The Academy of Abigail - Abigail Ellen

The Academy of Abigail grows out of the way I have lived, and continue to live, taking my own intellectual, creative and personal development seriously without necessarily handing an institution the authority to decide what I should learn and what I should do with what I learn.

My life’s journey includes a first-class honours degree in the arts, published poetry, performing at the world’s largest performing arts festival, a creative industries career spanning 25 years, two Scottish BAFTAs from my early film work, international work experience, multiple short courses in a range of personal and professional interests, a Level 5 coaching diploma, and a lifetime of living, solo and in relationships, travelling, making things and trying things out.

I’m not starting from scratch as I finally enter the next level of my academic development. I’m bringing with me an extraordinary amount of material.

After four years studying a fine art degree in my late teens, I found myself becoming less committed to drawing and painting than I had been when I first submitted my life drawings for selection. A first class degree didn’t assuage my lack of desire to start a studio practice or become an art teacher, which at the time, seemed to be the only options for a woman with an art degree in the late 90’s.

For decades afterwards, as I made strides into establishing what felt like a career in the precarious world of freelance film and TV work, I also wondered what I should study next.

I was sure at some point it would come to me as a crystal clear vision.

I was born into a family with three PhDs and a degree in veterinary science to their names, so academic achievement was hardly an unfamiliar concept. I just never managed to settle on what to spend £10,000 on for a Master’s degree, or identify a subject I could imagine committing three to five years of my life to without simultaneously wanting to pursue ten or twelve other paths.

There was always something else I wanted to explore, another subject that caught my attention, another idea that might lead somewhere unexpected. The problem wasn’t a lack of intellectual curiosity or depth, but the expectation that I should choose a single discipline and devote myself wholly to it.

Having undertaken a number of these explorations, I’ve now decided to establish my own academic institution.

Welcome to The Academy of Abigail

The Academy of Abigail (always in bold) will award me a Master’s degree and a PhD in my own life. I am its founder, its sole student and the authority responsible for determining when I have achieved the necessary standard.

I haven’t quite worked out the ceremonial arrangements, but I don’t anticipate the process will take long.

Without further ado, I have decided to award myself both qualifications immediately.

This isn’t entirely out of character. For much of my adult life, I’ve taken my own intellectual, creative and personal development seriously, following interests that have taken me in and out of formal education, across different disciplines and into experiences that no institution could have prescribed.

I’ve always been interested in learning, but I’ve never been particularly convinced that it needs to follow a predetermined route, lead to a recognised qualification or prepare me for a particular occupation.

The Academy of Abigail (always in bold) is the next step in that life. It is an imagined institution, an art project and an opportunity to play with the idea of academic authority. It gives me the opportunity to award myself the qualifications I might otherwise spend time, money and effort acquiring elsewhere, while still enjoying the journey of gathering a wide range of knowledge and expertise that may or may not prove valueable at some point.

Having taken this step, I am under no obligation to undertake any further study. I can continue to work in gainful employment, read, write, make things, travel, explore ideas and live my life. I can learn something new tomorrow or change my mind about something I thought I knew yesterday.

There is no defined curriculum. I don’t need to produce a dissertation. I don’t need to demonstrate that my experiences have made me a better person or that my interests have resulted in something useful.

I can simply get on with it.

The Academy of Abigail (still in bold) is not an argument against formal education. I work in education, and I understand the deep value of what institutions can offer.

I am interested in what happens when we question the authority of institutions to determine not only the shape, direction and validity of our intellectual lives, but also to define what constitutes health, normality, success and a life well lived.

Who gets to decide what counts as valid?

Universities help determine what counts as legitimate knowledge.
Professional qualifications help determine who counts as an authorised expert.
Medical systems help determine what counts as health, illness and disorder.
Social conventions help determine what counts as a successful or properly lived life.

These systems serve real purposes. Medical diagnosis, for example, can provide explanations, treatment and access to support. The interesting question is where useful classification becomes an overly narrow account of what it means to be human.

Who draws the boundaries, what assumptions underpin them, whose interests they serve, and what gets lost when a person is reduced to a category?

From academia to medicine, professional bodies to social conventions, we are surrounded by systems that classify, credentialise and prescribe, establishing frameworks through which we are encouraged to understand ourselves and our place in the world.

