Category: observations

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Reblog> The scholar and social media

Excellent advice here from Tamson Pietsch on the uses and limits of social media, especially blogging. Found through @HelenPallett.

I very much support the ethos and practices suggested here:

The scholar and the social media

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Last week I gave a talk on social media to post-graduates from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Foolishly (but only fairly) I promised to practice what I preached. So here are the salient points (and links) as I remember them.

Why you should think about the social media

Increasingly scholarly conversation is happening online – in curated and individual blogs, on twitter, and through other electronic forums. If you are not engaging with these forms of publication you are likely to be missing part of what is happening in your field.

Participating in the world of social media helps generate a bigger (and more diverse) academic audience for your research. Much of this will be  in aligned disciplines, or in different national contexts. If you are not engaging online, you’ll be missing part of your potential audience.

Social media also helps generate a broader non-academic audience, especially with those industries to which your thesis may connect. Try to consciously develop and promote your “shadow expertise”; that aspect of your work that might inform a non-academic sector. It’s tough in the academic job market, and this could well be where your post-phd career ends up going.

And finally, social media is increasingly a factor in every employment sector. Engaging online gives you skills that will serve you well, wherever you work.

But always remember the golden rule

NEVER LET YOUR MOUTH EXCEED YOUR VOICE.

This is Stefan Collini’s advice to public intellectuals in Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain and it should be etched onto the computer screens of every academic who reaches for the internet.  Have something to say that is well founded and established, and well supported. Be respectful of other people’s work and opinions and give them due reference. The last thing a junior (or indeed any) academic needs is to have a ruined reputation all over the internet.

If there is a second rule, it might be this: VALUE YOUR TIME – blogging & tweeting can be very rewarding because unlike most other parts of academic life you get direct feedback. But it’s a drug. Keep your main game in view and remember: your authority to speak will in 98% of cases come from your research. So respect it, foster it, prioritise it.

How to start

See how other people are doing it. Set up a twitter account and follow scholars you admire (and those you don’t!) Read the relevant blogs in your field – some of these are likely to be co-authored. If you are totally lost, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog page is as good a place as any to begin (and you have discovered this blog so you’re not doing too badly!)

People disagree on the merits of maintaining an individual blog as against contributing to established co-authored or other forums such as The Conversation, but my view is to go for both:

  1. Set up a blog site for yourself that will act a bit like your online CV:
    • use it to a) experiment with writing pieces and b) as a place to collect any material you publish on other platforms. WordPress is easy to use and integrates well with other social media.
  2. Generate content:
    • Work in progress & the process of working (see for eg. the Thesis Whisperer or Trickster Prince).
    • Communicate research you have published (eg https://t.co/UCbgE8RslC)
    • Wait for news item & apply research
    • Provide context through your “shadow expertise” – are you writing a Phd on the history of fashion? Contact fashion magazines and pitch articles to them.
  3. Maximise your reach
    • Connect to other people’s online content through using links, and cross-promote on twitter (using #hashtags), facebook, linkedin and academia.edu.au, among other social media outlets.
    • Write for established platforms, such as co-authored blogs, The Conversation, print outlets, your university, industry publications. The internet is a big place with a lot of shouting people on it, and you need to find a way to be heard. Established sites offer you support and a readership that is invaluable.

Parting comments

Academic research usually takes a long time to produce. It frequently works with complex information and tells stories that complicate what we think we know. The interwebs do not thrive on such complexity. This doesn’t mean you should go for simplifications , but it does mean you need to work with people’s attention spans. Put your argument up front, rather than at the end; try to stick to 500-800 words maximum. Inject some personality. Too often wonderful academic research is communicated in ways that do not make it easy for people to access or connect with. Paywalls and professional convention carry part of the responsibility, but as scholars we can do a lot more too to reach out to a public that has demonstrated a robust appetite for ideas.

Reading list

Prof Patrick Dunleavy’s Shorter, better, faster, free: blogging changes the nature of academic research, not just how it is communicated and How to write a blogpost from your journal article

LSE public impact blog and in particular their twitter guide and reading list on using social media for research

The Times Higher Education magazine’s Tips for academics on Blogging and Social Media

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Illness, reflecting on work…

I was off work for about a week and returned to work a week ago. Since then I’ve been struggling to catch up and I confess I’ve found it really hard. I’ve never really been properly ill during term-time before (that’s pretty lucky isn’t it?!) – it is exceptionally stressful. Pressure comes to return to work from your employer, from your students, from yourself – about possible student complaints, about dissertation anxiety, about delayed/late marking etc etc.

Moral of the experience: do not get ill. The work just piles up and you still have to do it all.

