Whilst the event drew on funding opportunities and support services specific to the University, it primarily focused on the key national funding schemes relevant to the Arts and Social Sciences, and general advice on applications, which might be useful to pass on.

Kicking off, Prof. Pat Thomson – in her capacity as CAS Director and an ESRC reviewer – located the role of fellowships in the post-doctoral landscape, and provided an honest assessment of the current opportunities facing new researchers in an increasingly competitive field. She stressed the need to be flexible, opportunistic and entrepreneurial. There was no mistaking that the limited number of fellowship awards represent a highly sought-after opportunity for academic career development, and that potential applicants should also consider other trajectories including: teaching posts, working as a post-doc on research projects (with possible opportunities for limited teaching), and external non-academic research work in the public, private and voluntary sectors.

Lisa McCabe from CAS ran through the main national award schemes relevant to the Arts and Social Sciences, namely:

• AHRC Early Career Fellowships
• ESRC Future Research Leaders
• Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships
• British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowships

Each have their own specific requirements and conditions of eligibility, but from these some common concerns and tips for applicants emerged that were re-emphasised by subsequent speakers.

It was stressed that applications should not be seen as a reworking or extension of doctoral theses, but a proposal for an original and timely piece of research in a significant field of study. The Leverhulme award in particular has an emphasis on originality and might privilege applications that challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries. Evidence of pilot work (including publication) may be advantageous, though not to an extent that risks concerns over ‘double funding.’

Crucially, reviewers of Early Career Fellowships give equal quality weighting to the project and to the applicant. Therefore, applicants should clearly demonstrate their ‘independent research potential’ and passion for the research subject.

Review bodies are commonly multi-disciplinary, and applications should have a clear rationale that engages a non-specialist audience. Ample time should be given to writing applications, inviting feedback from senior academics, such as supervisors, thesis examiners, and heads of school, as well as successful award holders, whilst making the most of research support services in the university.

It was stressed that applicants are eligible for most fellowship awards for several years after successfully gaining their doctorate. Whilst some may be fortunate to be awarded a fellowship soon after graduation, many will require the extra time gaining experience in teaching and research work and consolidating their publication output to be in a position to develop a successful application. As such, it is common for applicants to reapply for fellowships, though some schemes may have conditions on the timing of reapplications.

Not surprisingly, the need for strong evidence of work through peer-reviewed publications was emphasised throughout the event. Briony McDonagh, a successful Leverhulme ECF holder, explained how she worked as a post-doc for two years before receiving her award, giving her the opportunity to develop further journal articles from her thesis.

In addition, significant evidence of partnership and networking activities, knowledge exchange and public engagement are greatly valued.

Svenja Adolphs, an ESRC Grant Assessment Panel member, provided further insight on impact and outreach activities from a reviewer’s perspective, suggesting applicants involve end-users in the process of developing the application. It may not be sufficient to merely identify potential partnerships – a full commitment should be sought. She also reminded us that impact activities need to be evaluated, and that the method of evaluation should be described.

University of Nottingham researchers can access the presentations and further information on the CAS Workspace.

Douglas Rushkoff | Program or be Programmed

Rushkoff, D. (2010). Program or be programmed: Ten commands for a digital age. New York: OR Books.

The quickest way to avoid the annoying hard return formatting you usually get when copying and pasting text from a PDF into Word, Open Office or whatever is to first add tags to the document:

Advanced > Accessibility > Add Tags to Document

There are other ways round it, but to think I used to correct the formatting line by line…

Scholarship is generally recognised by its contribution to knowledge, which is seen as being more evolutionary than revolutionary – ‘shoulders of giants’ and all that. But do academics have distinguishable periods of peak creativity, and if so how might academic ‘creativity’ be conceptualised? At what stage of an academic career is the capacity for creative output and innovation best enabled and legitimised? Are our best ideas formulated early in careers when key epistemological positions and academic identities in the research field are still being negotiated? Or does the nature of academic enquiry lend itself to experience and longevity?

