University as workplace: new directions

September 25, 2015 / Karin Tusting

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On 4th September I presented at BAAL 2015 (Aston University), a paper entitled “The University as a Workplace: New Directions in the Study of Academic Writing” . There were a lot of nods in the room while I was talking, which suggests we are on to something! Further to Sharon’s reflections on our autoethnographies of email, many of the questions afterwards picked up on the issue of emails, and how the reading and writing of emails integrates with and affects people’s working lives and experiences. In particular, people were interested in the idea that the singular notion of the practice of ” doing email” actually brings together tasks, and therefore practices, of many different kinds: quick or complex, boring or challenging, potentially emotionally disruptive and definitely out of one’s control.

This was also the first time I had used our handy little project logo in public:

Someone who had come in after the start of the paper said to me afterwards, “I saw the logo at the bottom – are you part of a skills centre or something?” I still have to figure out what that means about the semiotics of branding ….

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The Mediatisation of the Literacy Practices of Academic Knowledge Production

September 16, 2015March 22, 2016 / David Barton

On the 8^th of September, I, David, presented a paper, The Mediatisation of the Literacy Practices of Academic Knowledge Production at the 6^th International Conference on Language in the Media at the University of Hamburg. This is the first paper from the project which I have presented and the focus of the paper reflected the theme of the conference, Mediatisation. Click on the title Mediatisation of the literacy practices of academic knowledge production Sept 2015 for my slides . I enjoyed presenting the work and people seemed interested in the topic. Many thanks to everyone who attended and especially those of you who asked questions. It was obvious from talking to people afterwards that the topics raised in the paper – about how every aspect of being an academic is being transformed – fitted with people’s experiences around the world.

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No email is an island

September 3, 2015March 22, 2016 / Sharon McCulloch

As one part of the Dynamics of Knowledge Creation project, members of the project team are researching our own practice and providing autoethnographic data on interesting themes to emerge from the research. One of these is the fragmented nature of academic work, and the role that email plays in this.

We each received between 3 and 106 emails per day, with the more senior team members receiving by far the most. These included personal messages, newsletters, circulars, and spam as well as emails that required a response. One team member deleted 68% of the 84 emails she received on the day she tracked her email habits, and sent only 5 messages, but it is sobering to bear in mind that this is an academic who is semi-retired!

One team member pointed out that “no email is an island”; those that require action often include links or attachments to everything from events websites to manuscripts, often involving hundreds of pages of reading. Our common strategies for handling emails included checking multiple times per day, dealing with the quick and easy messages first, flagging or marking as “unread” those that require further thought, and aiming for (but never reaching) the Nirvana of “Inbox Zero”.

Many of our research participants have described checking email early in the morning, or late in the evening, perceiving email as a distraction from their “real” work. But are academics unusual in this regard? It would appear not. According to Chui et al. (2012, p. 46) high-skill knowledge workers spend 28% of their workweek managing e-mail. In 2011, French IT company, Atos, announced their aim of going email-free after estimates that employees got an average of 100 emails a day, only 15% of which were deemed useful (Chui et al., 2012, p. 30). The same year, in response to union complaints about work-life balance, Volkswagen limited its servers to sending emails to staff between 7:00 and 18:15.

How would you feel about imposed limits like this? Is email a distraction from your “real” work? How do you manage the volume of emails?

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Conference talks this month

September 3, 2015March 22, 2016 / Sharon McCulloch

Conference season is upon us, and the Dynamics of Knowledge Creation team is sharing early insights on different aspects of our data analysis. This week, Karin is presenting a paper entitled The University as a Workplace: New Directions in the Study of Academic Writing at the BAAL annual meeting at Aston University in Birmingham on the 4^th of September.

On the 8^th of September, David is presenting on The Mediatisation of the Literacy Practices of Academic Knowledge Production at the 6^th International Conference on Language in the Media in at the University of Hamburg.

Finally, on the 15^th September, Sharon is giving a paper on the use of techno-biographic interviews and what they can reveal about academic identity at the Quadrangular Conference on Technology, Organisations and Society at Lancaster University’s Management School.

We will post links to the slides shortly.

