All entries for February 2019

Raising Local Visibility

In the past few weeks I’ve been engaged in a bit more of marketing push for Exchanges, largely because I continue to be acutely aware that our visibility across even Warwick leaves something to be desired. I confess, I’ve held back a little bit on promoting Exchanges within Warwick, due to our desire to increasingly ‘consciously uncouple’ the journal from the original ‘local brand’, and to try and attract more manuscripts from external scholars. This has worked to a degree, and I continue to be delighted each time I receive a new submission from a scholar globally. That said, one of our core strengths has always been some truly excellent, reflexive and critical papers from our ‘local’ scholars here in Coventry. Hence, to try and refresh this awareness locally I’ve recently sent out mailshots to key people across campus, in an effort to get some of our promotional literature and call for papers in front of post-graduate and early career researchers alike. If you’re the recipient of one of our promotional packs, including free gift, do let me know if you’d like to know more.

Part of this marketing too has been engendered through meeting significant campus figures. I met last week with Sandy Sparks, a key figure in Warwick’s researcher professional development programme. Sandy’s been a supporter of Exchanges right from the very start, and I was delighted to finally get the chance in her busy schedule to talk about the current direction of the journal. I know too that Sandy’s got the ear of many senior researchers across campus, so I couldn’t wish for a better informed or gracious advocate for the title.

Further afield too, I had the chance a couple of weeks ago to meet with visiting Monash University’s International Partnerships Manager Allan Mahler. Principally we were talking about ways in which their university can help, support and recognise the contribution made by my excellent Monash editors, but the conversation diverged to ways in which Monash can do more to raise the visibility of Exchanges among their research communities. I know from personal experience in recent weeks that raising awareness even for a part-time member of staff can take a lot of time out of the available work time. For my editors, who are contributing to the journal alongside their regular studies and employment, I can only imagine how challenging it can be! That many of them still make herculean efforts to raise awareness of the title for potential authors, readers and reviewers makes me so damned proud I could glow!

We’re fortunate that Monash and Warwick, though their University Alliance, have such strong links, and I’m hopeful my discussions with Allan will bear tangible fruit as this year goes on. If nothing else, I’ve increased the awareness of the Alliance of this locus of ongoing, scholarly and impactful collaboration between our two universities. In time, I hope I’ll be able to repeat this conversation with partnership managers from our other global research partner institutions.

The question remains, will all this effort actually increase the readership, author submissions and regular reviewers? I can’t say for sure yet. I’ll certainly continue to take every opportunity I can to promote Exchanges and our vital mission to champion publication and facilitate contributions to scholarly discourse from early career and post-graduate researchers!

Gareth Johnson : 26 Feb 2019 17:36 |  Tags: Alliance Awareness Ecr Marketing Monash Pgr Promotion University Warwick |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Some Very Special Issues

Regular readers of this editorial blog will recall I mentioned we’d been approached to host two special issues. Well I can happily confirm these are both going ahead. The first will be drawing on papers from the Bites Here and There conference, hosted here at Warwick last November. If all the interested authors who’ve submitted abstracts for my interest produce papers, we’ll have a bumper special issue towards the end of 2019, early 2020 with around 28 papers in it. Even if only get half of these as publishable manuscripts, I think it’ll still make for a really excellent edition of the journal. The other special issue will be drawing on the Utopia, Dystopia and Climate Change Conference, being held in sunny Prato, Italy this July. There’s the potential for as many papers (if not more) to come out of this conference, which makes me doubly excited that Exchanges has such a valuable part to play in facilitating scholarly and interdisciplinary discourse.

Okay, I’m also more than a little excited because I’ve been invited to speak at a pre-conference panel about Exchanges and scholar-led publishing, which means I’ll get to experience some of the conference first hand. It’ll also mean I get to speak with many of the potential authors about their publication plans too, an opportunity something I always value.

Needless to say, with these publications coming in alongside our regular submissions and issues, it looks like being a busy couple of years for Exchanges!

Gareth Johnson : 21 Feb 2019 16:13 |  Tags: Cannibalism Change Climate Issues Special |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Effective Scholarly Communication – Workshopping the Issues for PGRs

Effective communication is at the heart of everything we do as scholars. This is was why I was delighted last week to spend three hours running a workshop entitled Effective Scholarly Communication[1] for a post-graduate researcher audience. I’m lucky, because improving my own communication has always been an intrinsic aspect of my professional life. Partly, this is because I’ve benefited from quite a varied career trajectory, having been a participative interactive storyteller since before I was a teenager[2], and in the past decade a prolific produser[3] creator of videos and podcasts. That’s before we come to my doctoral studies specialising in emerging scholarly communication practices and the few hundred articles, reviews, chapters, reports, editorials and conference papers I’ve produced during my career(s)[4]. Despite, technically, currently being an early career researcher myself, I've successfully drawn on these scholarly and performance experiences to deliver communication workshops to professionals, scholars and the public alike for many years.

