Wednesday 28 June 2012, 14.00-17.00

Open University, Milton Keynes, Library Seminar Rooms, 1&2

The Creating Publics project was launched in March 2012 with the aim of innovating new ways of engaging publics in the on-going processes of social science research and public life. For the 3rd Creating Publics keynote lecture we are delighted to welcome Professor John Holmwood (University of Nottingham).

Programme:

14:00                 Welcome and introduction:  Prof. Jef Huysmans & Dr. Nick Mahony (CCIG)

14:10                 Keynote lecture: Prof. John Holmwood (University of Nottingham)

15:00                 Response by Prof. John Clarke and Dr. Vron Ware (CCIG)

15:30                 Q & A and collective discussion

The event will be followed by a drinks reception.

In the spirit of public experimentation that this project promotes, the event will be webcast live and accessible here.

Those viewing online will be able to post questions and comments, which will be relayed live to the event.

To register, to attend in person please email socsci-ccig-events@open.ac.uk

For further information on the event and an outline of Prof. Holmwood’s lecture, please go to our website.

An introduction to multi-author blogging
Tuesday, May 29th, 12pm to 1pm
Research Exchange, Seminar Room 2
Register for the event here

Faced with theoretical or philosophical positions that seem untenable, it is tempting to counter them by reversing or inverting them, for example, responding to empiricism’s belief in the rooting of knowledge in empirical observation by claiming knowledge to be independent of observation and observation to be wholly dependent on discourses. This strategy retains the problematic structures which generated the problems in the first place [...] Defeatist postmodernism typically defines itself in opposition to ‘foundationalism’, ‘objectivism’, and those who claim privileged access to ‘the truth’. In reacting against this, it then flips over into an anti-realism which rules out any possibility of empirical/practical evaluation and makes truth relative to discourse.

Andrew Sayer, Realism and Social Science, Pg 67-68

This event has been designed to give attendees the ability to produce competitive Post-Doc funding applications by giving them the chance to listen to, and interact with, more experienced colleagues who have won Post-doc awards.

Matthew Watson is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies. After a period running the department’s PhD programme and trying to incorporate advice on professional socialisation into the day-to-day running of that programme, he became the department’s first dedicated Director of Postdoctoral Programmes.This is a post he held for three years before passing it on to a committee of colleagues to oversee its future development. The department has been extremely successful since investing its staff time heavily in nurturing its postdoctoral programme, and this year it has eighteen fully-funded postdocs working for it.

The main points that Matthew will address will be those that relate to the all-important question from the prospective applicant’s perspective of ‘what do I need to do to put myself in the best possible position to secure postdoc funding?’.

More specifically the issues that he will talk about will be those of:

1. Mindset
2. CV management before the application stage
3. Departmental support
4. Tailoring the application to the demands of the particular funder

Three winners of Post-Doc funding awards will also be sharing their experiences and insights. This event will be interactive in style and attendees will therefore get a chance to ask their more experienced colleagues the questions about the issues that are most important to them

Register for the workshop here

What we are attempting to accomplish is to marry our concerns to a way of life that allows their realization, a way of life about which we can be wholehearted, investing ourselves in it with each personifying its requirements in our and unique manner. Hence we gain and maintain some governance over our own lives. This is a supremely reflexive tasks, entailing ‘strong evaluation’ of our social context in the light of our concerns and adjusting these concerns in the light of our circumstances.

Whilst everyone has to do this for themselves reflexively through their internal conversations, that does not imply that subjects have to do it alone. To engage in inner dialogue is to activate our personal powers but that does not make any of us individualistic monads. We all receive and use external information, we all engage in external as well as internal conversation and, above all, being human refers to a quintessentially relational being. Our human relations and the relationality between them form part of both our internal and our external conversations.

The Reflexive Imperative, Pg 15. Margaret S. Archer.  