This got me thinking anyway…

The weird thing about any job, but (in my experience) academia especially, is that there’s lots of things you do not learn until they happen. The PhD is supposedly a form of training but it is a tremendously poor preparation for any role beyond a full-time researcher. Some postgrads get some teaching experience, which is good – but it doesn’t prepare you for what I found to be the most surprising and perhaps testing parts of the job: managing the weight of adminstrivia and dealing with your pastoral role. The way I have experienced this is: admin just keeps coming, and will only grow; and: students’ lives are bewildering.

Relatedly, the only advice I think I’d dare give a colleague new to the job is: make sure you take care of yourself. I’m afraid no one else will. The job will take all you can give and want more. The things I continue to negotiate to handle this are:

  1. Decide how much of yourself you are willing to give to your job/career. This fundamentally changed for me when my son came along.
    • Think about how your work and life ‘balance’, for example: in my experience commuting is not a long-term career strategy, especially with small children.
    • Try not compare yourself to others. Just because they are doing things you privately perceive to be ‘better’ than you does not make it a valid comparison. Feel proud about your own achievements, celebrate others’ success (if you feel able – we’re all human!) and keep muddling along.
    • Do not let performance management systems rule your life – think about how what you want to do can be spun to answer the requirements. AND >> keep a handle on your self-worth, sometimes expectations are unrealistic – this doesn’t make you “bad” or a “failure”. Talk with those whose opinion you trust and talk with those going through the same thing, you do not need to be alone (plus: join the union).
  2. Prioritise what you must/want to do and then find ways of firmly but politely saying “no” to the other things.
    • You may find you actually have some latitude to change things, like re-scheduling tutorials etc. If this makes things easier: do it!
  3. Most importantly: enjoy the job, regardless of the things we all know are difficult about it, teaching and researching for those who are interested can be very rewarding.

 

 

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Reblog> The Geopolitics of Context: Mordor, Russia and Google Translate, by @Pip__T

An interesting blogpost by Pip Thornton on the Royal Holloway Geopolotics & Security blog:

The Geopolitics of Context: Mordor, Russia and Google Translate

“One does not simply walk into the Russian Federation”

Over the last week several media outlets, and many more Twitter feeds, have been spreading news of a series of ‘glitches’ in Google Translate which saw the word Russia being synonymised with Mordor when translated from Ukrainian to Russian. Furthermore, Russians became occupiers and for a short time the name of the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov returned the result sad little horse. 

vk-russia-to-ukraine

Twitter / Vadim Nakhankov (wired.co.uk)

Noting that ‘the terms mirror language used by some Ukrainians following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014″², some suggested the possibility of foul play; that the algorithm was ‘hacked by spies‘, ‘jokers’ or ‘mischievous pro-Kiev activists’,  or that the words had been inserted manually by users as alternative translations presumably in order to ridicule Russia and humiliate Lavrov. Other sources referred to a ‘bug’ or an ‘automated error’ in the algorithm, an explanation seemingly substantiated by the way Google quickly issued an ‘embarrassed apology’, stepping in to ‘fix’ their wayward algorithms as soon as the matter came to light.

Read the full post here.

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Sue Ruddick ~ reading & writing in a materialist way

There’s a free to access commentary on the Society and Space website by Sue Ruddick on reading and writing in a materialist way. i really enjoyed reading this and I recommend it…

Here’s a snippet:

…concepts matter.  They matter in their distinctions.  They make a difference, in the most literal sense that, in the act of philosophizing, in the invention, creation of a new concept, one is attempting to change sensibilities, provoke new perceptions and understandings, to make difference. This is why we must proceed with caution in attempts to make new or difficult concepts legible to a wider audience; we must be a careful not simply to appeal to a common sense understanding, lest we risk losing the very specificity of the concept in question. It is in this sense, I argue, that we cannot simply substitute a more commonly understood term for its less familiar concept. We cannot for example exchange “affect” for “emotion” (unless we want to launch a fully developed argument as to why they are equivalent) any more than we might substitute “price difference” for “surplus value”.  To paraphrase Deleuze, when a philosopher employs a distinctive term or concept, it is in principle because he or she has a reason to (Deleuze 1978).

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A summary of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time 1 by Dan Ross

I’ve mentioned this here before but Dan Ross wrote an excellent and accessible summary or guide to Stiegler’s first and perhaps most extraordinary volume of the series at the heart of his project Technics and Time, which was the Wikipedia page for that book. Unfortunately this has been open to some questionable editing and so it is great that Dan has uploaded his version to Academia.edu as a free-to-access PDF. I recommend this as a support to a reading of T&T 1. Dan’s knowledge and interpretation of Steigler’s work is brilliant.

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Recommended: Cultural Geography Going Viral – provocation By @ProfGillian

Another interesting article out in the ‘Online Early’ section of Social & Cultural Geography is by Gillian Rose, from the “Provocations of the Present” OU event, way back in 2014(!).