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The new landscape of academic communication: conference paper

July 28, 2015March 22, 2016 / Karin Tusting

Between 13th and 16th July 2015 I attended the 19th European Conference on Literacy in lovely Klagenfurt, Austria. The theme of the conference was ‘Literacy in the New Landscape of Communication’, and our paper based on early project findings developed this theme, entitled ‘The new landscape of academic communication: transformations of writing practices in the contemporary university’. Drawing on some of the phase 1 interviews, we drew out a few key aspects of changing writing practices that are starting to emerge as important: the significance of changing working and writing spaces; new patterns of collaboration, particularly those afforded by digital technologies; and managerial demands, particularly those associated with the REF. Thanks to all those who attended the paper and engaged with it, we had some stimulating questions (including the penetrating ‘Does tenure still exist in the UK?’) and some recognition of similar kinds of experiences in people’s own work. If you would like to see more detail (and some great quotes from our initial data!), the slides are downloadable by clicking this link:

‘The new landscape of academic communication: transformations of writing practices in the contemporary university’. Paper given at 19th European Conference on Literacy, Klagenfurt, 13-16 July 2015.

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Pineapples and potatoes: What go-along interviews can reveal

June 19, 2015March 22, 2016 / Sharon McCulloch

As part of the Academics Writing project, we are conducting interviews with academics across nine different sites; three disciplines at three universities. One of our interviews is a ‘go-along’ interview (Garcia et al., 2012).

A go-along interview entails walking around the research site with your participant, talking about the physical environment as you go. Moving around while talking has affective benefits in that it takes pressure off the respondent to speak continually, and its relative informality may help in building rapport.

In the context of a university department, the go-along format can also offer insight into how different discourse communities orient themselves and share ideas. Garcia et al. (2012) found that walking around and encountering different aspects of the research site by chance added an extra layer of richness to the data and shed light on the participants’ own perspectives. This also happened in the Academic Writing project.

It was not until one respondent was showing me around her department that the topic of shared social space came up. She showed me the kitchen and an open seating area with colourful but rather uncomfortable-looking sofas (pictured).

“Is this where you sit and have lunch and chat?” I asked.

“Yes”, she replied, and began to whisper, “but students are around as well”. She went on to explain that she did not feel able to discuss what she really wanted to talk about in this space: her research. This academic had talked earlier about how highly she valued advice she’d received over the years from other academics in her department and how this collegiality was a crucial part of what she enjoyed about her work. However, she did not feel comfortable talking to colleagues about, for example, negative comments from journal reviewers in such an open space. “You might be upset,” she said, “and you can’t show that in front of students.” In this sense, the physical layout of space actually hindered this academic’s ability to exploit the potential it offered for knowledge sharing and informal professional support.

It was not only the way in which the physical environment interacted with social networks in this case that was interesting, however. The chance discussion about the seating area also highlighted the level of emotional investment this academic felt in connection with her scholarly work. Although she had been working as an academic for more than 10 years and had published extensively, her research writing was at the heart of her sense of professional identity and she was not immune to feeling bruised by reviewers’ comments.

In the current higher education environment, where academics are pitched against one another and have their worth measured by metrics, it is important to consider the emotional effects of these practices, and to ensure that the physical organisation of space fosters the kinds of social and professional networks that provide appropriate support.

And if you are wondering where the pineapples and potatoes come into this, another respondent said during his go-along interview that the combination of his department’s ventilation system, open-plan atrium, and floor-to-ceiling windows made it cold on the lower floors and hot at the top. “We are the pineapples” he joked, as we walked around the sunny fourth floor, “And they”, he indicated down through the atrium, “are the potatoes”.

atrium

Garcia, C. M., Eisenberg, M. E., Frerich, E. A., Lechner, K. E. & Lust, K. (2012). Conducting go-along interviews to understand context and promote health. Qualitative Health Research, 22(10), 1395-1403.

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‘Technobiographies’ as a method of researching digital practices

March 10, 2015March 22, 2016 / Ibrar Bhatt / 1 Comment

When did you first use a mouse? Send a text message? Search for something on the Web? Set up a social media profile?

What caused this first usage? Was it mere inquisitiveness? Or did you have to?

Can you remember the first [essay, email, and shopping list] that you wrote? How did you write it? Is it different to how you would do it now? What has changed over time?

The above are just a few of the many questions you could ask yourself (or someone else) as part of a technobiography, one of a number of methods we will adopt in the ‘Academics Writing’ project.

A technobiography is about researching your own practices with digital media, the phases of change over time, in different domains of your life, and how and why your habits of use emerged. Reflecting upon our use of digital media in our past and how we approached technologies can help us understand our use of new media today, and its anticipated future use. The use of technobios as a research method can add new dimensions to ethnographic exploration of digital literacy practices, especially when looking at ‘habits’ as opposed to ‘skills’ and how these are played out over time in people’s lives (Page et al., 2014).

