Iris Murdoch

Two years ago, Anna and I both became completely absorbed by Lyra Ekström Lindbäck’s novel Moral, in which the Irish-British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch plays a key role. With Anna Victoria Hallberg’s book You Touch My Soul: Scenes from a Life with Iris Murdoch fresh off the printer, it felt like an obvious new piece to the puzzle – and a necessary investment.

Otherwise, the big news today is that my co-authored article Critical Perspectives on HyFlex Teaching is finally live on the website of the Journal of Social Work Education. First submitted in May 2023, back when I was still working in Umeå, it has been one of the most drawn-out publishing experiences of my career – rivalled only by my book chapter with Edward Elgar earlier this year. From initial submission to first decision, my co-author Linda and I waited 13 months. Fortunately, the reviewers were positive, so after some minor revisions our article was accepted in September last year. Normally, it then takes a few months for an article to appear online (and possibly much longer before it is assigned to an actual issue of the journal). In our case, however, we had to wait another ten months before the next chapter of the saga: getting the journal to recognize that Halmstad University (like all Swedish universities) has a “transformative agreement” with Taylor & Francis that covers the cost of open access publishing. Countless e-mails later, I got to sign the publishing agreement last Tuesday – and, after yet another exchange with the portfolio manager and the “typesetter” (only the “lamplighter” missing) – the article finally appeared online today exactly one week later. I like to think that Iris Murdoch would have appreciated the whole affair: the long wait, the bureaucratic entanglements, the small triumph at the end symbolized by fish tacos and a bottle of Portuguese white wine – all the stuff of moral life, just with more email threads and fewer Oxford quadrangles.