Atul Joshi is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney.

Show Notes: https://bit.ly/tkm006

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A former classical musician, Atul Joshi is an arts and culture manager currently working for Bangarra Dance Theatre. In this capacity he has also worked for companies such as the State Theatre and State Opera of South Australia, Griffin Theatre Company, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and Bundanon Trust in senior management roles. He has also led government funding programs at the former Australia Council (now Creative Australia) and City of Sydney.

Born in Myanmar of Indian parents, Atul migrated to Australia as a child. Returning to his own creative life later in his career, he completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at UTS in 2020. Since then he has been shortlisted for the Saturday Paper’s 2020 Donald Horne and the Newcastle Writers' Festival 2022 Fresh Ink Prizes, had short fiction published in The Big Issue, Westerly, Island, Seizure and Ricepaper Magazine, non-fiction in the Portside Review, Peril Magazine, Sydney Review of Books and Benjamin Law’s Growing up Queer in Australia. His interest in the representation of queer lives and in the possibilities of creative non-fiction and auto/biography led him to commence a PhD in creative writing at UTS focusing on queer memoir and biography.

Atul and I share a passion for reading and writing, so our conversation came easily. I was especially intrigued by the manner in which his PhD project is being constructed around a creative component - quite different and, dare I say, a bit more intimate than completing a traditional thesis. I found it all very intriguing and I think you will, too.

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This episode of The Knowledge Mill was recorded in my office at UTS on September 18, 2023.

Ashleigh Marshall is a PhD candidate at Victoria University in Melbourne.

Show Notes: https://bit.ly/tkm005

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Ashleigh Marshall is a sport administrator, sport event professional, and qualitative researcher. Ashleigh’s PhD research at the Institute for Health and Sport at Victoria University focuses on how national sporting organisations can maximise opportunities for elite women athletes who need to suddenly transition to a second career. She was awarded the Amy Gillett Foundation Research Scholarship to undertake this research.

Ashleigh has a passion for research that aims to benefit the sport industry, particularly in relation to opportunities for women and girls. She’s based in Brisbane, but enrolled in a university in Melbourne, so all aspects of her PhD have been completed online: coursework, meetings with supervisors and interviews with participants! In 2022 she won Victoria University’s “Visualise Your Thesis” competition; an international programme that challenges graduate researchers to present their research in a 60-second audio-visual explainer.

Ashleigh has worked at state and national sporting organisations in Australia as well as the federal agency for sport, the Australia Sports Commission. She completed her undergraduate studies - a Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) in Sports Studies, and a Bachelor of Science in Human Movement Science - at the University of Queensland, but travelled to Greece for her master’s degree. There, she completed a Master of Science in Olympic Studies, Olympic Education, and the Management and Organisation of Olympic Events. This degree is organised and awarded jointly by the University of Peloponnese and the International Olympic Academy (IOA). The IOA premises are located in Ancient Olympia, just ‘down the road’ from the Ancient Olympic Stadium.

Ashleigh is passionate about women and girls’ participation in sport. She coaches both netball and badminton to girls aged 12-18, and teaches swimming to children aged from 3 onwards. She likes to keep physically active herself and swims 2km most days.

Ashleigh and I spoke after the final day of the 2022 Conference of the Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand - a.k.a., SMAANZ. We met for the first time only a few days before, and immediately discovered we were good at making each other laugh. Because I can't help myself, I've included an 'outtake' of these shenanigans at the start of the episode that will surely put a smile on your face. At the time of the podcast recording, Ashleigh was a second year PhD candidate. Presently, she’s a third year PhD candidate and is working toward submitting her thesis within the next six months.

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This episode of The Knowledge Mill was recorded on December 2, 2022 on the campus of Swinburne University of Technology during the 28th Annual SMAANZ Conference.

Linden Moore is a PhD candidate at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.

Show Notes: https://bit.ly/tkm004

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Linden Moore's research sits at the intersection of women's sport and marketing. She's currently working on a funded PhD research project that looks at the role of individuals in community sport as ambassadors and their role in marketing sport - basketball in particular - to participants at the grassroots level. Her research was inspired by a passion for storytelling and a motivation to help tell the stories of female athletes from around the world.

Linden's background primarily sits in the marketing and communication fields. She's gained experience in both of these fields through internship opportunities whilst pursuing her B.A. in Journalism and PR at the University of Oregon, and Masters in Sports Business at New York University. Her previous experience includes serving as a Brands and Properties Intern for the Wasserman Media Group in New York City, where she helped create and execute marketing ideas as a member of the AT&T account for work with partners such as the WNBA and American Film Institute Festival. Her experience also includes marketing and communications for the TrackTown USA organisation in Eugene, Oregon, and as a member of a team of marketing consultants for Devin Booker of the NBA's Phoenix Suns. Outside of research she runs the @nz_nbl_girl brand, which is dedicated to promoting women's basketball in New Zealand and around the world. Linden aims to bring a mix of knowledge about marketing, research and storytelling combined with a global perspective to projects that she tackles.

Linden and I spoke after the first full day of the 2022 Conference of the Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand - a.k.a., SMAANZ. While we first made contact on Twitter (and wouldn't you know it, we discuss academic Twitter in this episode), we only met each other for the first time in person the previous day. We share an interest in women's sport and the promotion thereof, so the conversation came easily. I hope you enjoy it.

