Flexible Planning
Our systems for tracking and making progress on our goals are often deeply personal and idiosyncratic. How we organize our days to find motivation changes over time as well, as our lives and our worlds shift in ways we don’t always get to control.
In episode 127 of Imagine Otherwise, I talk to Chicanx media studies scholar Dolores Inés Casillas about the creative planning and project management systems that scholars use to get their writing done while navigating the rest of life’s adventures.
Inés shares how years of parenting taught her a method of flexible planning that has come in handy during the pandemic as well as how she uses bullet journaling to create her publishing pipeline and academic diary.
We also discuss how Inés links her goal of telling the stories of immigrant communities to her writing practice by prioritizing morning pages and calling on a robust support network of editors, colleagues, and friends.
Dolores Inés Casillas
Dolores Inés Casillas is an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies and director of the Chicano Studies Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with US Spanish-language and bilingual media, the representation of accented Spanish and English languages in popular culture, and the integration of ethnic studies in K–12 schools.
Inés is the author of Sounds of Belonging: US Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014), a coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media (Routledge, 2016), a coeditor of Feeling It: Language, Race, and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge, 2018), and a regular contributor to Sounding Out!
Her forthcoming book, under contract with NYU Press, investigates how Mexican immigrant communities interact with book-audio sets, WhatsApp, memes, and social media campaigns in creative, transgressive ways.
Inés is also a board member of Adelante Charter School, the only dual-language (Spanish-English) K–6 elementary school in Santa Barbara.
