{"id":199,"date":"2016-06-30T12:26:50","date_gmt":"2016-06-30T12:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/?p=199"},"modified":"2016-06-30T12:30:50","modified_gmt":"2016-06-30T12:30:50","slug":"holding-our-disciplinary-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/2016\/06\/30\/holding-our-disciplinary-ground\/","title":{"rendered":"Holding our disciplinary ground"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had the pleasure of going to Ann Arbor last week\u00a0to present at the International Writing Across the Curriculum<\/a> conference\u00a0on behalf of the Academics Writing<\/em> project. Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan. It’s a lovely college town where, it seems, people have a passion for gardening and also apparently don’t\u00a0lock their doors at night.<\/p>\n

\"ann<\/a><\/p>\n

Our presentation focused on the ways in which academics’ disciplinary writing practices have been affected by changes at managerial level, particularly the REF. For some disciplines, the picture is rather bleak. For example, in Marketing, our participants were forced to aim their scholarly writing at specific target journals prescribed by the Association of Business Schools’\u00a0benign-sounding Academic Journal Guide<\/a>, which ranks business and management journals according to their supposed quality.<\/p>\n

Only 5 of the journals ranked highest (4-star) by the ABS guide in 2015 were in Marketing, making it a very small target to aim for. There is also a perception that most of these journals are US-based, and\u00a0publish mainly quantitative work.<\/p>\n

Here’s a taste of\u00a0what our participants in working in Marketing departments in England said about this:<\/p>\n

“Now it\u2019s not just four star journals. It\u2019s four star journals in marketing. Now the four star journals in marketing [\u2026] are US based four star journals. I think there were only 16. I can\u2019t remember what the figure was but it was such an unbelievably low figure, of UK academics getting published last REF into US four star journals.” <\/em>Charles, lecturer in Marketing<\/p>\n

“Now I target management journals, which is one way of hitting a four star.” <\/em>Diane, professor in Marketing<\/p>\n

\"michigan<\/a><\/p>\n

There is much to comment on here about the primary purpose of publishing research, the effect of attempting to measure quality in this manner, the level of autonomy academics enjoy (or not) regarding what and where to publish, cultural differences, disciplinary boundaries, and much more. The other disciplines in our study are experiencing their own sets of pressures related to disciplinary values and practices, which you can find out more about by checking out\u00a0the slides<\/a> from the talk.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Many of the other presentations at the iWAC conference were pedagogically-oriented, focusing on improving students’\u00a0writing in the disciplines, but this still provided an opportunity to consider what it is that we are preparing our students for; what disciplinary writing actually looks like in the context of contemporary higher education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had the pleasure of going to Ann Arbor last week\u00a0to present at the International Writing Across the Curriculum conference\u00a0on behalf of the Academics Writing project. Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan. It’s a lovely college town where, it seems, people have a passion for gardening and also apparently don’t\u00a0lock their doors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23,18,32,31,17],"tags":[24,21,34,26,33],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-writing","category-conferences","category-disciplines","category-ref","category-talks","tag-academic-writing","tag-conferences","tag-discipline","tag-events","tag-ref"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6I3yL-3d","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/acadswriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}