Category: academia

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Reblog > Companion animals (and belonging)

Over on the excellent More-Than-Human Lab blog Anne Galloway discusses her prep for the RGS-IBG annual conference in <plug>Exeter</plug> and beautifully and evocatively opens out her experience of living with other (non-human) animals.

I feel like I know Anne’s cat Enid Coleslaw, I have seen lots of pictures through blogposts and social media and her stories about her life, I somewhat share in the experience of moving (nowhere near as far!!) with cats and watching them change and live their lives in new and perhaps surprising ways with us.

Read Anne’s blogpost and look at her photos. They are a joy.

I’ve started pulling together my paper for the Losing Ground – Gaining Ground session at the RGS Conference in Exeter in September, where I’ll be presenting on what it means to belong in the valley in which I live.Part of this involves sorting [Edit: casual (iPhone)] photos I’ve taken of the plants, animals and elements around us, and thinking about how I’ve learned the differences between native and endemic, abundant and protected, introduced and invasive species.

I started by choosing a set of representative images I’ve taken since moving here in mid-September last year. I didn’t select them to represent a linear progression of time, but sorted them by type of animal–cat, sheep, bird, insect, other–and selected my favourite ones.

Continue reading on More-Than-Human Lab.

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Running towards publication – Jonathan Sterne on the pace of publishing

Over on the group blog Culture Digitally, Jonathan Sterne has written about the competing paces of publication, audiences and the lifespan of our examples:

The recent Culture Digitally posts by Jeff Pooley and C.W. Anderson suggest that one of the main broken areas of new media scholarship has to do with publication and speed. Our examples are out of date before our articles appear in the journals to which we submitted them. Our books suffer even worse fates. Both authors suggest the problem is the speed with which our objects of study–digital media–change. Both also point to the dilemmas faced by academic authors and presses as the world of academic publishing changes. . . slowly. And both suggest that iterated versions and new digital platforms would be one set of solutions to this problem.

Sterne makes the point that the texts to which we continue to return, and with which we teach, are those that do not solely rely on the examples. While examples are ‘examples of themselves’ (see Dewsbury et al. 2002), they are also (hopefully) illustrative of a broader theory about the world:

Scholars have developed a number of strategies for dealing with the different temporalities of scholarship and life, and that in fact is important for our students to learn about. Take four canonical examples that still frequently appear on media studies syllabi (do a search for these and “media studies syllabus” if you don’t believe me): Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding,” Raymond Williams’ Television; Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style; and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. All of these were originally published in the 1970s and reference social worlds vastly different from the ones our student inhabit. Two of them refer to the UK, one to the US, and one to France, which means students everywhere else need to make some adjustments. Why are these texts still being taught if they are so out of date? The answer is simple: the ideas in them transcend the examples, and even where the conclusions no longer obtain, the questions they ask might be useful for students to ask today. To be sure, treating them as timeless social science theories would be a disservice: Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model is tied to the inaccessibility of television production in the 1970s; an account of the same politics around news today would have to think very differently about production.

…

Dated examples in readings are not a problem. They are unavoidable when the reference is popular culture, current events or new media. They can be used to teach students about the specificity of their (and our) own moment; and they provide an opportunity to teach students that intellectual work is an ongoing process and conversation of which our students can be a part.

Sterne goes on to make a plea against ‘keeping up’ with the acceleration, against ‘keeping [old work] up-to-date’ and that

we must also let scholars walk away from their projects. More than that, we should encourage it. Abandoning work has probably done more to advance scholarly conversation than any other single act by academic writers.

It’s worth reading the whole thing. I would briefly note that it is possible to argue that there is a healthy academic tradition of ‘abandonment’. In philosophy, there have been a number of writers/thinkers that have unapologetically changed their minds or simply shifted the terms of their projects – for example Francois Laruelle has made it a feature of his work as such, and one might argue that Foucault did so too.

Likewise, there have been arguments made for a more contemplative pace of work. For example, Bernard Stiegler has argued that we need to (re)constitute what the Romans called Otium the techniques of the self, of our care for ourselves and for knowledge, such that we allow space and time for attentive thought.

