptic shows such as The Walking Dead, The Handmaid’s Tale, andThe Rain echo this atmosphere. These media formats have been interpreted as a social training to synchronize collective fears (Kleiner, 2013: 225). TV series seem to have some important aesthetic and emotional functions in today’s uncertain times.
Dear readers. Below you will find two poems. These poems give voice to the practice of security work in a Dutch airport. Writing poems is for us a process of engaging with the research data in an affective way, a process of writing together-apart (Barad, 2014), and a process that sparks joy and creativity. We see the contributions of this paper as twofold: (1) with these poems we feel that we can better capture the material agencies that constitute organizational life, and (2) we hope to spark an affective engagement from you when reading these poems on the doings of airport security work.
I am someone who loves to travel. I love to experience new places and adventures – it’s one of the things that attracted me to academia, being able to add a few days onto conference trips and scholarly exchange visits so I can explore the varied global locations I’ve been fortunate enough to visit over the years. Even when I’m at home, I travel around the UK a lot to see friends, and I thoroughly enjoy the liminal space that journeying provides, so the ‘stay at home’ imperative of the Covid-19 pandemic has felt especially challenging for me. Although, thankfully, my physical health has (so far) been good, my mental health has fared less well, especially in the early weeks of the pandemic. A first world, middle class, problem for sure, but the lack of freedom to go where I please has hit me hard. No more adventures? A slap in the face. The thought that I might not see one of my sons for months? Winded. He moved to San Francisco just before the pandemic took hold of the UK and US and it’s nearly a year since I’ve seen him in person. If I’d known that back then I don’t think I’d have coped. I am just grateful he got there in time to be locked-down with his love.
Because we are all in this fight that we fight even without knowing it. We are all in the world, under the stars, we are managers of the life and of ourselves. If not, we are nothing. Manager is not only a work. It is being themselves.
When it comes to getting through the Covid-19 pandemic with our spirits intact, one consistent message we’re hearing from healthcare professionals is that being outdoors can have lots of positive effects. There are those among you who may know I am a keen rock climber (Wood, 2016; Wood and Brown, 2014). With a few extra precautions, most climbers in England, at any rate, have been able to get out and enjoy the sport we love and feel some semblance of “normal”.
This terse poetic expression involves a candid narration of the journey of an organizational practice as it passes through multiple levels in an organization. Based on my research with organizational practices, this expression captures how the organizational practices (majority of them) take birth at the corporate headquarters which are then passed down (or rather forced upon!) the middle management for implementation. The middle management then gives their own treatment to these practices and somewhere in these processes the essence of the practice gets lost. Thus the practice is narrating its journey in this poem.
The Poet in Business is about the business world with its focus on growth and a relentless push every quarter to achieve expected revenues. Success is measured in numbers and stock market performance. In contrast to this, poetry seems irrelevant, considering the time spent, and an output that is not measured in numbers. Yet poetry can contribute in many more subtle ways to organisations, and it is relevant in ways unseen.
The process of poetic composition shares properties of complex systems, and of endeavors in other arts and domains, including science and technology. Through a Poetics of Discovery, we can understand poetic composition as an organizational process that encourages us to suspend or transcend habitual pathways to a prematurely narrowed range of outcomes. A brief discussion through poetics and systems principles presents tools, strategies, and approaches to compositional challenges; these can be extended to numerous areas of inquiry and enterprise.
Vinod Kumar Shukla is a contemporary poet from India, whose write in Hindi, and has won prestigious awards. Organizing as a verb is coming together of people to do together what they cannot do alone. In an elegantly simple and profound way, this short poem describes the coming together of two strangers to walk together, a metaphor for organizing. I have read this poem at the Academy of Management workshops with universal resonance felt by colleagues from around the world, which confirmed my original instinct in translating it from Hindi to English, that the relevance goes beyond the Indian context to be universally applicable.
This prose poem draws out the sadness and loneliness people are feeling at altered working spaces due to COVID19 that despite so many deaths, the world over, are still plagued by biases and indifference.
As I look back on the events of last year, like so many people, my reflections turn to how our home has been central to all that we have done and all that we have experienced. And like so many others during lockdown, our dining room became a classroom, the kitchen table became a meeting space, and the living room became a gym. All this meant our homes became ‘contested spaces’ (Lefebvre, 1991) and as I recently wrote in a book chapter with my co-author Michal Izak, we have suddenly found ourselves in a space with multiple meanings and uses (Shortt and Izak, 2020). We have appropriated and re-appropriated rooms across the landscape of our domestic spaces and perhaps most predominately, the boundaries between work and home have been well and truly broken and re-established.
This poem was created as an exercise in an annual faculty advance to kick off the academic year. I invited faculty and staff to identify what comes to mind when they think about organizations as a form of art. Some of the examples come from that exercise.
am a fetcher is a pattern poem. By presenting this pattern poem, I wish to show how visual poetry captures the organization of training, the dimension of subjectification and the 'reactivating of sensuousness' in the attempt to understand how young people struggle on the edge of the educational system.
As this extra-ordinary year draws to a close and a new one beckons us into the unknown, we have much to ponder. The COVID-19 pandemic has been traumatic and devastating as it spread with a similar intensity and reach as the fires on the West Coast of the United States of America. Despite the destruction, COVID has also bestowed an unexpected gift, especially to the citizens of my country, Aotearoa New Zealand.
