The Emerging Impact Landscape (Wade Kelly)

White Night Melbourne 2018 | Photo by Wade Kelly
Shared via Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

There’s considerable confusion about what ‘impact’ is, and this is no surprise given that it’s a term that’s used for so many things in the contemporary research space.

For my research, I’ve had many, many conversations with people across higher education in Australia and Canada at all career levels (graduate researchers, Early Career Researchers, Mid Career Researchers). Alongside the confusion about what impact is is what impact means (and will mean) to academics.

The following primer is a brief history of the impact landscape, an exploration of some of the trends in higher education, and some things to consider as you start your ‘impact journey.’

So, let’s start by clarifying some of the many meanings of impact. I find it easiest to consider impact as happening either inside (internal) or outside (external) of academia.

How cups of coffee lead to world leading research (Greg Dingle and Sam Grover)

La Trobe Sports Park | Photo courtesy of La Trobe University

What is it about a cup of coffee that can lead to a $48,000 research grant and world leading research?

The answer is that if that coffee is had at a university Early Career Researcher (ECR) event then, more likely than not, emerging researchers will be also talking for the first time with other researchers from outside their discipline where they have exchanged ideas and realised the linkages that exist between their seemingly disparate research interests.

The scenario described above actually happened in October 2015 when we – Dr Samantha Grover and Dr Greg Dingle – were chatting between sessions at the La Trobe University ECR Network Conference in the John Scott Meeting House.

We were there to give presentations on our latest research and explore the potential for collaborating with researchers from outside our disciplines. Sam is a soil scientist, and Greg is a social scientist specialising in sport management. In addition, Greg thinks that the opportunity to have a free lunch should never be missed!

Showing up (Rachel Loney-Howes)

This article, written by La Trobe University PhD alumna Rachel Loney-Howes, is cross-posted from the University of Wollongong Careers blog. It is an excellent example of the importance of building your profile and reputation as a scholar and colleague from early in your career. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Photo by Fabian Gieske | unsplash.com

In recent years, career development researchers have focused on the role of chance and luck in career development. They’ve found that, although on reflection we have a tendency to ‘reframe’ our career success in terms of luck, there are certain behaviours and attitudes that contribute to taking advantage of ‘chance’ events. Dr Rachel Loney-Howes a Lecturer from the School of Health and Society here at UOW was ‘lucky’ enough to start an ongoing academic position 6 months after her PhD (yes – 6 months!) In this blog post, she talks about one of the behaviours that helped make that happen.

Using rewards to help you achieve your writing goals (James Burford)

Photo by Jennifer Pallian | unsplash.com

As a lecturer in the RED team, I facilitate learning opportunities for La Trobe’s researcher community. Across these workshops we often touch on one of my favourite topics: rewards, and how they can be helpful for researchers who are trying to motivate themselves to achieve writing goals.

Writing is often a lengthy process for researchers. Motivation can sag as the hours turn to days and the days tick over into months. Added to this picture are the brain bending, shoulder crunching and finger cracking realities of many hours spent at a keyboard trying to get words on a page. It can be exhausting work on all levels, which makes pushing on so difficult sometimes. This is where rewards (some people call them power ups), combined with appropriate planning can be so useful for researchers. Some positive reinforcement can be a really valuable way of sustaining motivation throughout the long duration of a research project.

Spaces that matter for graduate researchers (James Burford)

Given that this post is all about the spaces and places research is conducted in, let me start by describing the space I currently find myself in. I am clicking the ‘publish’ button on this post while sitting in a library at Thammasat University in Pathumthani, a province in the northern part of the Bangkok metropolitan area. The library I have been working in this morning is possibly the coolest place on campus, which is important given that the temperature outside is hovering around 40 degrees celsius! This library is named after Puey Ungphakorn, the former Rector of Thammasat University. Professor Puey is an important figure in Thai history. He resigned his rectorship (what we might call vice chancellorship in Australia) in protest following a massacre of university students on campus in 1976 and subsequently fled Thailand for his own safety, ultimately dying overseas. The ground floor of the library features an exhibition about Professor Puey’s life and service, and nearby to here is a memorial to those killed in the 1976 massacre. Sitting in this library, I find myself thinking about the uneasy social space that universities often occupy and the risks that have been taken to defend universities as spaces for critical and creative thinking.

Reflections on HDR supervision: The graduate student experience

Ebony Monson (School of Life Sciences) and Allira Hanczakowski (HuSS) participated in the supervision panel convened by Jamie Burford during our first graduate researcher orientation of 2019. 

The reflections from all participants in this panel were thought-provoking and reflected the diverse ways that supervision occurs across the campus. Throughout this conversation it became clear that there is no one ‘perfect’ model for arranging supervision. It is always a complex negotiation between all the players involved and is responsive to the kind of knowledge that is being produced.

