myResearchSpace

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 are still blank, and most of the ideas tend more towards turning off lights and using ...

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, so I took the time to add a bit more to my profile and look through the groups. Has anyone ...

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 helps you collect, manage, and cite your sources. It sounds handy, and it's free and open ...

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 with activist groups, and have provided a space (and equipment) for young documentary ...

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 occasionally realise that I've prepared a lecture that does not reference any women, or anyone ...

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. When I asked my (secondary) supervisor what they thought, the reply ...

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 the claim is that students who don't run with the standard left-wing line are being excluded ...

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 critique of the world. I was stuck. There are a lot of books that made an impression on ...

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 and Haraway), and I can't help but see resonances between the issues I'm discussing and the ...

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 that I currently find difficult is finding words that don't have any connotations I would ...