These systems can offer valuable knowledge, support and structure, but they can also constrain the possibilities we imagine for ourselves.

What happens when we reclaim the authority to explore, interpret and make meaning of our own experiences, rather than relying on external institutions to tell us what they mean?

The Academy of Abigail is both an exercise in self-authorisation and a place to examine the systems that authorise other people to define us.

I am awarding myself a number of Master’s and PhD’s from several faculties of The Academy of Abigail.

I shall add the qualifications to the imaginary update of my academic record and get on with the business of being alive.

In lieu of a graduation ceremony, I’m using the money for another motorbike trip around a far-flung land where I will no doubt spend hours on the road exploring the nooks and crannies of my mind, with my body enveloped in extraordinarily stunning scenery.

The Academy of Abigail (never shortened to The Academy) is a institution in which I am simultaneously the student, the academic, the research subject, the field researcher, the internal AND external verifier, and, occasionally, the person who decides the entire curriculum is nonsense.

The central premise of The Academy of Abigail (always capitalised) is not that I have to study everything. It’s that I get to decide what interests me, and that my life doesn’t have to justify that interest by producing a qualification, a career or a useful outcome.

There are no mandatory modules. No dissertation supervisor who doesn’t understand my interests or really wants me to subsidise theirs. No requirement to turn everything I learn into a career of suitable societal value commensurate with the stock I have come from.

There are no policies or procedures to write and ignore. No governance documents to assure the student and staff body that everything is in order, and no requirement to submit financial statements to the Board because there isn’t one.

Instead, I am designing my own programme of advanced study in each of the esteemed faculties of scholarly merit established at The Academy of Abigail.

I anticipate completion of my studies may take up to the next 40-50 years if I am lucky (or not given the way the world is going), and I appreciate your patience for when I see fit to make public my findings.

What will I discover? What will challenge my assumptions? What will make me feel alive? What will I learn about myself, other people and the world?

The Academy of Abigail is under no obligation to unearth any new artefacts, break any new ground or answer any of these questions.

It is under no obligation to follow its own rules, which is just as well as it hasn’t set any.

As founder and sole authority on the matter, I see no reason to amend the prospectus or curricula in light of new research unless I find it interesting and amusing to do so.

Introducing the 10 Faculties of The Academy of Abigail

Introducing the 10 Faculties of
The Academy of Abigail

The Faculty of Living

In this faculty, I will spend my time getting on with being wholly as I am, reflecting on day to day life as an extraordinary ordinary person, and occasionally sharing some of the magical insights of a life I think is quite well lived with others.

Research questions: Who decides what a successful life looks like? How should we live when we don’t want to follow the conventional script?

Areas of study:

The social construct of success and achievement
Singlehood, solo living and unconventional lives
Ageing, reinvention and the possibilities of midlife
Autonomy, solitude, connection and belonging
The relationship between freedom, security and responsibility
Designing a life beyond conventional expectations

Faculty motto: Just get on with it

The Faculty of Creative Practice and Un-Profitability

In this faculty, I will write a screenplay, develop audio work, explore the relationship between creativity and wellbeing, experiment with different artistic forms, and investigate what happens when creative practice is removed from the demands of productivity, public evaluation, commercial success, or producing another human.

Research questions: What happens when you give yourself permission to be an artist again? What is creativity for when it doesn’t have to earn its keep?

Areas of study:

Creativity as a way of thinking and understanding
The value of making things that serve no obvious purpose
Art, play, experimentation and the unfinished
Creative identity beyond professional achievement
The relationship between attention, curiosity and imagination
Resisting the pressure to monetise every interest

Faculty motto: Thinking outside the box. Getting trapped in another.

The Faculty of Human Nature and Social Fictions

In this faculty, I will draw from years of work in organisations, my coaching training, my creative projects, business endeavours and my observations to write essays, comedy, audio drama and undertake serious research.

Research questions: Why do people behave the way they do, particularly when reality doesn’t match their stated intentions? Why do we collectively agree to things that might not make sense?

Areas of study:

The social construct of norms and expectations
Institutional rituals, professional identities and organisational theatre
The performance of health, happiness and success
Social conformity, belonging and the fear of being different
The stories people and institutions tell to legitimise themselves
Why people enthusiastically support ideas but rarely help bring them to life
How people construct identities around being helpful, healthy or socially conscious
The difference between what people say they value and how they actually behave
The tension between individual responsibility and collective responsibility

Faculty Motto: The show must go on. Unfortunately.

