EXPRESS: “And we gossip about my life as if I am not there.” An autoethnography on recovery from infidelity and silence in the academic workplace

2021 ◽  
pp. 001872672110222
Author(s):  
Truus van de Berg
Keyword(s):  
Work Performance ◽  
Academic Identity ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
Betrayal Trauma ◽  
Collegial Interactions ◽  
Academic Workplace ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
As If ◽  
Lack Of Knowledge

In this autoethnography, I engage with betrayal trauma from my husband’s infidelity as it relates to my recovery and my academic identity, and my work performance. As I navigate between the trauma, the stigma and taboo, the shame and lack of knowledge, my responsibilised academic self, the collegial interactions, and the question whether keeping silent robbed me of my voice, I distinguish toxic secrets, hurtful silencing, and healing silence. Although the exploitative nature of the academic workplace had never been more visceral, I also found that a tending silence contributed to my protection and my recovery. In silence, my academic life is opening up to embracing needs rather than enduring hardships, to inviting rather than striving, to vulnerability rather than empowerment.

scholarly journals Learning of academics in the time of the Coronavirus pandemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-107
Author(s):  
Ela Sjølie ◽  
Susanne Francisco ◽  
Kathleen Mahon ◽  
Mervi Kaukko ◽  
Stephen Kemmis
Keyword(s):  
Academic Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
Collegial Interactions ◽  
Practice Architectures ◽  
Abrupt Changes ◽  
Teaching Research ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Case Stories

This article explores academics’ learning. Specifically, it focuses on how academics have come to practise differently under the abrupt changes caused by responses to the Coronavirus pandemic. We argue that people’s practices—for example, academics’ practices of teaching and research—are ordinarily held in place by combinations of arrangements that form practice architectures. Many existing practice architectures enabling and constraining academics’ practices were disrupted when the pandemic broke. To meet the imperatives of these changed arrangements, academics have been obliged to recreate their lives, and their practices. We present case stories from four individual academics in Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Australia. Building on a view of learning as coming to practice differently and as situated in particular sites, we explore these academics’ changed practices—working online from home with teaching, research, and collegial interactions. The changes demonstrate that academics have learned very rapidly how to manage their work and lives under significantly changed conditions. Our observations also suggest that the time of the Novel Coronavirus has led to a renewal of the communitarian character of academic life. In learning to practise academic life and work differently, we have also recovered what we most value in academic life and work: its intrinsically communitarian character.

scholarly journals Living The Dream In An Erudite World: Writing As If Ones Career Depends On It

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Michael Craig Budden
Keyword(s):  
Professional Growth ◽  
Junior Faculty ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
Publish Or Perish ◽  
As If

In academia, the old maxim, “publish or perish” sends chills down the back of many.  Junior faculty members, especially, are rightfully concerned a lack of publications may inhibit their professional growth and, more importantly, their professional survival.  Thus, for many, if not most, of those who pursue an academic life, publishing is a necessary and important part of the job.  This article provides advice on beginning and maximizing writing and publishing efforts from an experienced editor and reviewer.

Higher education, impact, and the Internet: Publishing, politics, and performativity

First Monday ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Research Funding ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Internet Publishing ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Academic Communication ◽  
Opening Up

This paper considers how and why scholarly publishing has changed over the last two decades. It discusses the role of the Internet in overcoming earlier barriers to the rapid circulation of ideas and in opening up new forms of academic communication. While we live in a world increasingly dominated by images, the written word remains vital to academic life, and more published scholarly material is being produced than ever before. The paper argues that the Internet provides only part of the explanation for this growth in the volume of written material; another key contributing factor is the use of performance-based research funding schemes in assessing scholarly work. Such schemes can exert a powerful influence over researchers, changing their views of themselves and the reasons for undertaking their activities. With their tendency to encourage the relentless, machine-like production and measurement of outputs, they can be dehumanizing. Of even greater concern, however, is the possibility of systems based entirely on metrics, ‘impact’, and revenue generation. The paper critiques these trends, makes a case for the continuing value of peer review, and comments briefly on the subversive potential of the Internet in resisting the dehumanization of scholarly work.

