Give Racism a Chance

wow worth reading

The Activist History Review

by Simon Tam

A few years ago, my band, the Slants, was invited to perform at the Oregon State Penitentiary. I never thought that this simple concert would become a direct parallel to my legal battle, one that would eventually lead me before the Supreme Court of the United States. To many, sending an all-Asian American dance rock band into a prison with a significant neo-Nazi population seemed like an invitation for disaster. However, I didn’t question the decision until we actually showed up and were handed bright-orange vests to wear over our clothes. One of my band members asked if it would be okay to take them off mid-concert, since our suits and vests could get quite warm.

“Sure,” the guard said, “but if an incident occurs, the orange vests let the sentry towers know who to avoid shooting.” Got it: keep the safety gear on.

We continued…

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Mobile & Online Qualitative Research: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

provoked some ideasfor design of understandings of….health, education etc

Research Design Review

Data quality matters. Regardless of the research method or approach, our ability to say anything meaningful about our research outcomes hinges on the integrity of the data. The greater care the researcher takes to ensure the basic ingredients of “good” research design, the more confident the researcher and importantly the user of the research will be in the recommendations drawn from the research and its ultimate usefulness.

This focus on data quality applies to all research. And although it is most often a topic of discussion among survey researchers, data quality considerations are increasingly (I hope!) a discussion among qualitative researchers as well. Indeed, the underlying validity of our qualitative data is an important consideration regardless of the researcher’s paradigm orientation or the qualitative method, including the more recent methodological options – that is, mobile and online qualitative research.

Mobile and online technology – in particular, tech solutions that combine…

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Writing our way out of neoliberalism? For an ecology of publishing

via Writing our way out of neoliberalism? For an ecology of publishing

Laying the research groundwork

research thinks

The Research Whisperer

This article first appeared in Funding Insight on 3 June 2018 and is reproduced with permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com.

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Photo by Jon Tyson | unsplash.com

When I’ve asked researchers about their funding streams, many want to talk about the projects they want grant money for. Drilling down a bit further, however, it becomes obvious that many of the projects aren’t actually projects…yet.

Some researchers have ideas for projects, while others have started initial discussions but haven’t gotten their collaborators to commit to the project yet. Some researchers have said they have a full-fledged project in their head but haven’t talked with anyone else about it. Often, even if the team has come together, the thinking around the project itself has not.

This makes it hard to talk to your university’s grants team because the research project you want funded isn’t properly baked…

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Academic institutions, abuse allegations, and organizational ethics

abuse in the academy

Minding the Workplace

Writing for Inside Higher Ed, Greg Toppo asks why colleges and universities continue to deal with significant cases of sexual abuse and related mistreatment despite well-publicized, recent stories that should’ve served as cautionary tales:

When horrific, large-scale cases of sexual abuse emerged at Pennsylvania State University in 2011 and more recently at Michigan State University, higher education leaders expressed shock and vowed that such abuses would never happen again.

Then last month, it happened again. The Los Angeles Times reported on a University of Southern California gynecologist accused of decades of “serial misconduct” at a student health clinic, accusations now being investigated by police.

In each of the abuse cases, critics say key leaders failed to act on abuse reports until it was too late and dozens or even hundreds of victims came forward. How could the complaints fall through the cracks?

In several recent cases, presidents who mishandled…

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Can Critical University Studies survive the toxic university ?

A British view of CUSSING. Australia has been CUSSING for long time, and non-academics have been vocal, not just academics. Still a great blog post tho.

Academic Irregularities

Several things in the news recently have made me want to write again about Critical University Studies (CUS) – a discipline that has been given momentum in the UK by the USS pensions strikes of spring 2018. As I visited a number of campus rallies and teach-outs, I became aware of a real thirst for analysis of the UK and global higher education landscape. The pensions issue seemed to be a conductor for a whole host of other grievances about marketization, financialization, audit culture, management by metrics and the distortions of league tables and concern with university ‘reputation’.  These objections have spawned critique from all areas of the academy, from blogs by experimental scientists (Bishop 2013, Colquhoun 2016 ) to theorised analysis in social science (Burrows 2012; Holmwood 2011;  Petersen and Davies 2010; Hall & Winn 2018), to perspectives from literary scholars (Warner 2014; 2015; Docherty 2011; 2014; 2015). This…

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New special issue on precarious labour from Work, Employment and Society

precarious in deed

SAGE Business and Management INK

[We are pleased to welcome Gabriella Alberti, Ioulia Bessa, Kate Hardy, Vera Trappmann and Charles Umney from Leeds Business School. They recently edited a special issue for Work, Employment and Society on precarious labour.]

The special issue In, Against and Beyond Precarity: The Struggles of Insecure Workers received almost 100 submissions, one of the highest in the history of the British Sociological Association’s journals. The call for papers was launched following the 2016 Work, Employment and Society conference organised by Centre of Employment Relations Innovation and Change at the University of Leeds. The volume of submissions reflects the level of academic interest in the topic and its political relevance. As workers’ power relative to capital has weakened, the use of the term has rapidly expanded. It is often used to describe a rise in contingent forms of employment (such as short-term or zero-hours contracts), but also to denote an increase…

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When grants were handwritten

remember and speak

The Research Whisperer

For the International Network of Research Management Societies (INORMS) 2018 conference, Ipshita Ghose asked Adam Golberg, Bo Alroe and I to help out with a workshop about how technology changes the research development role.

I couldn’t actually be in Edinburgh, so my main contributions was a personal reflection on the last 30 years of research administration, and how the technology has changed. This is an expanded version of that talk.

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1987: Thirty years ago

1987: note the ‘Office use only’ boxes, where we could hand write the file number.

Thirty years ago, I began my career in research administration working for one of Australia’s national funding agencies, the Australian Research Grants Committee. I spent a lot of time on the telephone, talking to universities because, at that time, there was no effective email between government departments and the universities. I also spent an inordinate amount of time in front…

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Faculty as quantified, measured and tired: The lure of the red shoes

academic men and their red shoes

opendistanceteachingandlearning

[This is the text of my keynote on 31 May 2018 at the First Annual NWU Teaching and Learning Conference at the North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa.]

I would like to take the opportunity to thank the conference organisers for the invitation to join your celebrations. Looking at the conference program of yesterday and today, it is clear that there is a lot of passion and commitment in this room. The variety of topics presented at this conference reveal ample evidence of honest reflections to, among other things, increase the quality and effectiveness of learning experiences, for both student and faculty. Please accept my apologies for not being able to attend yesterday as I had another commitment.

Organising conferences is an increasingly difficult task. Not only does one have to ensure that the  budget of the conference breaks even or even make a profit, but one also needs to…

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writing a bio-note

wise words on who the bionote is for – the reader and the publisher, not the ego

patter

their  Dr F. E Line is researching which humans are attracted by a fixed gaze.

Most of us have to produce bio-notes. The bio-note is a little verbal selfie that goes with a book chapter, a journal article, or sometimes a conference presentation. Book authors also have to provide brief bio-notes which might go in their book as well as on the publisher’s website. The bio-note tells the reader some key information about you, the writer.

Most bio-notes are short. They often have a word limit of 100-150 words. So there is not much space in a bio-note to communicate a lot about you. And there’s not much room to be creative with them either.

Many doctoral and early career researchers struggle with bio-notes – they think that they have nothing to say about themselves that is particularly noteworthy.

But quite often, when you look at bio-notes, say in the…

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