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 use Lego Serious Play to conduct research. And, of course, … Continue reading Bricking it: teaching and researching with Lego
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, not as fixed systems for conveying pre-linguistic truth. Despite that, … Continue reading Some learnings from the gifting space
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, and so on. I will be nice, promise. One often … Continue reading Farewell mutterings 1: decentralised Britain
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 download some policy papers at a few clicks of the … Continue reading Hiding behind transparency: the UK government online information strategy?
But wait! There’s more! My top 10 continued… 6. The article that brewed for 8 years. As an academic you get used to rejection. It happens. A lot. For reasons that range from the incisive to the insane via the merely bewildering. This year I finally got an “accept” from a top-ranked journal, Environment and Planning C, for an article that I first started working … Continue reading The academic year: my top 10 (part 2)
Whew. Week 10 of the Summer Term has come and gone. That’s the end of teaching although not the end of work, what with PhD students to look after, articles to write and review, a couple of book chapters to get on with… …oh, all right then, the students have gone so I’m off on holiday for three months. Happy now? Hmph. Anyway, it might … Continue reading The academic year: my top 10 (part 1)