The Faculty of Wellbeing by Design

In this faculty, I will study the role of movement, creativity, nature, friendship, solitude, adventure, rest and meaningful activity, experimenting on myself, exploring the research, talking to other people, coaching and developing my own ideas, while examining where popular wellness advice, and relatively often I, can fall short.

Research questions: What makes a life sustaining, rather than simply functional? How do we design the conditions for a healthy life well lived?

Areas of study:

How environments, routines, resources and opportunities shape our experience of wellbeing
The influence of social structures, culture, relationships and place on individual wellbeing
The interplay between movement, creativity, nature, rest, connection, solitude and meaningful activity
How we shape our circumstances and make choices that support the lives we want to lead
Questioning universal formulas for happiness, health and fulfilment
Who defines wellbeing, whose interests those definitions serve, and what happens when wellbeing becomes another measure of personal performance
Exploring different ways of living a healthy life without assuming there is one right answer

Faculty motto: Well. Well. Well.

The Faculty of Adventure and Experience

In this faculty, I will reflect on past motorcycle journeys, walking solo in unfamiliar landscapes, learning new physical skills, the exploratory constraints of lockdown, visiting places for a particular experience rather than ticking off a destination, while simultaneously making a list of more places to visit, and more new hobbies to buy all of the essential tools and gear for.

Research questions: What do we learn by putting ourselves in unfamiliar situations? What can only be learned by living?

Areas of study:

Experiential knowledge and the limits of theory
Travel, exploration and encounters with the unfamiliar
The body as a site of knowledge
Risk, uncertainty and the appetite for adventure
Nature, place and our relationship with the world
The difference between collecting experiences and being changed by them
The ability to explore when you can’t go anywhere
The pursuit of things that turn out to be closed
The art of the impulsive decision and retrospective justification
Why humans enjoy unnecessary expeditions and complicated ways of getting there

Faculty motto: Veni. Vidi. Oops.

Faculty of Knowledge and Authority

In this faculty, I will ponder all of the things I know, and that I have learned myself, from others, in institutions and through experience as well as things I think I know but may have just imagined or dreamed. I will have authority to ponder them either way. I might write about some of them.

Research questions: Who decides what we know? Who decides what we need to know and why? Who gets to decide what constitutes knowledge? Who confers authority? Why does one person’s understanding become legitimate when an institution certifies it, while another person’s understanding of the world remains merely anecdotal? What exactly are we buying when we pay for a qualification?

Areas of study:

The legitimacy of institutional knowledge
The production, ownership and commodification of expertise
Qualifications, credentials and the manufacture of authority
Learning outside formal education
The relationship between lived experience and academic research
The right to intellectual self-determination
The absurdity of spending years learning things for a life that isn’t yours

Faculty motto: Says who?

Faculty of Anti-Pathology and Disordering

In this faculty, a light can be shone on the flashing bright billboards and phone screens we are surrounded by, encouraging us all to look after our mental health whilst simultaneously transferring responsibility for all the world’s daily services to us as the individual, selling expensive and time depleting solutions to fix our ordinary human reactions to difficult situations and life itself, and ensuring we know it’s ‘our fault’ when someone treats us abysmally.

Research questions: What if difference isn’t a defect? What would happen if we truly embraced human variation?

Areas of study:

The medicalisation of ordinary life
Health, illness and the boundaries of normality
Human variation and the construction of disorder
Diagnosis, labelling and the stories we tell about ourselves and others
The authority of medical and psychological frameworks
The politics of treatment, intervention and self-acceptance
The comedy of being the same as people like ourselves but different from everyone else
The psychology of being perfectly fine in a world that thinks you are not
The classification of things that are none of your business

Faculty motto: Diverse. Diversa. Diversum.

The Faculty of Nothing in Particular

The work of this faculty is dedicated to curiosity that refuses to settle into a discipline, interests that lead nowhere, and the right to change my mind.

It might even be the most important faculty of all.

Research question: What becomes possible when we allow ourselves to follow our curiosity without requiring it to lead anywhere?

