Sandra Burr is an Adjunct Professional Associate in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra where she also teaches creative writing and research methods.  She is a member of the Faculty’s Writing Research Cluster, a member of the editorial panel of the Axon: Creative Explorations, and is a regular reviewer for M/C Reviews, the Australian Association of Animal Studies Bulletin, and TEXT: Journal of writing and writing courses. She has a doctorate in creative writing and her research interests include exploring the relationships between humans and animals and her recent exhibition Inanimate Animals, comprising text and visual material focusing on animal representations in urban Canberra, was presented at the Belconnen Arts centre group show, Creative Practice (August 2011). Needless to say, Sandra is a woman who loves horses.

Defragging the horse stuff

We make judgments every day about all kinds of things. Whether wrestling with student assignments or finessing a paper for publication, the same critical principles and rational processes apply, so making judgments about paring back personal clutter should be comparatively easy—or is it? As one horsewoman found out, an exercise in defragging the horse stuff was about as conflicted and complex as it gets.