Mythologizing the Story of a Scientific Invention: Constructing the legitimacy of research commercialization

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 799-820
Author(s):  
Adi Sapir
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Academic Patenting ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Organizational Storytelling ◽  
Collective Work ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Academic Technology ◽  
Successful Case ◽  
Concurrent Processes ◽  
The Media

This paper explores the processes through which an organizational story acquires mythological status within an organizational field. To this end, I analyse a story of a successful case of academic technology transfer that gained mythological status in the field of higher education in Israel: the commercialization of the innovative pharmaceutical drug Copaxone. I identify three concurrent processes of mythologizing work: organizational storytelling, media diffusion and reconstruction, and field-level retelling and countering. I argue that myth-making is a collective work, in which an organizational story is shaped not only through the strategic rhetorical work of managers but also through interpretations and modifications by the media as well as other actors in the field. The myth of Copaxone, as it is currently told in the field of higher education in Israel, is a complex assemblage of the organizational story and various counter-narratives. I further suggest that this myth not only serves to naturalize and reinforce academic patenting, but also constitutes a discursive space for reflections about the ambiguities inherent in academic commercialization.

Constructing Pathways to Responsible Manhood

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-91
Author(s):  
Mellie Torres ◽  
Alejandro E. Carrión ◽  
Roberto Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Latino Men ◽  
Mixed Methods Approach ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Latino Boys ◽  
The Media ◽  
Stark Contrast

Recent studies have focused on challenging deficit narratives and discourses perpetuating the criminalization of Latino men and boys. But even with this emerging literature, mainstream counter-narratives of young Latino boys and their attitudes towards manhood and masculinity stand in stark contrast to the dangerous and animalistic portrayals of Latino boys and men in the media and society. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, the authors draw on the notion of counter-storytelling to explore how Latino boys try to reframe masculinity, manhood, and what they label as ‘responsible manhood.’ Counter-storytelling and narratives provide a platform from which to challenge the discourse, narratives, and imaginaries guiding the conceptualization of machismo. In their counter-narratives, Latino boys critiqued how they are raced, gendered, and Othered in derogatory ways.

Sexual Harassment, Speech Acts, and Public Secrets in U.S. Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Debenport
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Online Conversations ◽  
Survey Responses ◽  
Discursive Representations

This chapter draws on data from U.S. higher education to analyze the ways that the language used to describe sexual harassment secures its continued power. Focusing on two features viewed as definitional to sexual harassment, frequency and severity, the discussion analyzes three sets of online conversations about the disclosure of abuse in academia (a series of tweets, survey responses, and posts on a philosophy blog) from grammatical, pragmatic, and semiotic perspectives. Unlike most prior research, this chapter focuses on the language of victims rather than the intentions of harassers. The results suggest that speech act theory is unable to account fully for sexual harassment without accepting the relevance of perlocutionary effects. Using Gal and Irvine’s (2019) model of axes of differentiation, the chapter demonstrates how opposing discursive representations (of professors, sexual harassers, victims, and accusers) create a discursive space in which it becomes difficult for victims to report their harassers.

scholarly journals (Dis)Embodied Disclosure in Higher Education: A Co-Constructed Narrative

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Aubrecht ◽  
Nancy La Monica
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Graduate Students ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Spatial Processes ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
College Course ◽  
University College ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
College Environments

In this paper we use co-constructed autoethnographic methods to explore the tensions that animate the meaning of “disclosure” in university and college environments. Drawing insight from our embodied experiences as graduate students and university/college course instructors, our collaborative counter-narratives examine the ordinary ways that disclosure is made meaningful and material as a relationship and a form of embodied labour. Our dialogue illustrates the layered nature of disclosure—for example, self-disclosing as a disabled student in order to access academic spaces but not self-disclosing to teach as an instructor. Katie uses phenomenological disability studies to analyze disclosure at the intersection of disability and pregnancy as body-mediated moments (Draper, 2002). Nancy uses Hochschild’s (1983) notion of “emotional labour” to explore how socio-spatial processes of disclosure can be an embodied form of “extra work” (e.g., managing perceptions of stigmatized identities).

