In Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries, Angela McRobbieaddresses how the encouragement to foster one’s ‘creativity’ as a set of capacities or skills necessary for professional success is entwined with the rise in freelance, temporary and low-paid labour. Drawing upon McRobbie’s extensive contributions to the field of cultural and creative industries, this book underscores the contemporary link between […]
Author: Sierra Williams
Writing for Impact: How can we write about our research in a way that leads to meaningful change?
Academic work may have impact in a variety of ways, depending on purpose, audience and field, but this is most likely to happen when your work resonates in meaningful ways with people. Ninna Meier encourages a more systematic investigation of the role of writing in achieving impact. Impact through writing means getting your readers to understand and remember your message and […]
How to increase public support for policy: understanding citizens’ perspectives
Policy-makers, we presume, want to solve social problems. Therefore, they select policy measures. In practice, these measures tend to trigger different reactions in society. How might a government avoid bad reactions, such as the tuition fees protests and ‘bedroom tax’ campaigns? Peter van Wijck and Bert Niemeijer present a framework which looks to align the perspectives of policymakers and citizens. […]
Book Review: An Economist in the Real World: The Art of Policymaking in India by Kaushik Basu
In An Economist In The Real World: The Art of Policymaking in India, Chief Economist of the World Bank Kaushik Basu seeks to explain Indian policymaking in lay terms. Ankita Mukhopadhyay writes that the book deftly delves into the complexities of the Indian economy. However, she warns that while the author is an excellent storyteller, a reader without a background in […]
Enabling authors to pay for open access – The Gold Open Access market and the role of an institutional central fund.
Having tracked and analysed the usage data of one university’s central open access fund over an eight year period, Stephen Pinfield shares findings from a detailed case study of the paid-for Gold Open Access market. Mandates, particularly if accompanied by funding, have played a very important role in encouraging uptake of Gold OA. Communication was a crucial factor in making potential users of the […]
Mathematicians against the clock: Accelerated work and accelerated careers in the Neoliberal University
Even though we grapple with different scientific questions, academics in different disciplines all face the same ongoing challenges with academic acceleration. Dr Milena Kremakova argues mathematics as a discipline is an excellent test case for understanding recent transformations in academia — and a cautionary tale for the social sciences and humanities. The main problem is that technocratic time of the neoliberal university […]
Is it ethical to be passionate in academia? Passion is a central concept for understanding academic labour.
Today we launch a new series of posts from a recent conference about the Accelerated Academy. Pieces over the next few weeks will explore the history, development and structure of audit cultures in Higher Education, digitally mediated measurement and the quantification of scholarship. The first piece in the series is from Fabian Cannizzo. Drawing from his research in Australia, he explores performance management criteria, motivational […]
Book Review: The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us by Nicholas Carr
In The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us, Nicholas Carr expands upon his prior examination of the internet’s impact upon the workings of the human mind by turning his attention to the implications of wider processes of automation. As Carr’s nuanced approach communicates caution without positing either a fully utopian or dystopian view of technological advances, Audrey Borowski praises […]
Five Minutes with Lambert Heller: “Do we need an open operating system of science?”
Publishing companies such as Elsevier are facing increasing criticism from scientists. And yet they do not only pursue antiquated models such as traditional journals – they are also working towards creating tomorrow’s “operating system of science”. For Lambert Heller the essential question is whether science will be capable of developing open alternatives to such a system. This is an English version […]
A European Twitter sphere? What tweets on the Greek bailout say about how Europeans interact online.
To what extent does twitter provide a platform for the emergence of a European public sphere? Max Hänska and Stefan Bauchowitz outline preliminary results from a study on the use of twitter by Europeans during the negotiations that produced the provisional agreement on a third bailout programme for Greece in July. They write that there is some clear evidence of […]