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Clive Barnett on Foucault and Problematisation

On his blog Pop Theory my colleague Clive Barnett highlights a new paper he has out with nonsite.org entitled On Problematization: Elaborations on a theme in “late Foucault”. It’s worth (of course!) taking a look – A funny coincidence is that this appears at the same time as I am revisiting Rabinow’s Anthropos Today which is one of the sources through which Clive reflects on Foucault’s conceptualisation of ‘problematisation’ (not least in The Order of Things [Les Mots et les Choses])…

Clive suggests his article is ‘an experiment in seeing how much mileage along the path of developing useable social science concepts you can get out of a few passing remarks from a master-thinker’. In this case, Foucault’s suggestion of problematisation as ‘an interruption of the normal, naturalized, settled flow of events’, which Clive argues, by putting Foucault in conversation with Dewey (as does Rabinow, but to different ends), that:

The notion of problematization might, in short, point towards a mode of descriptive analysis that helps to draw into view the significance of the difficulties and concerns that already animate people’s actions. Rather than underwriting a model of critique in which it is presumed that people’s subjectivities are readily available for re-making under the force of the revelatory exposure of contingency, elaborations of Foucault’s notion of problematization invite us to give more credence to how aspects of people’s subjectivity come to matter so strongly to them, and in turn to ask what price would have to be paid in the pursuit of transformation.

An interesting paper, well worth exploring (for free!), on nonsite.org.

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Gillian Rose previews the 4th Ed. of Visual Methods

Over on her blog Visual/Method/Culture, Prof. Gillian Rose has offered a preview of the changes and additions to the fourth edition of her essential Visual Methodologies book. Gillian lists seven things, here’s an excerpt:

I’ve been working on the fourth edition of Visual Methodologies on and off since January, squeezing it in the gaps between way too many other projects. As a result, it’s rather hard to have an overview of the beast (also because I seem to find it impossible to delete any more than a few sentences and a handful of references from each new edition). But I’m now facing the final run-through of the whole thing, when of course it will be lovingly burnished into a seamless whole, cough cough.

…

1) one big change (for me at least) is that I’ve added a fourth site to the framework that structures the book. Editions one, two and three were based on the idea that there are three sites at which the meaning/affects of images are made: the site of the production of the image, the image itself, and its audiencing. The fourth edition adds the site – or, better, routes – of an image’s circulation to that list. This was so discussion could focus on how different methods might approach the online platforms that now host and distribute so many images, and through which so much of social life is mediated and performed.

2) adding the site of circulation to the book also gives a framework for introducing debates about ‘convergence culture’ and whether it deals with questions of power adequately or not. It seems to me that one way that ‘power’ in a largely digital visual culture can be thought through is by asking about the ‘power geometries’ that structure its circulations: what sorts of patterns are there in those circulations and how to they structure certain forms of agency while mitigating against others? The Guardian’s recent report on the languages of the Internet is a great example of mapping those circulations to show their situatedness and partiality.

I recommend reading the whole post!

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Stuart Elden on writing and “why blog?”

One of the more prolific geography bloggers, Professor Stuart Elden, has offered an observation on the recent conversation that emerged from the list I compiled (and adapted from other sources) of (relatively frequent) geography blogs.

As Prof. Elden notes (and as linked in a previous post) there was a discussion back in 2011 on Crit-Geog-Forum about this, and he links back to a blogpost from that time which offers an interesting comparison of activities. Prof. Elden notes:

the readership of the blog is much larger than it was back in 2011; and I have less time now for the kind of substantive posts I’d like to write. So much of the blog is a noticeboard, for myself and for others, but it’s also – as Clive [Barnett] noted – still a place where I blog about my work, rather than blog parts of my work.

This theme of blogging about how we work rather than blogging our work seems an important point, and Prof. Elden expands on this in terms of his blogging about the practices of writing.

The posts I have written that I return to tend to generally be posts about how I (have) work(ed) for example – about blogging and about doing research about other kinds of research (i.e. industrial research). So, an important part of using a blog as a means of curating (which is what I suggested in my second post about being a sharing academic) is contributing to discussions about the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ of research.