Areas of study:

The intellectual value of curiosity without purpose
The pursuit of interests that don’t fit into a single discipline
The freedom to change direction, abandon an idea or begin again
The difference between being interested in something and needing to become good at it
The right to explore without producing an outcome
The relationship between idleness, attention, imagination and discovery
The rejection of productivity as the measure of a worthwhile activity
The possibility that a life can be meaningful without following a plan
Advancing the study and practice of abigai

Faculty motto: No purpose. No pressure. No problem.

Faculty of Work, Worth and Identity

This is the faculty where I will fulfil my ambition of running away to the circus, and learn the skilled craft of walking the fine tightrope of exploring the vagaries of the modern workplace, while also being in and relying, to a level currently above somewhat, on the modern workplace.

Research Question: Who are we when we aren’t defined by what we do?

Areas of study:

Professional identity and personal worth
Productivity, ambition and the value of time
The relationship between work, freedom and fulfilment
The social expectation to turn interests into careers or businesses
The measurement of human value
The right to do nothing useful as long as you are rich enough
Reinvention beyond established professional identities
The economics of having a life outside work
The economics of middle-class career progression on a solo income

Faculty motto: Strive to Thrive with the Drive to High Five Alive

Faculty of Self-Authorship

This is the faculty everyone aspires to be in. All of the other faculties are extremely envious of the student of this faculty. Sometimes they get so annoyed at the emotional freedom of the student and her supervisor, that they sneak into the lecture theatre at lunch break, and take out all the lightbulbs. The student is actually quite happy about this because there is nothing worse than overhead lighting when you are trying to do your work without your eyeballs burning out.

Research Question: Who gets to write the story of a life? Does it matter what anyone thinks of you if they are wrong?

Areas of study:

Personal agency and the authority to define oneself
The stories we inherit and the ones we choose
Making meaning without external validation
The freedom to reject conventional life scripts
Self-definition versus the labels assigned by others
The relationship between identity, experience and imagination
The right to change your mind about who you are and what your life means

Faculty motto: I am

The Faculty of Things that Go Wrong

This faculty is where I will investigate the persistent failure of reality to comply with expectations.

Research questions: Why does life so frequently refuse to follow the script? Why is that so often the funniest part?

Areas of study:

When a perfectly reasonable plan produces a completely unreasonable outcome
Observing what people actually do, rather than what they claim to do
Why things rarely unfold quite as anticipated
The elaborate pretence that we know what we are doing
Why learning from experience is rubbish because we often don’t get to put the learning into practice again
When the systems designed to make life easier become the problem themselves
Decisions that seem entirely sensible until they aren’t
The comedy of being a person who occasionally makes an idiot of themselves
The comedy that everyone gets embarrassed for you, but you have already moved onto the next mishap.
The transformation of an terrible experience into an Olivier-winning theatrical farce (as long as no-one died).
The absurdity of endlessly trying to become a better version of yourself
The difference between the story we think we’re living and the one that is actually unfolding
The various ways we think we are doing well in our attempts to organise life that spectacularly backfire

Faculty motto: Never behind. Unless someone is in front.

The ten faculties of The Academy of Abigail collectively explore knowledge, health, wellbeing, creativity, social expectations, work, adventure and personal autonomy.

There is some overlap, but that’s entirely appropriate. These are connected areas of inquiry, not rigid academic departments.

How to apply to The Academy of Abigail

There is no application process because it is not possible to apply. If you want to apply, you need to set up your own Academy of You. It’s not possible to have my life, especially if you made entirely different life choices to mine.

You may however be able to read and share some selected publications from The Academy of Abigail as they become available. There may be talks you can attend.

There also might not be, as The Academy of Abigail exists to serve my curiosity, not become a institution demanding that I perform.

The Academy of Abigail has one founding principle.

My life is not something I need to optimise. It is something I can investigate, create and experience. Whether anyone validates it or not.

The Academy doesn’t teach anyone how to live. It gives me a framework for exploring what living can mean.

My research is my life.

My fieldwork includes my career, my travels, my relationships, my creative practice, my mistakes, my observations of human behaviour and my experience of being a woman in (hopefully) mid-life.

My thesis is whatever I happen to be thinking about. My viva is conducted by me.

I pass.

No further work is required.

I am already a Doctor of Abigail.