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This episode of The Knowledge Mill was recorded on December 1, 2022 on the campus of Swinburne University of Technology during the 28th Annual SMAANZ Conference.

Paul Bowell is a PhD candidate within the Sport Innovation Research Group at Swinburne University of Technology.

Show Notes: https://bit.ly/tkm3

Paul’s research project seeks to understand how women Australian Rules footballers affectively experience digital self-tracking, and what impacts these interactions have on the player’s construction of selfhood, identity-making, and body as athletes. With these insights he aims to develop a framework that empowers women footballers to maximise their performance through digital self-tracking, while promoting positive self-image and women athletes’ identity.

Paul obtained a Bachelor of Arts with Honours specialising in sociology from The Australian National University. Paul’s Honours project, in which he achieved First-Class Honours, investigated the compliance processes of employees who were digitally self-tracked in their workplace. As an undergraduate Paul was awarded a New Colombo Plan scholarship that allowed him to participate in an ethnographic field school in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG). During the ethnographic field school in PNG Paul conducted fieldwork activities including interviews, survey taking, and social and participant observations focused on the social restrictions of cash cropping. Paul has also worked at Deakin and La Trobe Universities lecturing and tutoring first and second year undergraduate sociology and sports management units. Paul is also a board member for the Sports Innovation Research Group advisory board. A position he has held since May 2022.

Paul and I spoke after the first day of the 2022 Conference of the Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand – a.k.a., SMAANZ. I had only met Paul that same day, and yet we easily fell into a wide-ranging conversation about his academic journey and women’s sport. Two days later, Paul won the 2022 SMAANZ three-minute thesis award. Did our chat spur him to victory? Some things are not for us to know.

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This episode of The Knowledge Mill was recorded on November 30, 2022 on the campus of Swinburne University of Technology during the 28th Annual SMAANZ Conference.

Leanne Sobel is completing her PhD at the University of Technology Sydney, researching the roles of design in strategy.

Show Notes: https://bit.ly/tkm002

Leanne Sobel is a strategic designer, researcher and educator. Her work draws on design practices to investigate complex problems and deliver strategic outcomes. Leanne has a background in visual communication design and management. Her career spans design management, corporate strategy consulting, design education, and research roles. Leanne is currently undertaking a funded PhD research project at UTS – the University of Technology Sydney – investigating the role of design in strategy.

Previously, Leanne worked as a Senior Strategic Designer and Researcher at the Design Innovation Research Centre at UTS, having joined the team from her time working in Strategy Consulting at Deloitte. Over the course of her career, Leanne has worked on consultancy projects with both public and private sector clients, including the Department of Defence, Australian Human Rights Commission, icare, NBN, Legal Aid NSW, Westpac, Qantas and Telstra. Leanne brings her knowledge of design practice to consultancy engagements, along with her research and education background, and is an experienced workshop designer and facilitator.

Leanne and I have a common research interest in design and design thinking. Despite this, we did a fairly decent job of preventing this episode from turning into the design thinking hour, although… your mileage may vary. When we sat down late last year, Leanne was working toward her Stage Two Assessment. In the UTS Business School framework, Stage Two is typically a check of the candidate’s readiness to go into the field and collect data. However, and as she discusses here, Leanne had already begun her data collection and was, through her grounded theory approach, in search of data saturation. In the weeks following our conversation, Leanne successfully completed her Stage Two assessment and she is now working toward completion of her PhD.

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This episode of The Knowledge Mill was recorded in my office at UTS on November 23, 2022.

David Bickett completed his PhD at the University of Technology Sydney, researching curiosity as practice in executive decision making.

Show Notes: https://bit.ly/tkm001

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I've known David for a few years now, as our PhD candidatures at UTS – the University of Technology Sydney – overlapped. Myself, David, and our mutual friend Lewis Whales – who you will hopefully hear from in another episode – would get together over coffee for weekly accountability meetings to keep each other honest. This continued even after the COVID-19 pandemic hit Australian shores in March 2020… we just simply moved our meetings onto Zoom! Now that we’re back on campus, David and I continue to be good friends and colleagues.

The thing that made David unique among PhD researchers at the UTS Business School is the extensive professional experience that he brings to his candidature. Before embarking on his PhD journey, David held various roles in corporate leadership, developing and executing key strategic initiatives in both for- and non- profit organisations. In 25 years of this work, David’s career took him around the world to: the UK, Japan, Singapore and, of course, Australia.

As David recounts at the start of our conversation, it was this industry work that led him to researching curiosity and the role it plays in the strategic decision making of top management team executives. While curiosity is often viewed through a psychological lens, David considered curiosity as a social practice in his PhD research. This was a “turn” in his candidature that he discusses in this episode.

Ultimately, David’s research aimed to understand how curiosity as a social practice assists top management team executives in making strategic decisions, and in managing organizational ambidexterity. When we sat down to record this episode, David was finishing the minor revisions to his thesis that his examiners had requested. By the time you hear this episode, his PhD will have been conferred. So let me be the among the first to say: Congratulations, Dr Bickett!

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This episode of The Knowledge Mill was recorded in my office at UTS on November 23, 2022.

The Knowledge Mill features PhD researchers and the work they do. Each episode is a longform conversation covering the guest's journey to doing a PhD, the nature of their PhD life, the ideas they're currently swimming in, and their non-academic passions. Hosted by Greg Joachim.