Gillian gave an interesting talk on the day, which resonated with things I’ve written, and it’s interesting to read the ‘final’ version, entitled “Cultural Geography Going Viral“.

Using the example of Emily Thorberry’s injudicious tweet concerning white vans and the St George’s cross, Gillian explores how the techniques of analysis of such an image and how it is audienced, interpreted, circulated, and so on and, provocatively, discusses how “the skills of the cultural geographer are now widespread”:

In fact, they are probably no more widespread than they ever have been, but social media and online commentary is making them more visible than ever before. Everyone is reading cultural texts and coming to conclusions about their meaning and sharing their interpretations, it seems – and if they can’t understand what’s going on, they ask and they get an answer. Those answers unpack both the symbolism of specific cultural texts but also the production and circulation of those texts by specific forms of media institutions. In other words, cultural interpretation has gone viral.

This resonates in many ways with some of what I argue in my own ‘provocation‘, in which I argue that we (cultural geographers, and others) need to attend to the various ways on understanding mediation when discussing popular culture (and that we need to discuss popular culture more!)

Anyway, all this is simply to say that I recommend reading Prof. Rose’s article.

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Highly recommended: Theatrical magic and the agenda to enchant the world

Some great articles in the ‘Online Early’ section of Social & Cultural Geography (as Mary Gilmartin tweeted today) and one jewel amongst them is a great new paper from Charlie Rolfe on theatrical magic, ‘unreal experiments’ and the agenda to enchant the world.

Charlie gave an early version of this in what was a tour de force seminar at Exeter Geography and I highly recommend reading the article!

Here’s the abstract:

This paper addresses the agenda of enchantment as it relates to contemporary theatrical magic (those deliberately enigmatic activities that are performed, experienced and commercialized as a form of entertainment). Magic practice is regularly constructed along a particular teleology: ‘action → effect of impossibility → affect of astonishment’. The paper supplements this teleology in four sections. First, a discussion of magicians’ knowledge and the ignorance required for participant-spectators to apprehend effects of impossibility and become astonished. Second, an examination of two forms of reason: one, an investigation into hidden ‘secrets’; the other, a perception of superficial ‘effects’. Third, a critique of the figure of the magician and its disputed role within magic practice. Fourth, a presentation and discussion of three empirical vignettes – professional magician Jay Sankey’s ‘Unreal Experiments’ – which advocate an evental logic with an experimental ethos; thus, enacting a critique of the figure and teleological structure of practice, and posing a challenge to rethink and invitation to expand theatrical magic practice. In conclusion, the paper highlights some of the ways in which theatrical magic participates in the agenda to enchant the world that has so gripped social science.

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Reblog> Making space for writing: geography and research writing

This looks interesting and pertinent to the rash of writing-related blogging by Stuart Elden and others in the last couple of years…

Making space for writing: geography and research writing

RGS-IBG ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2016
Royal Geographical Society, London

30th August – 3rd September 2016

Call for Papers

Making space for writing: geography and research writing

Sponsored by the Higher Education Research Group of the RGS-IBG

Session Organisers: Rae Dufty-Jones (Western Sydney University) and Chris Gibson (University of Wollongong)

Writing is integral to how we perform our scholarly identities as geographers. As Kamler and Thompson (2006: 15) argue: ‘we are represented by our writings and we are judged by them’. Research writing is a key product by which colleagues and institutions evaluate our past and potential contributions. It is often the source of much personal anxiety. To be able to write about their research is also a key skill that graduate students are often expected to have mastered by the time they complete their doctoral studies.

Yet, while we regularly espouse the need to ‘find space’ for our writing, we have seldom overtly theorised space in our writing practices. Writing remains a ‘black box’ in geographical literatures.

This session invites proposals to present work examining the nexus between geography, geographers and research writing. Some suggested questions for framing papers include:

  • What role does ‘space’ play in our writing practices?
  • What strategies are employed by geographers to make ‘space’ (figurative, literal, relational) for our research writing?
  • What does the advent of the neoliberal university mean for academic writing practice?
  • How have geographers challenged or resisted managerial expectations around their writing practices and products?
  • How might geographers contribute theoretically/conceptually to understandings of research writing both generally, and pedagogically?
  • What approaches do geographers use in teaching graduate students how to write, and how might these approaches be improved, especially through a focus on ‘making space’ for writing?
  • Reflections on graduate student experiences of being taught how to write their research – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Please email proposals (title + 200-250 word Abstract) or queries to Rae Dufty-Jones (r.dufty-jones@western.edu.au) and Chris Gibson (cgibson@uow.edu.au).  The deadline for Abstracts is Friday 5th February 2016.  The format of the session will be the presentation of 4-5 selected papers each lasting 20 minutes.

Reference
Kamler B and Thomson P. (2006) Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision, London: Routledge.