What I Got Wrong About the Rural–Urban Divide

facing our own stereotypes

The Revolution Where You Live

Wisconsin dairy farmers reminded me not to allow Fox News and the NRA to define groups of people.

I thought I knew something about Wisconsin politics. I assumed the state was neatly divided between blue cities, like Madison and Milwaukee, and solidly red rural areas that twice elected Governor Scott Walker, one of the nation’s most right-wing governors, and went for Donald Trump in 2016.

Matt Gartman walks through the milking parlor at his farm in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Photo by Darren Hauck for The Washington Post via Getty Images.

Turns out there’s a lot I didn’t know. And the assumptions and stereotypes that I—and many others—hold are dividing us and harming our chances of building powerful coalitions across rural–urban divides.

In early February, I visited the town of Wisconsin Dells to give a keynote presentation at the Wisconsin Farmers Union pre-convention gathering, “Groundswell.” I stayed for the convention, where…

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When research moves too close: Maintaining awareness of boundaries

the emotional researcher, ethics and others….

DoctoralWriting

By Susan Carter

Some doctoral students find their study overwhelming for more reasons that all the usual ones. Sure, they face the same challenges as others do: the study is vast; there is so much to read and to write; and almost inevitably difficulties occur with the research itself—it’s hard to find participants, experiments don’t work, or data fails to make sense. But beyond all this, some students find that their research topic winds so intensely into other people’s lives it involves something of a meltdown. How can such crises be handled?

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worth thoughtful ponders

via Distinguishing Qualitative Research Methods from Paradigm Orientation

When peer review goes well – and when it doesn’t

oooooh another bobby dazzler

The Research Whisperer

Dr Jodie Goldney is a qualitative researcher with extensive experience working in the community services sector.

Her PhD is a critique of the scientist-practitioner, or Boulder model of pedagogy that underpins the training of psychologists in most of the Western World. Drawing on that work, Jodie created the attributional approach to recruitment and training, which screens for reflexivity and capacity to learn from experience over a static knowledge-base.

Jodie recently launched Qualitate (www.qualitate.com.au; on Twitter: @Qualitate01), which applies qualitative methodologies to the problems of industry.

She is both adjunct and sessional academic with Charles Sturt University. Jodie tweets from @jgoldn01.

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Photo by eatsmilesleep | http://www.flickr.com/photos/45378259@N05 (Shared via CC license 2.0 – creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

In the academic world, getting published is serious business, it can mean the difference between getting a job, and not even getting an interview.

For new PhD graduates, this need is particularly strong…

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On Being Responsibly Bold (and other advice for TJ-Informed Change Agents)

oooooh

The ISTJ Blog

Professor David Yamada writes…

At a recent therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) workshop hosted by Professor Carol Zeiner and the St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, Florida, I urged us all to be “responsibly bold” in our research and advocacy for legal and policy change. The term resonated with a number of workshop participants, and that response has prompted me to gather three clusters of advice for those who are operating as change agents in a TJ mode.

The advice is based primarily on two ongoing points of significant involvement:

1. engaging in scholarship, legislative drafting and advocacy, and public education on workplace bullying and mobbing; and
2. researching and proposing law reform measures concerning the widespread practice of unpaid internships.

It is also informed by the promise of our new organization, the International Society for Therapeutic Jurisprudence, which is happily recruiting founding members.

I hope these thoughts will inspire your ideas…

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Building your track record

The Research Whisperer

Deb Brian currently works at the Office of Sponsored Research at The University of Queensland, where her focus is on helping researchers to write better funding applications, and supporting early career researchers and women in science and research.

She can be found on Twitter at @deborahbrian, where she talks higher education policy, research strategy, Australian politics, social justice, and cats. Mostly cats.

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight on December 14, 2017 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com.

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Photo by Ravi Roshan | unsplash.com

As the year begins, many of you will be planning your research for the coming year and identifying funding schemes to target. Some will have received the outcomes of last year’s grant applications and will either be breathing a sigh of relief or girding their loins for the next attempt.

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We Need Radical Imagination

ooooh

The Revolution Where You Live

Imagination, as Hawaiian Native rights advocate Poka Laenui describes it, is more than an antidote to hopelessness. It is a source of power.

Mural in Newark, New Jersey, celebrates imagination. Created as part of the mayor’s Model Neighborhood Initiative. 

There are many consequences to the near daily barrage of lies, violence, bigotry, and vulgarity produced by the Trump administration. One impact: This atmosphere crowds out space for imagining and creating new possibilities.

So it was refreshing to hear that for Poka Laenui, radical imagination is not dead. His favorite thing to imagine: What his beloved Hawai’i will be like once it regains sovereignty.

Laenui is one of the leading voices for Hawaiian independence, a radio host, attorney, convener of the Hawaiian National Transition Authority, and an international advocate of indigenous peoples recognized for his work at the United Nations.

Imagination, as Laenui describes it, is not only an antidote to…

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A new approach to the assessment of learning outcomes in Japanese Universities

Hmmmmm

srhe

by Toru Hayashi

In recent years Japanese universities have faced unprecedented demands for developing student learning and have rapidly reformed courses to introduce active learning and practical internships. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan (MEXT) states that: ‘Amid the rapidly changing circumstances at home and abroad surrounding universities, expectations and demands towards universities,

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Time Management in Academia – A Road Map for Research

Time management in the academy

the social thinker

How do academics organise their time? What experiments and techniques of time management are practiced in higher education? How are early-career academics socialised into time management routines? In this post, I outline an upcoming project to trace the personal and communal practices that academics use to organise their work. If you have any advice or opinions, please share them in the comments below.

The pace of life in academia has become a central concern of professionals in the sector. I have written and published a bit on work/life balance, managerialism, identity, values, and range of topics that are pervaded by discourses of accelerationism and the loss of autonomy over working conditions. Heather Menzies and Janice Newson’s paper ‘No Time to Think’ is typical of the sentiment. Intensifying and mobile work routines have been enabled by digital technologies and brought into demand through competitive pressures in the university bureaucracy…

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3rd International Marxist-Feminist Conference 2018 – Call for participation

OOOOH

International Marxist Feminist Conference

Transforming our lives. Transforming the world.

The Third International Marxist-Feminist Conference will take place at

Lund University (Lund, Sweden), October 6-7, 2018.

 

The format of the Conference

In March 2015 over 500 scholars and activists participated in the first international Marxist-Feminist conference in Berlin exploring topics such as neoliberalism, intersectionality and social reproduction. The Second International Marxist-Feminist Conference took place in Vienna in 2016 under the title: Building Bridges – Shifting and Strengthening Visions – Exploring alternatives. It had the same number of participants but was more international with attendees from 29 countries from 6 continents. Discussions focused on concepts such as labour and care-work, intersectionality, new materialism, and ecofeminism, as well as Marxist-Feminist analyses of motherhood, fundamentalism, racism, education, and many others. Activists and researchers from Brazil, Turkey, Argentina, South Africa, the USA, and a number of European countries presented the different ways in which Marxist or Socialist…

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