Also blogging at University Affairs Careers Café- Hangin’ with the students May 15, 2012 Nicola Koper
- Where do I put… May 7, 2012 Jo VanEvery
Category Archives: Academic Culture
Disturbing read about job advice to PhDs
How do you advise students about academic careers? Apart from the obvious “there aren’t a lot of jobs out there”, what do you say? What do you feel uncomfortable about saying (or not saying)? Continue reading
Collaboration, co-authoring, and such
If you are in the humanities or some social science disciplines, co-authorship is much less common and may even be frowned upon. Some humanities researchers have been heard to doubt the existence of co-authorship, “Two people cannot hold the pen.”*
If you are in this kind of discipline, writing with others can feel odd. And it raises some interesting issues about how it will be evaluated.
Why co-author? … get more written … share expertise … mentor students
How will peers view it? … separating you from your co-authors … getting collaborative grants Continue reading
Posted in Academic Culture, Publishing
Tagged Ailsa McKay, Amy Wallis, co-authoring, co-publishing, collaboration, collaborative grants, deadlines, feedback, peers, students, supporting graduate students
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Validation vs communication: another example
How is it that just as I write that post about validation and how stuck it can get you, I find another relevant link: Why Lists are a Flawed Approach to Assessing Excellence Continue reading
Posted in Academic Culture, Publishing
Tagged evaluation, journal rankings, journals, peer review, The Australian, validation
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Communication vs Validation: why are you publishing?
When you come to actually write, the validation narrative is often what gets you stuck. The reason your paper is never good enough to send off is not because you don’t have something to say but because you think of the process as validating your worth. The content is in many ways incidental to the fact of having a publication in a high ranking journal.
Focusing on what you want to say, and to whom, can be a powerful road out of the stuck. It also helps you see that some media are more suited to particular material than others.
Continue reading
Posted in Academic Culture, Publishing
Tagged audience, authority, blog, Bon Stewart, citations, classroom, communication, conferences, journal articles, Margaret Atwood, monographs, seminar, validation
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Validation vs. communication: an example
Bon Stewart made a very prescient point in the comments of my post on how scholarship is evaluated. “the notion of validity by process became more important than the idea of contribution TO the process”. This morning I was catching up on blog reading and read a very thought provoking article that I think makes excellent background to such a discussion. It’s about scientific publishing, which is the model that humanities and social science researchers are being compared to implicitly or explicitly. And it illustrates some very serious issues in relation to this question of validation. Continue reading
Posted in Academic Culture, Publishing
Tagged communication, Dalhousie University Graduate Studies, high-ranking journals, validation
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