Removing Barriers to Collaborating in Virtual Writing Projects

2010 ◽  
pp. 128-143
Author(s):  
William Carney
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Project Managers ◽  
Virtual Collaboration ◽  
Collaborative Project ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Potential Barriers ◽  
Psychosocial Barriers ◽  
The Media ◽  
Successful Collaboration ◽  
The U.S

While there are some obvious rewards of virtual collaboration, technological, organizational, and psychosocial barriers to effective collaboration certainly exist. First, familiarity with the media used for collaboration and opportunities for practice are essential. Next, organizational concerns can hinder successful collaboration. Huws (2005) suggested that traditional face-to-face hierarchical organizations or even those with a degree of hybridity can subvert successful collaboration of any sort but also contain features that might enhance collaboration, if used correctly. Additionally, making work roles clearly defined and making the collaborative endeavor explicit and transparent can ensure positive outcomes. Finally, knowledge of the personality traits and values of the participants in a collaborative project is necessary for project managers. This chapter discusses these three potential barriers; provides examples from higher education and the U.S. Army; and discusses possible solutions.

On Not Believing What You Read

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
High School ◽  
College Admissions ◽  
Reading Strategy ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Gallup Poll ◽  
The Public ◽  
University Life ◽  
The Media ◽  
The University

Every student should, before graduating, see the 2006 teen-comedy movie Accepted. It’s a broad satire built around some high-school misfits whom no college admissions officer in his right mind would accept, not even in this economy. So they commandeer an abandoned mental asylum and construct their own college based on Marxism (Groucho), and they do to higher education what A Night at the Opera did to Il Trovatore. To a flabbergasted visitor, the teenage president of the college recommends the school newspaper, The Rag. “There’s a great op-ed piece in there about not believing everything you read,” he explains. Like all absurdist comedy, Accepted poses that subversive question, “Who’s absurd here?” It stands upside-down all the pretenses of university life, including its most fundamental pretense, that if we spend years here reading, we will get closer to the truth. Is there, though, any necessary relation between reality and what we find on the printed page? It’s a question that has become particularly acute today, when it seems that every man is his own deconstructionist. When Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase “hermeneutic of suspicion,” he was only recommending this reading strategy to literary theorists, but his students took it quite seriously and in 1968 turned the University of Nanterre into, well, something like the campus in Accepted. And today that skepticism is thoroughly mainstream. According to the Gallup Poll, only 32 percent of Americans in 2016 have confidence in the media, down from a high of 72 percent in 1976, post-Woodward and Bernstein. Among millennials (18-to-29-year-olds), just 11 percent trust the media. In Britain, back in 1975, only about a third of tabloid readers and just 3 percent of readers of “quality” broadsheets felt that their paper “often gets its facts wrong.” But by 2012 no British daily was trusted by a majority of the public “to report fairly and accurately.” In something of a contradiction, the Sun enjoyed both the largest circulation and the lowest level of trust (just 9 percent).

Parenting, Social Class, and the College Admissions Scandal

Contexts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-45
Author(s):  
Katerina Bodovski
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Class ◽  
College Admissions ◽  
The Media

In March of 2019, news of the college admissions scandal broke. Opinion pieces flooded the media on how and why such a thing could have happened. Here, the author argues that the scandal is more about parenting than the institution of higher education.

scholarly journals Cufflinks, photos and YouTube: the benefits of third object prompts when researching race and discrimination in elite higher education

2020 ◽  
pp. 146879412097260
Author(s):  
Constantino Dumangane
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Young People ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Black British ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Research Techniques ◽  
Sensitive Issues

Research suggests that interviews, unaided by additional methods, may be an ineffective way to explore young people’s experiences with sensitive issues. Researching minority youth’s experiences on personal or emotionally charged issues requires research techniques that enable young people to reflect on issues in a way that reduces the potential discomfort involved in such discourse. This article discusses the methodological approach of incorporating interviews with ‘third objects’ via photos, cufflinks and video in a study aimed at facilitating conversations with black British university men about the significance of their parents guidance during their formative and adolescent years, and their experiences with racism during their higher education studies. The overarching message of this article is that when exploring personal and sometimes emotional topics, the implementation of third object visual and physical prompts with semi-structured interviews can contribute to the depth of findings by unearthing the seldom heard counter-narratives of marginalised ‘others’.

The spread of English in Morocco

English Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Hamza R'boul
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Business Administration ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Official Languages ◽  
The Media ◽  
Global Language

Morocco is a multilingual country where the official languages, as indicated in the constitution of 2011, are standard Arabic and Tamazight, while French is the nation's second language, pervading sectors of business, administration, diplomacy and higher education. English and Spanish are used as foreign languages in many contexts for different purposes and tasks (Ennaji, 2009). Unlike French and Spanish, whose presence in the Moroccan linguistic situation is due to colonial policy in the 20th century, English does not ‘have a colonial legacy in Morocco’ (Buckner, 2011: 213). With ‘strong demand for a lingua franca’ brought about by the media, economic incentives and globalization, the presence of English has consequently been furthered in Morocco ‘as a global language’ (Zouhir, 2013: 275).

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