The Limits of the Self in Plotinus

Antichthon ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 96-101
Author(s):  
Annick Charles-Saget
Keyword(s):  
Personality Development ◽  
The Self ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Place Of Birth ◽  
Mirror Stage ◽  
Child Personality ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Partial State ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
As If

Psychoanalysis is born of the fact that the notion of the self appears unable to take account of the whole of psychological life. Rejecting the limits of the self is recognizing the fact that it is invaded by forces which are completely other than it; it also involves both an analysis of why these are not understood, and a recognition that it is possible for the self to be obliterated. Plotinus asks: “But we . . . who are we?” (6.4.[22].14, 16). Does it involve flagrant anachronism to establish a link between the contemporary philosophy of the limits of the self and the Plotinian opening up to what is activity beyond the self? That this is not merely an arbitrary comparison may be demonstrated firstly on negative grounds, in that psychoanalysis rejects the cogito, exactly in the manner of Plotinus; the subject is born neither of itself nor of thought. However psychoanalysis, while accepting the partial state of the self, affirms the constitutive value of narcissism. The child’s identification with his image, called the mirror stage by Lacan(Écrto 1.89ff.: 1966 edn.), is the crucial stage in the building of the self. If this identification fails, or the image of the self is rejected, serious personality destructuring results. We are not here in the business of confusing philosophy with psychology, or child personality development with the progress of the spirit, but Plotinus’ reticence about images throughout the Enneads does bear a connection with Porphyry’s anecdotes in theLtfe of Plotinus: “Plotinus was ashamed of being in a body”; Plotinus refused to divulge any details of his family, or his place of birth; Plotinus was opposed to a portrait being made of him (Vita Plotini 1). This concurrence of life and writing cannot be neglected: Plotinus refused to allow Porphyry to write his biography, as if to assert the paradox of such an undertaking: an effort to paint the portrait of one who rejected all portraits.

scholarly journals Individualization in the widening participation debate

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Baker ◽  
B. Brown ◽  
J A Fazey
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Higher Education Institutions ◽  
Traditional Students ◽  
Widening Participation ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Non Traditional Students ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
As If

We provide an analysis of some recent widening participation literature concerning the barriers preventing non-traditional students accessing higher education. This literature criticizes higher education institutions and staff, opening up the academics' attitudes and skills to inquiry. We follow the genesis of four themes in the literature and these are visited in turn to provide substantive arguments. Students' accounts of their experiences are taken as if they were a systematic analysis of higher education institutions and result in an individualistic analysis of the problems related to access and progression. Beck described such assumptions and devices as individualization. We question the use of such pervasive individualism in the widening participation debate.

scholarly journals ‘Collegial Accountability’ and Bias: The Solution or the Problem?

1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Temple
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Evaluation Criteria ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
Funding Agencies ◽  
Restricted Group ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Opening Up

In a recent debate about bias in social research, Hammersley and Gomm (1997) discuss error, and bias as a form of error, as ‘a matter of collegial accountability’. They argue that radical epistemologies are a growing threat to the research community. Only by using such a community to decide what is reasonable can researchers avoid the threatened slip into the abyss. This threat is illustrated for the authors by, for example, the growing emphasis on the role of users of services by funding agencies. For those researchers who have struggled to be heard within academic life, the desire to install a single community as judges of research is a step backwards. The evaluation criteria used for research have been narrowly defined by some researchers within that community. Feminists, amongst others, have been trying to widen the definitions of validity. The desire to return to an authoritative voice, a particular and restricted group of ‘colleagues’ in Hammersley and Gomm's case, constitutes the threat rather than the solution for those researchers. It assumes that these colleagues speak for everyone and are only accountable to themselves. In this article I examine the way in which Hammersley and Gomm (1997) have set up the debate with feminist researchers. I then go on to discuss the notion of ‘the research community’ and the assumptions the authors make about the criteria for evaluating research. I finish by introducing an alternative way of being accountable which involves opening up dialogue with a wider audience.