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The anti-social academic blogger? A post by Sam Merrill

Over on his (re)new(ed) blog/site Sam Merrill has posted about blogging and his uneasiness with some of the less collegial, more narcissistic, and perhaps more target-driven (in the vein of h-index etc. perhaps[?]) implications of blogging becoming a normalised part of academic practice. Its definitely worth a read in full [here] but I’ve copied some choice excerpts below…

It all reminds me just a little too much of Zygmunt Bauman’s keynote at the re:publica 15 conference that I attended last month. He discussed how today most people seek publicity rather than privacy, primarily through social media use, and they are thus replacing the community networks which previously belonged to them with the social networks to which they now belong. […]

There is now a widespread acknowledgement that academic progression, especially at the early career stage, often relies on one’s ability to develop their own recognisable brand. This narcissist factor of academic social media use is another that leaves me feeling inherently uneasy about blogging even as I engage in it more and more willingly (the narcissism that is, not the blogging). […]

Although there is little new about Bauman’s prognosis – that social media leads to the state of being alone together – the fact a future colleague later admitted that what Bauman had described sounded just like him made me shudder as I realised that if the pressure to use social media and the Internet for academic purposes was so apparent across the disciplines that I had already encountered (archaeology and geography in particular), then what must it be like in the field of social media studies that I was about to join – and how would I ever find enough time to relieve it!

I suppose I’m inclined to argue that including blogging in your academic practice is only really worth it if it isn’t a chore, if it doesn’t become another target to hit, and if it enables us to celebrate our collective exploration of ideas – otherwise, its surely (yet) another  instrument of ‘governmentality‘ ~ those logics we internalise by which we are in some sense controlled, as workers, and become alienated from our labours… in the sense in which it seems that those that work in academia (at least in the UK) are really good at internalising and living out precisely those logics we critique as neo-liberal (i.e. the REF and so on…) and just to be crystal clear, I am just as guilty of this as any.

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Three things that inspired me to apply for postgraduate study in geography

It’s an open day for our Exeter campuses, I’ve finished marking exams and we’re preparing for exam boards etc. next week, capped off by our departmental barbecue… I still wonder at how I got to where I am. I really enjoy my job, I feel extremely lucky to be in a fantastic and supportive department and teaching about and studying the things about which I have a real interest.

I did not do a bachelors degree in geography. I was one of an eclectic mix of students that studied the BSc MediaLab Arts programme at Plymouth, now called Digital Art & Technology. We were taught to programme, to build things, to read theory and to ask lots of questions, in many cases by Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, Dan Livingstone, Mike Phillips and Chris Speed. My peers were, in many cases, as interested, passionate and challenging as the tutors. It was utterly brilliant.

In my final year I took an option module convened by Chris Speed called ‘Production of Space’, à la Henri Lefebvre. I read lots of human geography and got hooked. So much so that my coursework for that module, my dissertation and my final year project were all, in one way or another, about spatial experience.

I wanted to share three things amongst all of that which inspired me to apply for postgraduate study with the inimitable J-D Dewsbury.

1. Rob Shields’ Places on the Margin, and especially the chapter “Alternative Geographies of Modernity“. This was a massive influence on getting me to think about how to think about space and place and got me excited about geographical thought.

2. Chris Speed’s Spacelapse – a beautiful film that offers a really nice exposition of the inter-relations of space and time and urban experience.

3. The ‘Arch-OS‘ project by i-DAT. “An ‘Operating System’ for contemporary architecture (Arch-OS, ‘software for buildings’) … developed to manifest the life of a building and provide artists, engineers and scientists with a unique environment for developing transdisciplinary work and new public art.” As final year students we got to play around with this as it was built into the newly completed Portland Square buildings. In many ways this pre-saged my interest in ubiquitous computing, pervasive media, smart cites etc. etc.

I went on to discover Anne Galloway’s blog, Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs, and received encouragement from quite a few generous people, including Anne and Howard, and Alex Pang – for which I remain grateful. I hope I now have the opportunity to encourage people myself to begin their own careers in research.

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Professional web presence

Another post from a train (with very poor connection and so actually uploaded from my office)…

Re-reading the responses by Clive Barnett and Jeremy Crampton  to my post about ‘being a sharing academic‘ reminded me, eventually, about the conversations held on the JiscMail list ‘Crit-Geog-Forum‘ about blogging in March 2011, the session ‘Between freedom and narcissism?‘ at the AAG in 2013, for which Scott Rodgers wrote a really useful blogpost (see below) and the useful publication by Wilson and Starkweather in the Professional Geographer on the ‘web presence of academic geographers‘.