Though it still has strong aesthetic and spiritual connotations within artistic domains, modern definitions of creativity discount popular misconceptions based on the romanticism of divine inspiration, which celebrated the originality and imagination of a select few. Freudian and Marxist critique helped reconceptualise creativity as a cultural process, relocating the creative practice from the individual to the social. Therefore, contemporary pedagogy generally views creativity not as a skill related to talent or artistic sensibility, but as a strategy or technique that can be learnt and developed.

At a psychological level, creativity is a function of intelligence that exists as a form of self-expression. It satisfies our expansive tendency: our instincts for exploring and risk taking (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Most contemporary interpretations of creativity also acknowledge an act of novelty or originality, which in a world increasingly dictated by the knowledge economy, has to have an effectiveness or value. Therefore, creativity does not occur in a vacuum, but is “defined and assessed in relation to the context in which it is achieved” (Seltzer & Bentley, 1999: 13).

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) systems model for creativity consists of three elements:

• The Domain: a culture that contains symbolic systems and rules.
• The Field: consisting of ‘gatekeepers’ to the domain; experts that can recognise, appreciate and validate a creative product. They assert a type of control and can act as filters to a wider social and cultural audience.
• The Individual: whose creative product significantly adds to or changes the domain at the consent of the field, and who must learn the domain and field to ‘internalise’ the system.

If we have insufficient domain knowledge, Csikszentmihalyi suggests we are incapable of discerning creative ideas from other forms of personal expression and are therefore merely engaging in play and experimentation. So called ‘everyday’ or ‘low range creativity’ may account for spontaneity or expressiveness – at least on cognitive developmental terms – though these may be considered peripheral in their contribution to domain knowledge.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Collins.

Seltzer, K., & Bentley, T. (1999). The creative age: Knowledge and skills for the new economy. London: Demos.
http://www.demos.co.uk/files/theCreativeage.pdf?1240939425

Related post: The Elusiveness of Flow

“Knowledge is conscious use of information; ‘wisdom’ means choosing one’s behaviour on the basis of knowledge and shared values, in order to enhance the well-being of all, and the awareness that personal actions have social consequences.” (p. 407)

Blasi, P. (2006). The European University: Towards a Wisdom-Based Society. Higher Education in Europe, 31(4).

Image: Craig Fineburg | Occupy Philadelphia (2011)

Reading the introduction to Ben Fine’s Theories of Social Capital, I was struck by how much it resonated with my own emerging suspicion of how original concepts of social capital have been transformed by reductionist (and predominantly neoliberal) interpretations, that seem to disregard the complexities and nuances of formative work on the subject. As Fine suggests, they expand on Bourdieu’s relatively narrow definition with a fraction of his depth of understanding. The ‘peculiar relationship’ with neoliberalism and rational choice in particular, represents a ‘generalised commodity fetishism’ of social capital.

The literature on social capital thrived in the 1990′s, representing a radical increase in the scope, definition and application of social capital across the disciplines. According to Fine, these largely exploitational interpretations have degraded, rather than contributed to, the literature. As such, social capital has become an attractive motif for ‘hacademics’ and policy makers at the expense of rigorous academic arguments. In response, social scientists offer limited critique or choose to ignore social capital altogether.

It is right that ideas, concepts and theories are open to development and reinterpretation in interdisciplinary contexts, and Fine’s arguments may seem elitist. But he believes social capital has become a parasite that has ‘reduced and distorted’ the rich traditions of the social sciences. This has resulted in the adoption of social capital as a leading explanatory factor of social, cultural and economic factors at the expense of other (and more convincing) determinants.

In the new conceptual chaos of social capital, the nature of its relationship with other forms of capital is rarely defined. There is often a presumed transference between components and effects of different forms of capital; “rounding up the symbolic and the cultural into the social” (p.4). In addition, the relationship between social capital and capitalism itself is frequently ‘glossed over’.