Competing Ways of Hearing Nature in Berg's Wozzeck

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-89
Author(s):  
Marc Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Political Power ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
The Political ◽  
Creative Power ◽  
Aesthetic Values ◽  
Nature Scenes ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
As If

AbstractMusicologists have tended to assume that Berg's ‘translation’ of Büchner's play was an unproblematic affair and have felt free to set about uncovering how the music articulates the drama and the themes as if the meanings of play and opera were identical. In this article I listen to Wozzeck as a dialogue between Büchner's original fragment and Berg's operatic translation in a manner that acknowledges the differences between them. In particular I propose an alternative way of hearing nature in the opera that accords with Büchner's and Berg's own valorisation of the creative power of Life, rather than focusing on the political power of the idealist subject like many earlier appraisals of the opera. I first argue that, with Woyzeck, Büchner was opening up an exploratory space in which he asked his audience: ‘If the autonomous self-identical subject is indeed illusory, what is the mechanism through which social progress can take place?’ Second, I challenge the assumption that Berg managed to set the text in a neutral way, arguing that he imposed upon the fragments an alien set of aesthetic values and inadvertently dismantled the mechanism Büchner had designed to provoke audiences into thinking about volition and creativity. In the final two sections of the article, I argue that, despite the violence Berg did to Büchner's plan, the music in the opera's nature scenes can be heard to generate the philosophy of potential that Büchner was searching for in the original fragments.

Improvement of an artificial test substrate technique for evaluation of em immunocytochemical labeling

1987 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 762-763
Author(s):  
G. D. Gagne ◽  
M. F. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Bovine Serum Albumin ◽  
Serum Albumin ◽  
Bovine Serum ◽  
Artificial Substrate ◽  
Chemical Fixation ◽  
As If

We recently described an artificial substrate system which could be used to optimize labeling parameters in EM immunocytochemistry (ICC). The system utilizes blocks of glutaraldehyde polymerized bovine serum albumin (BSA) into which an antigen is incorporated by a soaking procedure. The resulting antigen impregnated blocks can then be fixed and embedded as if they are pieces of tissue and the effects of fixation, embedding and other parameters on the ability of incorporated antigen to be immunocyto-chemically labeled can then be assessed. In developing this system further, we discovered that the BSA substrate can also be dried and then sectioned for immunolabeling with or without prior chemical fixation and without exposing the antigen to embedding reagents. The effects of fixation and embedding protocols can thus be evaluated separately.

Seeking to uncover biology's chemical roots

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 435-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Addy Pross
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Biological Systems ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
The Road ◽  
Physical Chemical ◽  
Systems Chemistry ◽  
Biological World ◽  
Inanimate Matter ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Opening Up

Despite the considerable advances in molecular biology over the past several decades, the nature of the physical–chemical process by which inanimate matter become transformed into simplest life remains elusive. In this review, we describe recent advances in a relatively new area of chemistry, systems chemistry, which attempts to uncover the physical–chemical principles underlying that remarkable transformation. A significant development has been the discovery that within the space of chemical potentiality there exists a largely unexplored kinetic domain which could be termed dynamic kinetic chemistry. Our analysis suggests that all biological systems and associated sub-systems belong to this distinct domain, thereby facilitating the placement of biological systems within a coherent physical/chemical framework. That discovery offers new insights into the origin of life process, as well as opening the door toward the preparation of active materials able to self-heal, adapt to environmental changes, even communicate, mimicking what transpires routinely in the biological world. The road to simplest proto-life appears to be opening up.

Telepractice: A Survey of AuD Students Pre- and Post-Telepractice

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (18) ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
Kelli M. Watts ◽  
Laura B. Willis
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Professional Services ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Lack Of Knowledge

Telepractice, defined by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA, n.d.) as “the application of telecommunications technology to the delivery of professional services at a distance by linking clinician to client, or clinician to clinician, for assessment, intervention, and/or consultation,” is a quickly growing aspect of practicing audiology. However, only 12% of audiologists are involved in providing services via telepractice (REDA International, Inc., 2002). Lack of knowledge regarding telepractice has been cited as one of the reasons many audiologists do not use telepractice to provide audiology services. This study surveyed audiology doctoral students regarding their opinions about the use of telepractice both before and after their opportunity to provide services via telepractice sessions. The authors expected that by providing students the opportunity to have hands-on training in telepractice with supervision, they would be more open to using telepractice after becoming licensed audiologists. Overall, the data indicates benefits of exposing students to telepractice while they are in graduate school.

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