Scott Rodgers reflected upon how he uses his blog, in 2013, and opened his thoughts out to consider how he has drifted away from ‘myopic blog-writing’ to engaging in discussion and sharing across several different kinds/platforms of media. Concluding his blogpost Scott argued, and I can only agree, that:

contemporary social media are becoming less and less tools that academics can opt out of. Rather, they increasingly comprise the basic environments of academic practice, and at a time of shifting priorities in higher education, these are environments academics need to claim.

The conclusions to the paper by Wilson and Starkweather are another useful way of framing some of the issues that arose between the blogposts written by Clive, Jeremy and myself and I think are worth quoting here:

The Web presence of academic geographers can no longer necessarily be described as a static online listing of the accomplishments of an individual scholar. Instead, the Web practices of academic geographers are increasingly marked by … a focus on online interaction and engagement, despite the lack of professionalization along these lines. Early-career geographers are likely not trained in this aspect of academic reproduction and might be flatly discouraged from “wasting their time” by producing online content. Given the continually shifting norms of online practices in society, and in academia itself, however, perhaps serious debate about strategies for using [social media] tools should enter into the training and professionalization of young scholars. The fact that academics would best avoid directing all of their writing energies into their Twitter account is all the more reason for explicit discussions about how to productively manage one’s Web presence.

We do not believe that it is wise to dismiss blogging, microblogging, and online social networking as nothing more than a distraction from the serious work of academic life. Not only are these new patterns of online engagement seemingly here to stay and are likely bound up in broader shifts in performance pressures but they also offer some notable potential scholarly benefits if used with intention.

First, pressures to publish and promote have spilled out into Web practices like blogging and microblogging. The blog can act as a way to claim intellectual territory, just as it can provide a space to share nascent ideas and work out scholarly thought in conversation with far-flung peers.

Second, and relatedly, online social networks and other informal venues for sharing scholarly productions have become important amidst the uncertainty of secure employment alongside the neoliberalization of the university. Junior academics, perhaps more than their senior colleagues, might rely on these Web practices to remain visible and viable among a growing body of recently minted PhDs.

Third, many junior scholars likely completed the bulk of their advanced degree post-Facebook. These online social networks provide the avenue for keeping informed of others’ engagements (scholarly and otherwise) and nurture the local and translocal collectives that are so important in the professional development of early-career academic geographers.

…
As institutions of higher education grapple with new pressures in a knowledge economy, academic geographers should incorporate everyday Web practices alongside the more observed and investigated techniques of a neoliberalizing academe.

(Wilson and Starkweather 2014, p. 79, additional emphasis)

I wonder, not least as a committee member of two RGS-IBG research groups, if the need for integrating the uses of various media into the training and professionalisation of early-career academics might be better-served by professional associations such as the AAG and the RGS-IBG. We could, for example, offer workshops as part of annual conferences and events. If nothing else, we could help one another by more-openly sharing things that have worked for us and  perhaps where we may have slipped-up and how that might be avoided. This is definitely something I think is worth consideration by those involved in our professional associations.

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Curating attention (Being a sharing academic pt. II)

My post from the train yesterday on blogging kept me thinking throughout the day. I wanted to discuss some of the responses (which makes up the majority of this post) and quickly clarify a couple of things. My initial post was, I recognise a little bit hypocritical: 1. My blog wouldn’t meet the ‘regular’ criteria I suggested for the list of blogs; and so, 2. I recognise that I am not, by any means, an exemplar of the sharing to which I aspire.

The blogpost led me to solicit some responses via Twitter (to which I’ll return) and I was really pleased to read posts from Jeremy Crampton and Clive Barnett, whose blogs and wider work I regularly read and admire. Likewise, not least because it is cross-posted there, the blog generated a little bit of discussion on Twitter with some interesting comments from Gillian Rose and Murray Lowe:

I very much welcome further comments and responses, so please do feel free to comment, blog elsewhere or tweet 🙂

Nevertheless, I wanted to collect together the conversation (so far) here (and I’ll return to that idea) and draw out two key points and make some comments.