Although reflexivity is a capacity of individuals, its exercise is not explicable in reductively individualistic terms. Not least of all because the process of coming to a modus vivendi, shaping a life within which the things that matters to us can cohere together in a satisfying and sustainable way, involves articulation. To understand what matters to us, what projects we can pursue to actualise these concerns and how to make a life for ourselves which incorporates them, we must elaborate a sense of who we are. Without others who are similarly occupied, attempting to articulate their personal identities and shape a life congruent with them, how could we do this? The relational dimension to human being doesn’t define our existence but it is both the spur to and the necessary condition for this struggle for self-definition. The meaningfulness of interiority is the flipside to our sociality.

And I got half a mind to let it all burn up in this fire
That’s been burning through my veins since I first learned to cry
I’d watch this whole night come down and never miss her again
I never felt right and never fit in
Walking in my own skin

Now I got scars like the number of stars, my mind’s full of vipers
I got the dust of the desert in my bones, coming through the amplifiers
Between the minor chord fall and the fourth and the fifth
It’s a broken Hallelujah and a pain in my fist
I wash my hands like the man with the blood on his teeth
Over and over without relief

And I got nothing for you darling but a story to tell
About the rain on the pavement and the sound as it fell
I’d watch this whole night come down and never miss her again
I never felt right and never fit in

Walking in my old man shoes, with my scientist heart
I got a fever and a beaker and a shot in the dark
I need a Cadillac ride, I need a soft summer night
Say a prayer for my soul, Señorita

Because I’ve been dying out here in the cold and the snow
I’ve got a picture of you, Mama, to remind me of home
On the hood of a Dodge on a Saturday night
Say a prayer for my soul, Señorita

• At the level of the individual, continuous publishing doesn’t in principle represent any additional workload. One of the most frequent questions I’ve encountered when running social media workshop is “how do you find the time?”. Increasingly all my research related blogging and tweeting is part of the research process itself, rather than something external to it. I use blog posts in particular as a notebook within which to record and develop thoughts. I have a large collection of notebooks from the first half of my PhD filled with often illegible notes and an iPad filled with mindmaps. The only difference with how I now use my blog is that the entries are indexed, easier to read and available to the wider world.
• Two important consequences flow from this. Firstly I take more care about articulating ideas because others can read them and, furthermore, it’s easier to do this because my typing keeps up with my thoughts whereas my handwriting often doesn’t (at least not if I’m trying to ensure their legibility later). Secondly categorising and tagging my posts inculcates reflexivity about the research process. It helps elaborate a sense of research agendas, as well their different sub strands, which is useful in a purely intellectual sense, as well as being helpful for forming practical publishing projects that can flow from them. It also inculcates reflexivity about your work flow: prior to consciously embracing continuous publishing, my experience of research involved a cycle between an (overly) chaotic process of putting together raw materials & threading them together and an (overly) structured process of fitting these into the formal requirements of journals, publishers, the PhD etc. Now it feels much more unified. I understand the different things I do more, the conditions amenable to them and how this all fits into a coherent sector of my life ‘research’ as distinct from other sectors. It helps put research in a box, though not in a way that feels restrictive. It also helps you work from anywhere and fit the fragments together in a unified way at a time that’s convenient for you.
• I think there’s a general and often quite vague fear about sharing on the internet which I”ve encountered a lot when running workshops. I don’t share it. Perhaps I’m being hopelessly naive but, in my mind, if you share your work in some venues, why not share it in others? I don’t think the internet is filled with nefarious academic predators waiting to steal your ideas as soon as you let your guard down. I do however think it’s filled with an enormous range of academics, far more diverse than any network you can encounter in face-to-face settings, who are just as eager to find direct and indirect interlocutors as I assume you are. Even if there are risks I think they’re manifestly outweighed by the benefits which accrue from open research. I passionately believe sharing can and should be a default option. It’s an impulse implicit in the act of publishing and, in so far as we are hesitant about it, I’d suggest that’s a consequence of social structures relating to academic careers, auditing and scholarly publishing perverting the practice of intellectual craftsmanship: making cultural products and sharing them.
• In technical terms I think all you need to do continuous publishing is a blog and a twitter account. Link the two together and you posses an incredibly potent publishing platform which is free and entirely within your own control. Use twitter to follow people whose work you find interesting and who, perhaps, will find your work interesting. Once you post twitter updates for your new blog posts and discuss them with others, an audience will quickly begin to develop.
• In doing so I think you maximise your online footprint and impact flows quite naturally from this. People know what work you’re doing, will often refer others to you, it helps publicise your books & papers and you become known for working in your area. It also helps bridge the gap with the world outside the academy. The greater your social media footprint, the easier it is for journalists (and anyone else for that matter) to find your work and to make contact with you. In turn the greater your social media footprint is, the easier it is for those who encounter the ensuing media coverage to find you online by searching for your name and/or your research topic. It’s an incredibly potent form of disintermediation which, I suspect, has yet to really effect the academy in the work it is likely to with time.

