The End of Flying: Coronavirus Confinement, Academic (Im)mobilities and Me

This chapter focuses on how the coronavirus pandemic disrupted ‘normal’ academic life and travel through an analysis of my own travel history over the past decade. After contextualising the ways in which quarantines and confinement radically decreased travel, the chapter has three parts. In the first part, I document my own curriculum vitae of academic travel over the past decade and quantitatively measure my estimated CO2 emissions. Next, I seek to situate the value of such academic travel in both quantitative and qualitative terms, through extrinsic measures such as publications and impact and through intrinsic values such as the experience of different cultures and places. Lastly, I look at the transition to virtual events and my own participation in online events during the past nine months and consider the relation between physical and virtual meetings within academic practices. Insofar as the pandemic demonstrated our ability to transform academic travel and accelerate the use of remote meetings within academic practices, a pressing concern is how to find ways of extending this into the post-pandemic phase. Among the questions I ask in conclusion are: What possibilities are there for more seriously extending remote no-fly meetings to address the climate emergency? And what are the implications of such changes, both positive and negative?

Quality of Academic Life during COVID-19 Pandemic as Perceived by Taibah University Students

The current study aimed to identify the quality level of academic life during COVID-19 pandemic from students' perception of Taibah University, Yanbu branch. To this end, a descriptive approach was used to answer the following main research question: What is the quality level of academic life during COVID-19 pandemic from students' perception of Taibah University? The study tool consisted of a questionnaire to measure the quality level of the students’ academic life. The tool was ensured for reliability and validity and composed of three sections that contained indicators to measure the quality of academic life; academic practices, academic satisfaction, and academic support. The sample of the study consisted of 187 male and female students. Results showed high perceptions for the respondents in the quality of academic practices section (M=4.15, SD=1.03). The statement No.9 entitles “Rate the precautionary actions provided to you to activate the online education as an alternative to face-to-face education during COVID-19 pandemic” obtained the highest rank (M=4.63). The second section that measured the level of academic satisfaction recorded (M=1.76, SD=1.10), obtaining 58.71%. The statement 6 entitles “I felt my love to home increased during COVID-19 pandemic” obtained the highest rank (M=4.63, SD=.81, 98.93%). The academic support dimension recorded (M=4.33, SD=.93), Indicating that the level of academic support for students during COVID-19 pandemic was excellent (86.65%) as perceived by the study sample. The statement 5 which entitles “Rate the extent to benefit from academic counseling during COVID-19 pandemic” got the highest rank (M=4.67, SD=.72, 93.485). The most challenges encountered the students gradually categorized from the highest to the lowest were the poor Internet network, non-availability of laptop computers, low experience in working with blackboard, and poor technical experience. The study recommended the significance of academic support and suggested doing further studies on and the reality of quality of academic life from faculty members perspectives and the role of precautionary health during COID-19 pandemic to enhance the national loyalty for the university students.

Theater/Performance Historiography: A Preamble

The introduction to the issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny which gestures towards current work on theater/performance historiography published in the Anglo-American academe. Reflecting on insights about the complex nature and the mediality of historical knowledge, we would like to offer a collection of essays which, in their singularity, draw attention to internal contradictions prompted by tensions between 1) time, space, and matter, which are used to frame academic practices, and 2) events and objects, which are determined historically not only by past and present imaginations but also by how time, space, and matter function within the field of theater/performance historiography. We ask the following questions: How are we to think about the ways of housing the past (the archive, the event, the object) and the experience of the past (time, space, matter)? How are we to think about historiography in ways that are not only not dualistic (e.g., self and other, mainstream and margin), but that facilitate seeing historical subjects as unsettled by (rather than settled in) time, as riddled with contradictions (rather than reflective of a status quo), and as constructs of meaning (rather than as regulated thought)? And finally, how are we to negotiate the dynamics and the contradictions between multiple temporalities and spatialities housed in one and the same object or event?

Doing Academia Differently: Creative Reading/Writing-With Posthuman Philosophers

This article considers how academic practices such as reading and writing might be reconfigured as creative processes through thinking-with posthuman philosophies and theorists, particularly, but not confined to the works of Karen Barad and Erin Manning. Both Erin Manning and Karen Barad are involved with creative philosophies and practices, albeit from different vantage points. Manning’s work engages with arts-based practices such as research-creation through process philosophies, whereas Barad reads queer theory through quantum physics to develop their agential realist framework and diffractive methodology. Although Manning and Barad never refer to each other’s work, this article proposes that thinking-with both of these feminist philosophers might be fruitful to consider how reading and writing as part of research projects and graduate supervision might be enacted creatively and differently.

Assessing and enhancing the impact potential of marketing articles

Although the impact of marketing is a recognized priority, current academic practices do not fully support this goal. A research manuscript’s likely influence is difficult to evaluate prior to publication, and audiences differ in their understandings of what “impact” means. This article develops a set of criteria for assessing and enhancing a publication’s impact potential. An article is argued to have greater influence if it changes many stakeholders’ understandings or behaviors on a relevant matter; and makes its message accessible by offering simple and clear findings and translating them into actionable implications. These drivers are operationalized as a checklist of criteria for authors, reviewers, and research supervisors who wish to evaluate and enhance a manuscript’s potential impact. This article invites scholars to further develop and promote these criteria and to participate in establishing impact evaluation as an institutionalized practice within marketing academia.