According to Page et al. (2014), this method of researching oneself begins as “a participant-centred way of documenting change over time in social practices, especially as these relate to people’s lived experiences with technology and their language use online” (p. 128). More broadly, technobios can also be a useful component of an ‘autoethnography’. Insights gained from technobios can therefore be used to explore commonalities between different people, identify how digital literacy practices are situated and located in particular times and spaces, and how everyone has an individual profile of literacy practices in their life history (ibid).

In this project, their adoption as one of our research methods is designed to provide insights into how the writing practices of academics have evolved through time in their professional lives, the challenges and opportunities different academics face, and how these have shaped the work of knowledge production.

Reference:

Page, R., Barton, D., Unger J. W. and Zappavigna, M. (2014). Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide. Abington and New York: Routledge

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Call for participants

February 5, 2015February 5, 2015 / Ibrar Bhatt / 1 Comment

It’s a pleasure to be working on this project at Lancaster University, and extending some of the insights and skills gained from my PhD study into a different research context and with a great team of people. One of the things that really appeals to me about this project is its focus on the practices of knowledge creation: how knowledge is produced, maintained, and disseminated in the modern University, and what this can tell us about academics’ writing practices and broader academic professionalism. It unpacks the ‘secret’ workings of academic knowledge creation whose outputs tend to gloss the messiness and ephemerality of what went into them. I’m reminded of Bruno Latour, in his ethnography of Science, who claimed that laboratory work was Janus-like, i.e. with two contradictory faces: ‘ready-made’ scientific knowledge from the perspective of an older face which looks back at previous achievements; and scientific knowledge ‘in the making’ from the younger face which confronts knowledge controversies in the moment (see figure below). Academics’ writing also involves a kind of dual activity of surveying, compiling and critiquing existing knowledge, and then adding new perspectives, formulating new arguments from them, and subsequently new knowledges.

Latour, 1987: p. 12

Academics’ various writing practices are central to the enterprise of Higher Education. The changing landscape of the contemporary academy places texts of various sorts at the centre of academics’ professional writing. This is markedly more pertinent with changes such as internationalisation, the Research Excellence Framework, and digitisation in the work practices of academics. What, therefore, does it mean to be an academic and to be doing academic work? And what background architectures, practices of different life-worlds, habitualised behaviours, administrative diktats and technological usages all together shape (through either constraining or upholding) the doing and being of academics’ writing?

That knowledge is ‘produced’ suggests a maker or producer and even a recipe. In my other work I have drawn from the sociology of actor-network to provide an account of how student work is done. In this framing we can turn to words like ‘perform’ or ‘enact’, and see knowledge as emergent in practices rather than a sole and unitary object with a sole and unitary producer.

Performativity, in this way, also leads us to the politics of what version of knowledge (i.e. an output) is lead/forced/encouraged to emerge as ostensibly the knowledge that we commonly see and hear about (e.g. a published paper, or media coverage reporting on a research publication). An assemblage of conventions, practices, norms, protocols, rules, etc holds this version in place, often precariously. The construction and performance of knowledge creation also leads us to look at the relationships readers of academics’ writing and beneficiaries of ‘impact’ etc. have with these knowledges.

Universities and their workers (‘academics’) will be approached much the same way as an anthropologist would a tribe . A detailed observational account of the settings will be conducted via ethnography, with a focus on the routine and mundane as we enter and explore the babel of disciplines before us. Here we will provide an account of the different professional milieux and the information and material environments which give rise to writing practices and give them their unique character.

As part of a more situational exploration of work ‘as it happens’, we will also carry out contemporaneous and in situ monitoring of academics’ writing through screencast recording alongside Livescribe capturing of note-writing.

As you can probably tell, this is going to be a fascinating research project and we are actively seeking academics from three disciplinary sites each within three HE institutions in the northwest of England. In each University we will work in three different disciplinary areas: STEM, social sciences/humanities, and professional/applied programmes. This will enable us to sample across a range of writing practices both across disciplines and institutions, and within them.

We are at a stage where we hope to establish our research sites and would like to hear from you if you are interested in being on board as one of the nine units of research sites. There will be more posts emerging as the project gets started with further details, but please do not hesitate to contact me on i.bhatt@lancaster.ac.uk if you would like to be involved in this project.

Best wishes

Ibrar Bhatt

Senior Research Associate, Lancaster University

http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/edres/profiles/ibrar-bhatt

Reference:

LATOUR, B. (1987). Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

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The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation

Academics’ writing practices in the contemporary university workplace

University as workplace: new directions

The Mediatisation of the Literacy Practices of Academic Knowledge Production

No email is an island

Conference talks this month

The new landscape of academic communication: conference paper

Pineapples and potatoes: What go-along interviews can reveal

‘Technobiographies’ as a method of researching digital practices

Call for participants