Category: Academia
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University mottos, comparison, and the nature of learning
I don’t suppose many academics pay much attention to their university mottos: odd, often-Latin hangovers from an elitist past, quietly being dropped in many cases; or bland nothings written for a marketing committee. We’re focused on other things. But I have been thinking about the nature of knowledge and learning recently, prompted by a very…
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‘Bricking it’ Part 2: the results
Five months ago I wrote about an intrepid group of Honours students taking their first steps into the wonderful world of Lego Serious Play. Well, the work is done and the report is in – and the team has allowed me to share it here. Not only that, but they produced a podcast too! I…
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Bricking it: teaching and researching with Lego
I love my job, but there are times when I really, really love it. And despite corona restrictions forcing us out of classrooms and onto Zoom, I’m having one of those ‘really, really’ times right now. It’s teaching a group of Honours students in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at Maastricht how to…
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Some learnings from the gifting space
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about language and communication lately, particularly the largely-unexamined assumptions about language that lurk in the background of my particular branch of democratic theory. I’ll write something longer about that shortly, but broadly speaking I think of language in rather anthropological terms as fluid systems of social meaning-making,…
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Farewell mutterings 1: decentralised Britain
This October I’m moving back down under, to the Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University, Brisbane. Over the next couple of months I’m going to post reflections on some of what I’ve learned in my 11 year stint in UK academia – reflections on the academy itself, on British politics and policy,…
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Hiding behind transparency: the UK government online information strategy?
In the last ten years, one of the great things about being an academic has been the explosion of public information available online. While I miss aspects of browsing through dusty archives and stacks, it’s been an awrful lot easier and an awful lot quicker to go to the relevant department or ministerial website and…
Ruminative Rumblings 