Strictly Confidential Anthropology

Anthropological interest in secrecy and silence – and related aspects such as lying, knowledge, memory, and forgetting – has been long and precarious. Through what may be called personal anthropology, in this article, I describe both private and professional anthropological experiences including family memories, fieldwork sites, and academic practices. By recalling state socialist ideology, censorship, and family secrets, I illustrate how citizens have relied on each other in order to counter state hegemony. I highlight how surveillance in Romania expressly encouraged my informants as well as the secret police to engage in mutual intelligence and observation tactics as evasive tactics. Building on these strategies, I argue that academic life is not immune to secrecy, silence and covert action. I introduce an anthropologist who worked for the Hungarian secret police, and consider how academic life continues to rely on covert programs and an institutionalized hierarchy to promote and maintain its structures and interests.

Anglocentrism in the Academy: On Linguistic Privilege, Mastery and Hoito

In this paper, we discuss the tacit agreement to use English as lingua franca in global academia. Our interest is in how Anglocentrism manifests within academic practices – seminars, conferences, and academic publishing – all of which are marked by neoliberal assumptions of mastery, quality, and efficacy. Drawing on autobiographical narratives, social media conversations, and literature, as well as recent discussions on conferencing and peer review practices, we analyse how historically shaped linguistic privilege and linguistic divides continue to be lived at the level of the body, affects and affective atmospheres. Language is not just language, rather, seemingly practical decisions about language always involve the aspects of material labour, time, money, and careers: they shape researcher subjectivities and entire domains of scientific knowledge. However, we also highlight the potentials nested in the emergence of minor language and the deterritorialising forces of humor. Articulating the speculative lines of what if, we propose more care-full academic linguistic practices.

Can Pedagogical Innovations Be Sustainable? One Evaluation Outlook for Research Developed in PortugueseHigher Education

Across higher education, teachers have been inspiring themselves (and others) to apply pedagogical innovations grounded in a unifying intention: to prepare students for labour markets and societal challenges. Research-based education has been funded to promote pedagogical innovations with valuable impact on the students' academic success and/or the teachers' academic growth. However, there is still few documented research-based evidence that highlight how long-lasting and/or how embedded are the pedagogical innovations in academic practices, particularly when the funding period comes to an end. The purpose of this article is to discuss the extent to which funded national research-based education projects, developed in public Portuguese higher education institutions (universities and polytechnic institutes), have considered the sustainability of research results (e.g., pedagogical innovations), after funding ends. Based on a qualitative research approach, data collection included: document analysis of 39 projects’ materials and conceptions collected with 9 coordinators and 17 key participants from selected projects, through interviews and questionnaires, respectively. Content analysis of data collected showed that there are key factors that contribute to enhance and/or limit the sustainability of research results (e.g., funding and institutional support to maintain innovation). Results and recommendations are put forward to inform educational policies, funding agencies and involved actors (e.g., institution leaders, researchers, and teaching staff) to increase the sustainability of research results.

‘Already Given Over’: Activism in Inquiry and in the World

This is the second of two part-issues on qualitative inquiry as activism. The first focused upon activism and/in the academy (academic work, academic cultures, academic practices, etc.), and this second focuses upon activism in the processes of research itself and activism beyond the academy, in the world. Drawing upon Butler’s claim that we are always already, from the outset, ‘given over’ to the human, non-human and more-than-human other, we argue for qualitative research to do what it can to make the future different, better, more ethical.

Reshaping How Universities Can Evaluate the Research Impact of Open Humanities for Societal Benefit

During the twenty-first century, for the first time, the volume of digital data has surpassed the amount of analog data. As academic practices increasingly become digital, opportunities arise to reshape the future of scholarly communication through more accessible, interactive, open, and transparent methods that engage a far broader and more diverse public. Yet despite these advances, the research performance of universities and public research institutes remains largely evaluated through publication and citation analysis rather than by public engagement and societal impact. This article reviews how changes to bibliometric evaluations toward greater use of altmetrics, including social media mentions, could enhance uptake of open scholarship in the humanities. In addition, the article highlights current challenges faced by the open scholarship movement, given the complexity of the humanities in terms of its sources and outputs that include monographs, book chapters, and journals in languages other than English; the use of popular media not considered as scholarly papers; the lack of time and energy to develop digital skills among research staff; problems of authority and trust regarding the scholarly or non-academic nature of social media platforms; the prestige of large academic publishing houses; and limited awareness of and familiarity with advanced digital applications. While peer review will continue to be a primary method for evaluating research in the humanities, a combination of altmetrics and other assessment of research impact through different data sources may provide a way forward to ensure the increased use, sustainability, and effectiveness of open scholarship in the humanities.