Consequently, when I was invited last August to put together a session for our Research Skills Programme (RSSP)[5] here at Warwick, I felt reliably confident in attempting to create an engaging three-hour workshop in this communicative domain. Or at least I was confident, when I originally pitched the session towards the tail end of a long hot summer. Pragmatically, finding the time to redevelop and enhance some of my earlier training into a bespoke and suitably polished researcher focussed session, absorbed rather more preparation time than I initially anticipated. Given researcher training isn’t my major focus here at Warwick, understandably this was perhaps an unsurprising conclusion to have reached.

As any experienced trainer will tell you, it’s a little difficult going in cold delivering a learning event to a new community for the first time. For myself, I wasn’t 100% sure what the intended audience would want, need or desire to get out of the workshop. I knew the kinds of material I’d have welcomed during my own doctoral training journey, but as noted, I’ve the benefit of being less a more mature scholar than many PhD candidates. Ideally, it would have been useful to get a group of PGRs together for a focus group some months ahead of the session, to workshop their skills needs more precisely[6]. Nevertheless, I toyed with making the entire session hands-on, being a kinaesthetic learner myself this would have been my personal learning preference. However, I really felt the session needed fleshing out with some elements of chalk-and-talk to provide illustrative and instructive context. I decided given the constraints of available workshop time that what would work best would be to offer the delegates a schmorgesborg of topics within the realms of written, verbal, non-verbal and digital academic communication. The intention being, no matter what delegates’ interests or personal learning expectations were, that ideally there’d be satisfactory learning elements for everyone.

Access the session slides via the image below, although without my narrative they might lose a certain clarity.

So it was that the Effective Scholarly Communication workshop version 1.0 received its premier performance last week to a, well, slightly smaller than was optimal audience. No matter! My teaching and public performance motto has long been ‘Just play the gig!’ Which means through embracing my customary passionate and entertaining teaching performance, hopefully I provided the handful of delegates with something useful to ponder, consider and reflect upon. I do feel structurally the low turnout worked against the desired delegate interaction levels I was hoping to engender. Certainly, I had to revise on the fly a number of the workshop elements as well, to accommodate for the low numbers. I’m not entirely convinced these rejigged versions quite delivered the learning outcomes for which I was aiming. The session was designed as much for the delegates to learn from one another’s varied practice and experience, as listen to the ‘great sage on the stage’. The low numbers, I personally believe, were detrimental to some of the value delegates received from their participation, which is regretful.

Nevertheless, from the delegates’ feedback, the workshop does seem to have been a very successful activity and they benefitted from their attendance. The worked exercises and interactivity came in for particular praise, which was deeply satisfying as a good workshop stands or falls on such activities. Undoubtedly, the degree of personal attention I was able to offer the audience likely contributed to their satisfaction too.

Like many academics, I remain somewhat of a perfectionist when it comes to my teaching and communicative practice, being rarely entirely satisfied with my materials and performance. I went into delivering this workshop fully aware that the original flavour, 1.0 version likely had some ‘fat’ which could have been judiciously trimmed, along with some contextual material which received insufficient prominence. Partly, this is a consequence of available preparation time, but it’s also a result of exposing the workshop to live, breathing, scholarly delegates for the first time. Hence, I’ve spent a couple of hours today looking through the delegate feedback, alongside my personal critique of the session, to identify what worked well, what didn’t, and where the session was lacking content. Good, solid, self-critical, reflexive practice in action, which will come in useful should this session be prepared for a second outing.

Naturally, the question forms in my thoughts: what next for this workshop? I’d originally planned to run the session twice within the RSSP 18/19, although I had to cancel the original November ’18 premier due to my pressing, more urgently in need of addressing, work commitments. Currently, there are no concrete plans to run the session again, although I based on the feedback I’d anticipate being asked to offer it in RSSP 19/20. That aside, I’ve had an outline approach to run the workshop (or elements) with the IAS’ Accolade training programme for our research fellows. Given the delegate numbers we get to those events, I think the challenge would be making the session coherent as I don’t think upwards of twenty delegates would make for a viable session[7].

With the training written, field-tested and subjected to a little peer review (thank you delegates!!), I’m sure evolving the next iteration will be faster, although I’ve a few more communication texts I’d like to read in preparation! Then there’s the 3.0 version and perhaps taking the show on the road to consider. Certainly, this is one workshop I’ll be able to deliver repeatedly, albeit with subtle and suitable enhancements.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the RSSP Student Careers and Skills team for their administrative support and commissioning the session. Also the netizens of the air-l@listserv.aoir.org list for sharing their insights. Finally, thanks to the PGR delegates who attended, shared, participated and engaged, I hope the session was of value!

Gareth Johnson : 12 Feb 2019 15:49 |  Tags: Academic Communication Ecr Pgr Reflexive Scholarly Training |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem