Development of an efficient large-aperture high damage-threshold sol-gel diffraction grating.

In order to develop the next generation of high peak intensity lasers, new grating technology providing higher damage thresholds and large apertures is required. The current assumption is that this technical innovation will be multilayer dielectric gratings, wherein the uppermost layer of a thin film mirror is etched to create the desired binary phase grating. A variant of this is explored with the upper grating layer being a lower density gelatin-based volume phase grating in either sol-gel or dichromated gelatin. One key benefit is the elimination of the etching step

Creating a positive casual academic identity through change and loss

Neoliberalism has significantly impacted higher education institutes across the globe by increasing the number of casual and non-continuing academic positions. Insecure employments conditions have not only affected the well-being of contingent staff, but it has also weakened the democratic, intellectual and moral standing of academic institutions. This chapter provides one practitioner’s account of the challenges of casual work, but rather than dwelling on the negativities, it outlines the potential richness of an identity based on insecurity and uncertainty. This exploration draws on the literature of retired academics and identity theory to illustrate the potential generative spaces within an undefined and incoherent identity

Strange Accounts: Applying for the Department Chair Position and Writing Threats and Secrets “in Play”

This autoethnographic layered account makes use of Georg Simmel and Jacques Derrida’s theoretical frameworks to simultaneously examine my experience of applying for the chair position in my department and to make the case for the use of strange accounts. Strange accounting is proposed as a method of writing about situations where there are secrets, risks, or threats. Strange accounts work with secrets through distance by leaving key information about the situations and identities of those represented in the story, unsettled, ambiguous, under erasure and “in play.” While applying for the chair position, I found the process to be destabilizing for both myself and my department. It was fraught with issues regarding strangeness and secrecy. The strange account (re)presents the role of the secret, while leaving the secret itself “in play.

Handing IRB an unloaded gun

The author\u27s autoethnographic article was accepted for publication and then blocked by her Institutional Review Board (IRB). The overt reasons for the denial of approval differ from accounts given behind closed doors. By weaving experience, excerpts from her article, and the responses of others into a narrative, the author creates an ongoing performance ethnography that resists the tacit norm of silence regarding discussions of incest and student/teacher attraction. Framing autoethnography as a breach of the academic norms regarding scientific inquiry helps her make sense of how IRB as a committee used the resources at hand - the existing religious/ political context, their identities, their formal roles, and the written rules they had before them - to coconstruct a narrative that rendered her manuscript unpublishable. It is the author\u27s hope that this performance of resistance will help facilitate the creation of a safe, defined space (similar to that of oral history) for autoethnography to occur. © 2007 Sage Publications

Sketching as autoethnographic practice

This article is an autoethnographic sketch that draws out substantive observations about the sketchy character of concepts such as identity, theory, self, and society. Using vignettes from my experiences as an art student, post-structuralist theory, and symbolic interaction, I render a brief sketch of how autoethnography and other representations of self can be conveyed in a layered process. The materials in each vignette may not seem to be consistent with or related to the other layers, but as each layer is superimposed on the others, an image or impression emerges from the whole. By presenting these materials in this way, the format or metaphor of sketching offers autoethnographers the possibility of doing analysis and evocation, while leaving open other interpretive possibilities. Artificial closure is not imposed on the final product. I also briefly sketch how self and society exist sous rature and in différance to each other, thus making autoethnographic sketching a useful tool for symbolic interactionists and other observers of society. © 2007 by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction