Why This Is Hell

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CALL FOR PAPERS: “The Evolution of Research: Adapting to Survive in the Changing World?”

Canterbury Christ Church University Postgraduate 10th Annual Conference

Friday 17th June 2011, 9.30am – 4.30pm

The CCCU Post Graduate Research Association Annual Conference has attracted greater interest and wider academic attention year upon year and for the first time proudly invites papers and attendees from a national demographic. In keeping with this organic evolution, papers are welcomed on the theme “The Evolution of Research.” The aim of this conference is to encourage post graduate students of an interdisciplinary range to present their research based on this theme to an audience of fellow academics, in a comfortable environment for debate.

The theme “The Evolution of Research: Adapting to Survive in the Changing World?” has been selected because as post graduate researchers we are in a climate whereby we inevitably have to adapt our research ideas and approaches to the changing world around us. These recurrent changes to the world affect us from the levels of technology right through to government policies regarding universities, alongside institutional and external pressures upon the very nature of research.

Papers are welcomed from all disciplines of research; to help you interpret the theme of this conference we have provided topic areas intended to help guide your ideas (below), but you are not restricted by these topics or the guidelines we offer within them. Poster presentations are also welcome. Please adapt these topics as you see fit, but should you have any questions or need clarification, please contact us. If you would like to present at the conference please follow the guidelines for applications; here you can also find more information regarding the conference.

( POTENTIAL TOPICS OF INTEREST )

So last night, whilst insufficiently binge-drinking, I was reflecting on the role of programme leader and how at some point I as likely to have to take the role on again. I'm not convinced that timetabling, checking registers, and giving extensions are academic jobs, or, if we are being paid to teach and research, I don't think it's an effective use of resources. (I leave to one side the notion that a third of our time is thought to be administration.) In addition to this the logic of whatever DRAM is called now - devolving the visibility of budgets as far down the foodchain as possible, and at Bucks that was meant to be the programme before they hastily retreated - it might include number crunching. In return for this, you are given teaching remission equivalent to one day a week. My theory is that I would therefore only spend a day a week doing so.

As I said last night, if I wanted a job where I had to take work home and work in the evenings and weekends, I would have become an accountant like my dad.

Good news - the 7000 word article only needed to be 4000 words. It didn't all get written yesterday - too much prevarication and discussion of biscuits - but the first half between 5 and 7 and 12 and 1. At this rate I should finish it before the deadline - although I need to rewatch The Man Who Fell to Earth again and insert more of the film into the article. Chopping the thing into 400 word chunks seems to work - I finally followed advice I give the kids...

2389 / 4000 words. 60% done!

Time for a December to-do list:

1. read and comment on article for journal
   
2. write and deliver six five lectures
   
3. mark thirty-five two horror essays Two got separated and need to be done. Darm
   
4. second mark ten audiences essays
   
5. write and deliver seminar paper
   
6. write chapter on The Man Who Fell to Earth
   
7. write chapter proposal for book project
   
8. read book and watch two films for adaptations project
   
9. write a chapter of seventies book
   

"The Faculty of Health and Social Care is holding a one day KT conference"

Knobbly Thighs?
Ketamine Transportation?
Kantian Theology?
Kristevan Theory?




I know really. I don't need to be told

... I learned from Doctor Who. And sf more generally.

I appear to be gaining a reputation for asking pointed questions. I've realised this before, as when I managed to put down a senior academic by noting the similarities between their paper and something television critic wrote nearly forty years ago - but I'm intrigued by the mismatch between the perceived value of my opinion by myself and by others.

This came back to me over an incident this week in which someone stated that they were getting annoyed, and I had to struggle to see this as a result, rather than a challenge for further action. Getting annoyed? I should push a litte further...

I must stop shaking beehives.


A public reflection on this (Facebook status) produced a response from someone who I've seen deliver a number of papers, in particular one in which spaceships were described as phallic or vaginal (with the Enterprise being an interesting liminal case). That seven word summary obviously doesn't do the paper justice, but the other liminal case I could think of was the TARDIS. Clearly it is phallic as it is a cuboid (...), but on the other hand its interiority makes it vaginal. I was given no answer at the time. And apparently scored a point. I can't remember this being deliberate.

Then this morning I remembered a forgotten umbrella. In Spurs, Derrida writes about images of feminity (as truth, modesty, as withdrawing from the light) and invokes a line in Nietzsche's unpublished manuscripts, "I have forgotten my umbrella." On the one hand, in its folded form, the umbrella is phallic, on the other, the opened state is a concave shape or cup.

There's an article in that.

I can't see me writing it, mind.

The second article idea of the week - or rather the first, as it sprang into mind last Friday - came to me in a coffee bar in Whitstable; reading through The Seventies Now I came across mention of a trope that echoes something in a contemporary British writer, and which again is to be found in Derrida (in Disseminations). This one I may write.

Two Derridean articles in one week, and that's before we deal with his "The Law of Genre". There may be a book in it.

I hope not.

PHD comic: 'Vacation v. Stress'

(Not that I take vacations....)