Anxious doctoral researchers can now call on a proliferation of advice books telling them how to produce their dissertations. This article analyzes some characteristics of this self-help genre, including the ways it produces an expert-novice relationship with readers, reduces dissertation writing to a series of linear steps, reveals hidden rules, and asserts a mix of … More On the failure of dissertation advice books
#OccupyHE. Axé.
“There is zero solidarity in a meritocracy, even a fake one, as the anthropologist Sarah Kendzior demonstrates in a recent series of hard-hitting articles on the adjunct situation. Just about everyone in academia believes that they were the smartest kid in their class, the one with the good grades and the awesome test scores. They believe, by … More Academy Fight Song
What is so awful about teaching beginning Spanish is not having the power to do anything interesting with it. If I were in power I would have innovative programs such as conversation partners outside of class, more structured grammar exercises, and greatly stepped-up cultural programming. But SLA is not my job or focus, either … … More I wanted to say it on Facebook, but they know me there
I have worked in others and only this university seems like such a rough neighborhood. The jackbooted bosses and the assembly line. Like the oilfield, I had thought to say, but I am not sure; it could be cruder and ruder. A recent study indicated that Louisiana was the worst state in the union for … More A few more things I say and know … and some phantasmagoria I have
Perhaps it is because of being from the west and meditating on the ocean. I like and have balance and calm, which is not laziness. People from New England are brash, loud, crass, immature, and anxious, so they have much harder lives than I do. Perhaps I have been on strike all these years, against … More …endless academic advice…
She has written me a letter. Another one she wrote, if I remember well, asked for donations for Katrina victims. Now I am to renew my MLA membership. Here is why: As we prepare for another MLA convention, which will take place in Chicago from 9 to 12 January 2014, I wanted to remind you … More Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal
Now I am coming up to the end of my second non-depressed month. I can see that part of not getting depressed is just mental health hygiene, as Clarissa says, and that includes, importantly, having resources for this and most importantly, knowing how not to internalize oppression. On the question of time, I now see … More Still more academic advice
Today I asked a Fulbright officer a question I wanted to ask over 20 years ago and got an even more positive answer than I had dreamed of getting then — had I dared to ask. I assumed that the problem I was having, that caused me to decline the Fulbright, was my problem, not … More Memories of underdevelopment
Is it? I like this old article on exceptionalism by Lund. “The most implacable Latin American appropriation of Euro- centrism is a center/periphery discourse known as civilization and barbarism (civilización y barbarie).” Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 