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lost in academia (RSS)
I've watched with pleasure the last few years as the University has adopted a number of measures to make the campus more sustainable. You can read more about the policies here . There's still a long way to go - several sections of the sustainability outline
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On Tama's recommendation , I recently had a look at the Graduate Junction , "a global graduate research community". The site looks good, although I feel that I haven't really explored its full potential yet. I had a bit of unexpected spare time tonight,
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Subtitle: Dear UWA, please stop using proprietary software. Alternate subtitle: Why my decision not to use Endnote now gives me a smug sense of satisfaction. Liz has been extolling the virtues of Zotero for a while now. It's a free Firefox plugin that
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I've had a few glancing contacts with the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal over the last few years, and the work they're doing has always struck me as very urgent. As well as mainstream academic work, they've made a lot of links
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Take a look at your bookshelf, or your references list for your latest article/chapter. How many authors there are women? How many are white? How many are likely to have had very similar life experiences to your own? I am disappointed in myself when I
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I recently had a paper accepted for the Australian Political Science Association conference, with no revisions required. Hurrah! At the same time, I suffer from the usual academic perfectionism...I can't help feeling that it still needs restructuringeditingresearchetcetcetc.
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A couple of days ago, I found a poster for the Young Liberals' 'Make Education Fair' campaign tacked to my door. Concerns are couched in terms of the need to protect 'diversity', 'inclusivity', and 'dialogue', familiar concepts from the left, except that
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Recently, a student came up to me after a lecture and asked me where to start reading. They wanted to know which books had been important to my own intellectual and political development, and get some ideas for books that would give them an intelligent
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Last night I went to the first of three sessions on Biological Art that SymbioticA is running through UWA Extension . I've been writing a lot about science and technology (or, rather, 'technoscience', to use a rather muddy concept developed by Latour
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I am in that special period of writing where all my words feel clumsy, stumbling knock-kneed across the page. I find myself staring at a sentence, rewriting it over and over in the hope that it will start to make sense. One of the many aspects of writing
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* I've been having a few interesting conversations with people of late about the ways in which academia interacts with the outside world, or 'the system'. Many of the academics who I've spoken to lately have been upset at the increasing commercialisation
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I'm still not entirely sure what purpose this blog is meant to serve, but I'm starting to find out. Over the last few days I've had a couple of people comment on my previous post, 'poverty snaps'. My supervisor, Jie, said that in his experience the key
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In T hiruvananthapuram we went for a walk along the beach in the morning, watching the fisherman pulling in their nets and sorting the catch. The beach is beautiful - colourful boats, small houses nestled among the coconut trees that lean out over the
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I'd be lying if I said that I had a clear goal in life, or if I claimed to know exactly why I'm doing a PhD. I know there are a lot of different reasons for doing a PhD (to get a good job, because you enjoy research, because you're thoroughly institutionalised
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I have a feeling that I'm not the only PhD student afflicted with constant doubt as to whether my work is good enough to show people yet. I've avoided putting my publications on this website for a while now, mostly because I keep thinking that they just
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