myResearchSpace

It feels like I have been writing applications and proposals for two weeks straight now. Probably because I nearly have. Mostly applications for project funding, but also for exciting extras like training at a synchrotron and going to international conferences. Yes, you can laugh at me for getting excited about synchrotron training. It must be ...

You know the famous Engel quote: An ounce of action is worth a tonne of theory. Well that's bollocks, at least for the average Ph.D. student... I propose instead that an ounce of theory is worth a tonne of action. You spend weeks of source/data analysis, thinking, reading etc (in other words 'action'), just to come up with one idea, one ...

FREAKING OUT and HERE'S WHY: List of things to do: Finish current chapter Start next chapter Amend lit review Finish abstract for 2010 Conference Continue primary source analysis of Melbourne and Indian materials Begin research for my T&L research project Plan my next lectures Plan my next tutorials Hand in all essay marks Read ...

I've been reading Judy Wajcman's Technofeminism, and just stumbled on a sentence: 'Oudshoorn shows how discourses about the natural body shaped the Pill, and how the Pill, in turn, constructed women's bodies as universal with respect to their reproductive functions' [emphasis added] (2004: 50).  I find this 'their' intriguing. On the one ...

I've been reading Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera in my 'spare' time lately. I'd read a few of her essays a long time ago, back in my increasingly-hazy undergraduate era, and thought that reading her work again might help me with my writing. I also wanted to balance out my reading a little - the subject matter of the chapter I've just ...

I've been thinking a lot recently about the way in which scholars become productive writers. It's not just that a scholar writes - a productive scholar writes a lot. So, with the analogy of pumping weights at the gym, how can you build up your writing productivity so that the words just flow, and eventually you can pump out a few thousand words a ...

How's this for an eye-opener?  Budden AE, Tregenza T, Aarssen LW, Koricheva J, Leimu R, Lortie CJ. 2008. Double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23:4-6. Abstract Double-blind peer review, in which neither author nor reviewer identity are revealed, is rarely practised in ...

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 ...

Yamin Ma submitted her PhD thesis today. She doesn't run a blog, so I'm making sure that recognition for her achievement reaches as many in the UWA community as possible. Yamin's thesis ended up with the title ''Vegetation as a biotic driver for the formation of soil geochemical anomalies for mineral exploration of ...

I love it when an examiner talks about ''the PhD'' in general, rather than simply the particulars of the one under consideration. When this happens, we get an insight into what examiners are looking for. Usually, such reflection occurs when the examiner is trying to explain to the candidate how a thesis might be improved - this is the formative ...