First, in response to my observation about the use of some of the social plug-ins like ‘re-blog’ Jeremy (who does use it) observed

This works very well within the WordPress ecosystem, but have you noticed how infrequently this option comes up on blogs or news stories etc”¦they all have Instagram (never used it) Reddit (ditto) etc but not reblog.

to which I can only agree and add the corollary that, as I touched on in my earlier post, sharing and developing ideas cannot be platform-dependent, as both Jeremy and Gillian noted:

twitter is where things seemed to be shared most effectively

The ethos of sharing I am trying to invoke has to go where the conversations can best be served. As Martin Weller suggests in the piece in The Chronicle to which I linked previously:

A key aspect of the digital revolution is not the direct replacement of one form of scholarly activity with another, but rather the addition of alternatives to existing forms

We might do this across all sorts of media, from Twitter and Facebook, to Instagram and Reddit (as Jeremy suggests) and further to Tumblr, Pinterest, and Storify. The most important thing for me here is that we are convening a conversation at all and that it brings about the opportunity to share, celebrate,  and disagree about topics that matter to us. So, and to clarify, I am arguing that for me it’s not about the nuts-and-bolts of the platform, it’s about the ethos of sharing.

This leads me on to my second point. In his post about the uses of blogging and his own blog, my colleague Clive Barnett makes an interesting case for the necessity to see the activity as both a personal fulfilment; a ploughing of an individual furrow (i.e. the ‘lone wolf’) and a contribution to collective knowledge production. The way in which I agree with this is in terms of another observation Clive makes:

I can see how a blog can serve as a way in which one can curate one’s own on-going thinking.

While I totally agree with both Jeremy’s and Gillian’s points about Twitter being the medium par excellence  for sharing things, the considered thinking through of what is shared, through comments and responses at length, and the bringing together of multiple sources (like in this post) remains better served by blogs. As Clive says (and so have many others), academic sharing is a form of curation.

Curation certainly can be the ‘micro-broadcasting’ and the ‘construction of anonymous publics’ Clive discusses, through tags, categories, hashtags and so on. It can also be the bringing together of interlocutors both on and off the blog. The curation is never solely located on the blog: the blog is instead a signifier, perhaps a place-holder, for the performance of the curation/conversation. If,  as Clive argues, ‘sharing only makes sense if things are separable‘ then the activities of curation are precisely those means of doing the separating (and assembling).

I want to make a final observation about attention, which Clive raises. If this mode of sharing (blogging and using social media) I’ve been stumbling over suggesting is roughly analogous to care of one’s self (Clive’s ‘Me’) in the form of writing[1] then the mechanisms of that writing can both enable and hamper that care. In publicly curating ideas we are soliciting attention and the platforms are not neutral equipment in that solicitation.

To post and share on social media is not only to share with readers but also with those who own/run the platform for the purposes of marketing. Likewise, when and how we ‘pay attention’, as users, is also surveilled in order to serve adverts. Attention then, is commodified (as Patrick Crogan and I highlighted in a 2012 theme issue of Culture Machine).

I whole-heartedly agree that Twitter, in particular, has been brilliantly useful for sharing –like Jeremy I joined in 2009 and it has very much enriched my academic life. Nevertheless, those conversations are only really easily accessible in the moment (which is fine, up to a point) but it is non-trivial to retrieve them from Twitter’s archive (if you want). What you post to Twitter and other social media platforms, as data, is a commodity – and it has a monetary value.

So, as with traditional forms of publication (in the guise of journal articles [behind the paywall] or monographs [in expensive hardcover only editions]) we have to remain mindful about access: who has it, who the gatekeepers are, and how we accordingly curate our forms of sharing. Nonetheless, I strongly believe that such sharing is vital. To misquote Beckett (again): “share again, share better“.

Notes

1. And thus a form of hypomnesis (riffing on Jeremy’s allusion to his work on Foucault and hypomnemata) ~ worth reading Stiegler on this, see: this Ars Industrialis vocabulary entry.

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Being a sharing academic

Recently I compiled a list of active (i.e. regularly updated) geography blogs and it got me musing about how we variously construct and perform our academic identities. These are some half-formed thoughts on a train about this in relation to uses of blogging [then edited in my office…].

It was a surprise to me how quite a few of those blogs, with some honourable exceptions, are tightly focussed conduits for personal research and are not participating in wider online/offline conversations. One of the big claims made for blogging in the noughties was, of course, that ‘social’ media precisely enable broader conversations. While the majority of those active geography bloggers I found use wordpress.com for their blogs they do not seem to use the ‘social’  functions such as ‘reblog’ and other conversation tools on the platform.

