Best foot forward, watching your step, jumping in with both feet, or sticking your foot in it? - the politics of researching academic viewpoints

This article presents our experiences of conducting research interviews with Australian academics, in order to reflect on the politics of researcher and participant positionality. In particular, we are interested in the ways that academic networks, hierarchies and cultures, together with mobility in the higher education sector, contribute to a complex discursive terrain in which researchers and participants alike must maintain vigilance about where they 'put their feet' in research interviews. We consider the implications for higher education research, arguing that the positionality of researchers and participants pervades and exceeds these specialised research situations.15 page(s

‘Inspired and assisted’, or ‘berated and destroyed’? Research leadership, management and performativity in troubled times

Research leadership in Australian universities takes place against a backdrop of policy reforms concerned with measurement and comparison of institutional research performance. In particular, the Excellence in Research in Australian initiative undertaken by the Australian Research Council sets out to evaluate research quality in Australian universities, using a combination of expert review process, and assessment of performance against &lsquo;quality indicators&rsquo;. Benchmarking exercises of this sort continue to shape institutional policy and practice, with inevitable effects on the ways in which research leadership, mentoring and practice are played out within university faculties and departments. In an exploratory study that interviewed 32 Australian academics in universities in four Australian states, we asked participants, occupying formal or informal research leadership roles, to comment on their perceptions of research leadership as envisioned and enacted in their particular workplaces. We found a pervasive concern amongst participants that coalesced around binaries characterized in metaphoric terms of &lsquo;carrots and whips&rsquo;. Research leadership was seen by many as managerial in nature, and as such, largely tethered to instrumentalist notions of productivity and performativity, while research cultures were seen as languishing under the demoralizing weight of reward and punishment systems. Here, we consider what is at stake for the future of the academic workforce under such conditions, arguing that new models of visionary research leadership are urgently needed in the &lsquo;troubled times&rsquo; of techno-bureaucratic university reforms.<br /

ATR Commissioning Software Task Force Report

The Beam Injection Test Software Task Force was Charged with Studying software needed for the ATR Test, seen as a stepping stone or template for the larger scope for the full RHIC control system. This report outlines our avenues of exploration so far, present the current analysis and implementation work in progress, and gives recommendation for the future on the ATR and longer time scales

The Euro Area Crisis Management Framework – Consequences and Institutional Follow-Ups

The current instruments in the EU to deal with debt and liquidity crises include among others the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM). Both are temporary in nature (3 years). In terms of an efficient future crisis management framework one has to ask what follows after the EFSF and the EFSM expire in 3 years time. In this vein, this briefing paper addresses the question of the political and economic medium-to long-term consequences of the recent decisions. Moreover, we assess what needs to be done using this window of opportunity of the coming 3 years. Which institutions need to be formalized, into what format, in order to achieve a coherent whole structure? This briefing paper presents and evaluates alternatives as regards the on-going debate on establishing permanent instruments to support the stability of the euro. Among them are the enhancement of the effectiveness of the Stability and Growth Pact combined with the introduction of a European semester and a macroeconomic surveillance and crisis mechanism, fiscal limits hard-coded into each country's legislation in the form of automatic, binding and unchangeable rules and, as the preferred solution, the European Monetary Fund

Diversity in collaborative research communities: a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group in public health

Writing groups for doctoral students are generally agreed to provide valuable learning spaces for Ph.D. candidates. Here an academic developer and the eight members of a writing group formed in a Discipline of Public Health provide an account of their experiences of collaborating in a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group. We consider the benefits of belonging to such a group for Ph.D. students who are operating in a research climate in which disciplinary boundaries are blurring and where an increasing number of doctoral projects are interdisciplinary in nature; in which both academic staff and students come from enormously diverse cultural and language backgrounds; and in which teamwork, networking and collaboration are prized but not always proactively facilitated. We argue that doctoral writing groups comprising students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds can be of significant value for postgraduates who wish to collaborate on their own academic development to improve their research writing and communication skills; at the same time, such collaborative work effectively builds an inclusive, dynamic research community.Cally Guerin, Vicki Xafis, Diana V. Doda, Marianne H. Gillam, Allison J. Larg, Helene Luckner, Nasreen Jahan, Aris Widayati and Chuangzhou X

Towards an ethical ecology of international service learning

International Service-Learning (ISL) is a pedagogical activity that seeks to blend student learning with community engagement overseas and the development of a more just society. ISL programmes have grown as educational institutions and non-governmental organisations have sought to achieve the goal of developing ‘global citizens’. However, Service Learning (SL) in general and International Service-Learning (ISL) in particular remain deeply under theorised. These educational initiatives provide policy makers with a practical response to their quest for a ‘Big Society’and present alluring pedagogical approaches for Universities as they react to reforms in Higher Education and seek to enhance both the student learning experience and graduate employability. After outlining the development of ISL in policy and practice, this paper draws on the rich tradition of ISL at one British university to argue that ISL is a form of engagement that has the potential to be ethical in character although we identify a number of factors that militate against this. Our contention is that ISL which promotes rationaland instrumental learning represents a deficit model and we therefore conceptualise ISL here as a transformative learning experience that evinces distinctly aesthetic and even spiritual dimensions. Upon this theoretical groundwork we lay the foundations for conceptualizing ISL in ways that ensure its ethical integrity

Ethnography, Multiplicity and the Global Childhoods Project: Reflections on Establishing an Interdisciplinary, Transnational, Multi-Sited Research Collaboration

This article offers a description and rationale of the Global Childhoods Project, initiated by a group of researchers from Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand and Australia. This transnational and interdisciplinary network embarked on a collaborative research endeavor concerned with investigating questions of childhoods and globalization in the Asia-Pacific region. A central premise of the group is that researching global childhoods is best conducted by local researchers with knowledge of their own culture and contexts. This article considers the ways in which such collaboration offers opportunities to productively explore the possibilities and dilemmas associated with collaborative interdisciplinary, transnational, multi-sited ethnographic research. While all the researchers taking part in what we termed the Global Childhoods Project are established scholars and experienced researchers, the group quickly realized that the multiplicity of cultures, languages, perspectives and research backgrounds that furnished us with such potentially rich ground for collaborative work also presented us with a number of unanticipated conundrums and challenges