Oblique Strategy Cards for Academia

This is a set of oblique strategy cards, designed for use in all areas of academic life. They are inspired by the oblique strategy cards that Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt designed in the 70s for use in artistic projects. Each of these contained a strategy, framed in a generic and indirect way, which would apply in many different situations. Picking a random card, and seeing how the strategy applied to your current project might just be the thing to help you get creatively unstuck.

While academia is often a very creative enterprise, the original strategies don’t work very well in academic life. This website provides 127 new oblique strategies, specifically written for academia. Some of these apply to experimentation, some to writing, some to teaching, and some to career management. Ideally, most will apply to multiple different aspects of academic work.

While these strategies are probably a little bit more direct and practical than the original ones, they do all follow two basic rules:

• They are oblique. They do not apply solely and obviously to one specific situation.
• They are strategies. They are not advice. The difference is that advice is always meant to be a good idea to follow (in its stated context). A strategy is sometimes good to follow, and sometimes it isn’t. It’s up to you.

The strategies themselves can be found in the file strategies.txt on the github. For a random card, see oblique.tips. There is also a twitter bot, which posts a random strategy card twice a day.