Most pertinent to the studying of the social web – and the apparent readiness of researchers to invoke the work of Robert D Putnam in particular – is the necessity to question the idea of social capital as:

“self-help raised to the level of the collective. However good or bad things might be, they could be better if people interacted more, trusted one another, and cooperated. Social capital offers the golden opportunity of improving the status quo without challenging it. Everything from educational outcomes through crime prevention to better psychological health can be improved if neighbours and communities would only pull together and trust and interact with one another.” (p.4)

Such convenient and consensual interpretations of collective empowerment through participation and collaboration often fail to acknowledge the corrupting forces of what Fine describes as the ‘dark side’ of social capital.

It appears that Fine’s book represents an important critical reading of the social capital literature, which I hope to have a chance to explore beyond the Introduction in the near future.

Reference

Fine, B. (2010). Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly. London: Pluto Press.

There is a significant overlap in my blogging and Twitter networks, and I’m increasingly finding when I access the reader (which I tend to do every two or three days), that I’ve already viewed many of the blog posts through following links on Twitter (which I typically access several times a day). This resonates with the duplicity of networks, differing frequencies of use, and transference of tasks that I’ve observed in studying the social media practices of doctoral students.

Chuck Palahniuk once said; “the best way to waste your life is by taking notes.” Admittedly, he probably meant it in the context of its inferiority to the lived experience, but note taking can sometimes seem like a fruitless or trivial activity.

Note taking encompasses a number of contexts, situations and formats, yet collectively these represent an undervalued scholarly activity that is not given enough attention when we consider core academic skills.

Note taking can be purposeful or opportunistic, structured or unstructured, original or augmentative. There are situations when the note-taker can dictate time – such as annotating a paper – and those when (s)he can’t – such as fieldwork, or during a conference presentation etc.. Visual forms of note taking such as doodling or mind-mapping introduce entirely new creative processes.

Note taking can be instantaneous – I’m particularly impressed by live-bloggers. Yet often notes are repurposed to a form or format appropriate for formal documentation. How much of their value is lost? How important is time here; not just in the time you may (or may not) have in making the notes, but in the time you allow to elapse before formalising them. Raw notes can be untidy, incomplete and virtually incomprehensible. How is the sense making embedded and translated, and what role does the reflective process play?

Blogging can be thought of a form of note taking. This post is a note to self. I’m not sure what to do with it now…

Can we stop talking like academics?

Most academic practices reflect the most basic human activities, but we try our best to make them sound otherwise. Even the most generic academic terms are loaded by disciplinary bias and individual assumptions. PhD students (and I include myself here) are amongst the worst culprits as it consolidates the necessary enculturation process inherent in becoming legitimised as an academic.

Using broad terms are useful starting points though not always workable. For example, in the morning session I helped facilitate, one table interpreted data collection as general academic information sourcing rather than in the narrower methodological sense. So, terms like collecting stuff, exploring ideas, explaining things etc. are useful to cut through the bullshit.

Tools vs. Practices

Social media is itself a problematic term. Social media constitute a range of different tools and platforms. Whilst some provide defined parameters of use that may be attributable to recognisable activities, many do not. As the Visitors and Residents framework suggests, understanding the effectiveness of social media can be dependent on whether they are perceived as purposeful tools for specific academic activities, or as flexible, social and cultural spaces for participation, enquiry and critique.

Despite practice-based approaches such as those we promoted at the event, there are those who inevitably lean towards the instinctive tool-focussed ideologies inherent in learning new technology, and therefore partly quantify the success of workshops or events on box-ticking exercises such as the collaborative listing of social media we employed in the first session. Some attendees appreciated the opportunity to explore some of the social media we discussed in the morning session in the drop-in IT workshop after lunch.

Balancing Assumptions

To me, the success of an event like this is partly dependent on the dynamic between how it both placates expectations and challenges assumptions. In this case, this was not only applicable to assumptions on social media, but also on what it means to ‘do a PhD’. And, as Jen’s excellent account of her workshop experience suggests, this is equally true for facilitators. The difficulty is; that dynamic and the implications of the event are different for each individual who participates.

Thinking practically, this requires developing an initial dialogue necessary to gain an understanding of these collective assumptions, and adopting a flexible approach that can adapt to changing needs. Basically, there are as many ways to do events like this, as there are events. If we go away not wanting to rip it up and start all over again, we are probably doing something fundamentally wrong.