William Pannapacker has published, over the last several years, a number of widely influential pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education and, this past week, in Slate, criticizing the ethics and economics of graduate programs in the humanities. His most widely quoted take-away point, for would-be Ph.D. students, is: if you don’t have private funds to support you both during and after graduate school, just don’t go.
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September 2013
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Recent Posts
- It's done!
- It's over!
- A sad goodbye
- Cautionary tales
- Marginalised in PhD land « The Thesis Whisperer
- From a workmate: liminality
- The Path Forward: The Future of Graduate Education in the United States
- Amanda Krauss -- Guest Post: How College Died - Worst Professor Ever
- Careers for PhDs beyond academia | Money | The Guardian
- Lonely PhD student? Just log in
My list pages
Presently reading...
Claire Aitchison, Barbara Kamler, Alison Lee: Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond
Penny Tinkler and Carolyn Jackson: The Doctoral Examination Process
Heavily weighted toward viva, but useful chapters. Very nicely presented to limit mystification of process.Malcolm Ashmore: The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
deep, man.Allaine Cerwonka: Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork
Fascinating insight into the processs of a PhD, plus interesting theoretical insights from an ethnographerDavid Boud and Alison Lee (eds): Changing Practices of Doctoral Education
Excellent and useful collection of essays (****)Annette Markham and Nancy Baym: Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method
Interesting structure to this book. Each chapter consists of an article, followed by a response, followed by a second response from the author. So it really is a conversation. (****)Barbara Kamler & Pat Thomson: Helping Doctoral Students Write:: Pedagogies For Supervision
Best. Book. Yet. Bloody Brilliant. Combines pedagogical thinking, post-structuralist ideas about writing/identity and practical advice (*****)Carolyn Ellis: The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography (Ethnographic Alternatives Book Series)
Better than I'd thought it would be. Ellis isn't a skilled novelist but she is a storyteller and has created a workmanlike and occasionally absorbing book that describes autoethnography by doing it. But didactic nature of subject gets in the way. (***)Mary Chayko: Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age
Excellent overview that puts internet communities into the context of both our everyday and less usual relationships (*****)Laurel Richardson: Fields of Play: (Constructing an Academic Life)
Interesting retrospective by Richardson over her academic careeer, using the writing she has done to give the perspective. Good exemplars of reflective writing and interesting as a history of the difficulty faced by a qualitative researcher as her discipline developed in the second half of the 20th century. (***)Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs: Uses of Blogs (Digital Formations)
Several useful chapters (eg Halvais) including Toril Mortenson reflecting on her earlier seminal article (***)Ruth Behar: The Vulnerable Observer : Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart
Some wonderful essays. The Girl in the Cast is my favourite, and I also liked Anthropology that Breaks your heart. (****)Annette N. Markham: Life Online: Researching real experience in virtual space
(*****)Christine Hine (ed): Virtual Methods
Variable contributions, some not well-thought through. But many are cutting-edge and all seem to have at least one interesting insight for me. (****)Tara Brabazon: Digital Hemlock: Internet Education and the Poisoning of Teaching
Tara's book is largely a rant, and an ill-informed one from my end of time. This is pre-Web2.0, of course. But her chapter on virtual communities may be useful. (**)- Alison Lee and Carolyn Williams: Forged in Fire
Seminal starting point for the framing of PhD as performance. (*****) - Lesley Johnson, Lee & Green: The PhD and the autonomous self: Gender, rationality and postgraduate pedagogy
More about the performance of PhD (****) - David Boud and Alison Lee: 'Peer learning' as pedagogic discourse for research education
Christopher Hart: Doing a Literature Review : Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination
Etienne Wenger: Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity
Norman K. Denzin & Yvonna S. Lincoln: Handbook of Qualitative Research
Chapters 1,- Ruth Neumann, 2003: The Doctoral Education Experience: Diversity and Complexity
www.dest.gov.au/sectors/higher_education/publications_resources/profiles/doctoral_education_experience.htm (****)
Useful sites
- Aust Govt Higher ed publications and resources main page
- DDOGS pages
- RCCS: Book Reviews Index (updated monthly)
- Postgraduate research studies handbook - Future postgraduate - The University of Sydney
- Fibreculture Journal
- Sydney doctoral students by faculty
- Quality in Postgraduate Research
- University of Sydney Library - Home Page
- Sociological Research Online - Home Page
- WebSurveyMethodology
Important files
Categories
- blogs/blogging (20)
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- Communities of Practice (3)
- Completion (3)
- cyberpsych/embodiment/performance (15)
- examination/submission (4)
- history (4)
- liminality (10)
- mutual support (3)
- my articles, presentations etc (12)
- narrative theory (2)
- Nature of PhD (59)
- online ethnography (19)
- PG/research pedagogy (32)
- PhD in Aus (background) (3)
- power/supervision (9)
- practical matters (39)
- presentations (1)
- reflexivity (19)
- Social practice (1)
- Sydney stuff (12)
- tangential but interesting (18)
- Thesis structure (7)
- Writing issues (21)