- what goes into producing a chapter or a paper? Lots of ideas, conversations, extracts from texts, chunks of writing etc. some of these have a social existence, in so far as they emerge out of formal or informal academic conversations, however most are private and few, if any, are meaningfully public?

- why is this status as public largely restricted to such ‘formal’ outputs? Is it some intrinsic characteristic of the activities which go into producing a paper or a chapter? Inevitably some significant cross-disciplinary variation here which I don’t feel qualified to make a conclusive statement about because it is an empirical question. However
I would contend that at least SOME of this largely private production can be ascribed to the restrictions of the communications infrastructure traditionally available to academics with these restrictions ossifying over time into seemingly ‘obvious’ norms of academic practice.

- these norms tend to restrict dialogue to the post-publication stage which, given the opportunity costs involved in engaging seriously with a paper, inevitably restricts the dialogues that emerge

- so why not try and seek dialogue at the pre publication stage? This would lead to a much broader array of dialogues because of the much lower opportunity costs attached to engaging with, say, a blog post rather than a paper

In the rest of the talk I will discuss:

- technical infrastructure required to do it
- benefits and costs to individuals
- its significance for impact
- my own experiences of trying this

Staff and students at the University of Sussex will be protesting against plans to privatise university’s support services next week.  Campus trade unions today (Friday) announced there will be protests on Tuesday (22 May) and Thursday (24 May) at 1pm at the university’s library square (see notes for directions).  On both days potential bidders will visit the campus to assess ways they could take over the running of the affected departments.

Yesterday (Thursday 17^th May) staff and students packed a lunchtime lecture theatre to hear from union reps about management plans to privatise catering, estates and facilities management at Sussex University, transferring 235 workers, more than 10% of the workforce, from university employment to private contractors.

Employees from caterers, to cleaners, to academic, administrative and maintenance staff, were furious to hear about proposals that threaten pensions, pay, conditions and job security, not to mention the quality and price of services, including in sensitive areas like security, and health and safety. Students attended and the Students Union joined the three trades unions, Unison, Unite and UCU.

Union reps reported that alternatives to outsourcing appear not to have been openly considered and the idea that privatisation can improve quality and reduce costs seems to have been uncritically accepted despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

Spokesperson for the three unions, Maureen Winder (Unison branch secretary), said “If staff become employees of a private company their future pension rights and working conditions will change significantly, and we will have a two-tier workforce, as new staff will be employed on different terms and conditions. The plans were sprung upon us with no discussion about finding solutions in-house. The university seems determined to outsource regardless of the impact on quality or future costs, and this is devastating for the whole University community.”
Sign the petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/save-our-services/

http://tinyurl.com/c7z38eo - directions to library square

Statement by the trades unions: http://www.sussex-ucu.org.uk/?q=content/privatisation-estates-facilities-management-and-catering-services

Letter from the Students Union to the Vice Chancellor: http://www.sussexstudent.com/news/index.php?page=article&news_id=270243

Although vivid metaphorical language can be found in some areas of social theory, it is far from consistent and, in my experience, there’s little reflective dialogue about how such communicative techniques can and should be used effectively. Too often visual metaphors in social theory simply don’t work. Likewise, when they do the lack of deliberate reflection about the pedagogical dimensions to their use often means that their success in illuminating ideas to people already inhabiting that conceptual landscape goes hand-in-hand with the emergence of further barriers to people outside that approaching coming ot understand the ideas within it. Which I write having finally got my head around Deleuze after years of being scornful. Given the increasingly imperilled place of theory in the academy, there’s an important conversation to be had about rhetorical and pedagogical innovation.