Now, I recognise that I am just as guilty as any in this (although I don’t use wordpress.com).  I do, at least, try and share other people’s work – especially cos this blog cross-posts to Twitter. That multi-platform-ness is also important, blogs aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of convening such conversations. For example, while it is persistently bemoaned, the JiscMail list ‘Crit-Geog-Forum‘ has hosted some interesting discussions amongst anglophone geographers.

There are, of course, lots of resources, endorsements and manifestos for academic blogging within and beyond a variety of disciplinary contexts. On this, I heartily recommend reading The Virtues of Blogging as Scholarly Activity (in The Chronicle) by my former boss Martin Weller, and his open access book The Digital Scholar. See also, for example, the posts about blogging on the LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog, and this piece on what makes a successful research blog by Pat Thomson in particular.

This leads me to the perpetual tension between two, often-opposing, pulls on how (in very broad terms) we perform academic identity: the ‘lone wolf’ syndrome of career progression and the aspiration to contribute to the collective production of knowledge.

On the one hand, to progress, especially as an early career academic, it is (sadly) important to develop a recognisable ‘project’ or ‘brand’ to allow employers to easily categorise you (probably to slot you into a REF submission), and this more-often-than-not involves ploughing an individual furrow – writing the position papers, getting single author papers published for a REF submission, applying for individual funding (such as the ESRC’s ‘Future Research Leader’ scheme), and attempting to speak to the fashionable debates (e.g. the ‘anthropocene’, ‘mobilities’ and ‘neoliberalism’). I am by no means against such actions (apart from the instrumental logics that sit behind a lot of it), these are part and parcel of being an academic, but it often feels to me that this leads to a lot of individuals talking past one another.

On the other hand, we all (I hope) aspire to advancing knowledge around those things about which are passionate and this must surely be a collective endeavour. Some of the very best events I have attended have been the small workshops where people present ideas, not in a scripted and tightly timed presentation, but in more discursive, less-pressured ways.

Surely blogging can address both of these drives: you can promote your work, but (and for me – more importantly) you can contribute to conversations and celebrate one another’s work. This is, broadly, what it can mean to participate in a community of practice as Lave & Wenger suggest (although–I don’t agree with everything in the linked piece).

We could all, perhaps, take a few more ‘risks’ and put our ideas ‘out there’ a little more to involve people in their development, rather than simply present our polished final argument/ results. My own academic hero in this regard is Anne Galloway, who’s intellectual curiosity and generosity has been an inspiration to me. From her PhD-related blog PLSJ, through to her subsequent blogs/projects the design culture lab and the more-than-human lab, Anne has offered insights, provocations and opened conversations. Indeed, Anne’s chapter on blogging in her PhD thesis is a really interesting and helpful (and probably more rigorous!) way of thinking about what I’m trying to get at here.

I recognise that for those early in their careers and those that feel embattled and under increasing institutional pressure this feels almost impossible, but(!) –I’d argue that the potential gains are worth it. I’ve found fantastically generous colleagues across the world through social media, who have profoundly enriched my work and I heartily recommend it.

I’ll conclude this post with (celebrating/advocating) some excerpts from Mel Gregg’s article ‘Feeling Ordinary: Blogging as conventional scholarship‘ that sum up what I’m trying to say better than I can (especially after lots and lots of marking!):

The participatory nature of writing, response and counter-argument on blogs allows for ongoing debate, critical refinement and thinking-in-process. In this sense, what is rarely acknowledged about blogging is how much it contributes to and mirrors traditional scholarly practice rather than threatening it. (p. 154)

Blogs are a modest political tool in that they can help overturn the hierarchies of speech traditionally securing academic privilege
[…]
Blogs allow us to write in conjunction with non-academic ‘peers’ and ‘colleagues’ who not only value and improve our ideas but practice their own rigorous forms of assessment, critique and review.
Blogs are counter-heroic in that they expose the life of the academic as banal. They help lay bare the fallacy of the ivory tower scholar secluded from the concerns of the ‘real world’ (pp.157-158)

If the grandiose aspiration of ‘making new contributions to knowledge’ is to hold any truth it surely has to be a collective endeavour. To misquote Beckett: ‘Share again, share better’.