Ebony and Allira generously contributed to this post for us, based on their panel notes.
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Jamie: Could you please introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about your research project?

Ebony: My name is Ebony Monson and I’m currently beginning the third year of my PhD in the School of Life Sciences. My research focuses on looking for novel mechanisms that drive an immune response to viral infections, with the hope that teasing apart the complexity of an effective immune response will allow the creation of novel anti-viral treatments to combat in-curable viral infections. I currently have 1 primary supervisor (Dr Karla Helbig) and 2 co-supervisors. I also have 2 external panel members who have an input at my progress panel meetings.

Learning about conferences by organising a conference (Karen Strojek)

This post is cross-posted from the academic conferences blog Conference Inference, with kind permission. Thanks for sharing your experiences of conference organising with us, Karen! View original post 

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 “The question of “What should I do at a conference” might be answered with a question, “What kind of researcher do I want to be”? …Once students understand the kinds of values they hold as researchers, they can think with greater clarity about how to enact themselves as researchers at conferences” – James Burford, Conference Inference Blog. 

Every year, La Trobe University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HUSS) runs a two-day interdisciplinary conference at which Masters and PhD students present their research to their peers and to academic staff. For many early-stage postgraduate students, this is their first experience of participating in an academic conference. Some approach their first solo performance in a state of high nervousness but, once it is done, most can relax into spectatorhood and many leave with positive memories. In this post I reflect on my experience of being on the organising team for the HUSS HDR 2018 Conference.

Jamie (from the RED team) has already posed some thought-provoking questions at La Trobe conference preparation workshops that I have attended in the past. He addresses the practical what-do-I-do questions but also invites us to be thoughtful about another important question: “What kind of researcher do I want to be?” The ensuing questions of how action might contribute to being and how being is enacted can be hard to disentangle but engaging with them shifts attention to what goes on outside the solo performer’s spotlight. What kind of researcher do we, students, want to be to whom, and how might we achieve it?

How uncertainty and doubt are friends of your research writing (John Hannon)

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During my post-graduate research I needed structure. First, I used goals, theories and methods to structure a space for the exploration of knowledge, then this gradually filled with things that count: progress reports, due dates, prescribed word lengths, abstracts, submissions to conferences, journals and grant bodies. What started as a personal program became populated with institutions, peers, academic traditions and disciplinary cultures. This was my introduction to the academic game, in which researchers have a stake and play by a set of rules. The game offers graduate researchers and academics, both employed or underemployed, a (competitive) position in a field of knowledge, that is, a space of certainty. You are really there when you forget about playing and the game is taken as doxa, the way things are.

 As one who came late to the game, a late ECR, I had no time to lose and plugged in, conferencing, networking, and aiming to produce a little more than the required annual output. Playing the game offered me clarity and certainty that was useful in the fast introductions that are a currency of the academic world.

"But you don't look autistic...": Unmasking Autistic representation in academia (Elizabeth Radulski)

La Trobe University Representatives attend the Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre Strategic Plan Launch on January 31 2019. The new strategic plan strives, in part, to increase Autistic representation in academia and research. 

Pictured L-R: OTARC Director Professor Cheryl Dissanayake, PhD Candidate Beth Radulski, Chair & Former Chancellor Sylvia Walton, Chancellor Richard Larkin, Strategic Planner Jan Ferguson, and Vice-Chancellor John Dewar. Photo courtesy of La Trobe University.

On 17 August 2016, La Trobe staff and students gathered in the campus Agora to protest the impending deportation of PhD candidate Sarmin Sayeed, whose family was declined Australian Permanent Residency. The reason: Their son’s Autism status. Sayeed’s visa denial exemplifies the Medical Model of disability, which understands Autism as a disease and developmental disorder—a barrier to ‘normal’ functioning. Fortunately, following public outcry over disability discrimination, Sayeed’s family was granted their visa, and allowed to stay.

I attended this protest as a proud La Trobe student and immigrant myself.

I was also there (in secret) as an Autistic person.

Nearly three years on, I am proudly ‘out’ as Autistic, and conducting a PhD exploring the overt socio-political and economic discrimination experienced by many Autistic people, alongside the social drivers which lead many of us to conceal our Autism status.

Academic productivity tips for 2019 (Lauren Gawne)

We may be into the third month of the year already - gasp! - but we can look forward to at least nine months of charged up progress! 

This post, bursting with productivity apps and tips, is cross-posted from Lauren Gawne's blog Superlinguo with kind permission. She published this just as she was starting a year's leave. Thanks for sharing your strategies with us, Lauren! View original post.

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I'm not really into the New Year's Resolutions thing, but a few conversations over my final few weeks at work made me realise that there are a few things I do to make my work life a bit easier that other people don't know about.

Most of it is about filtering out noise. Whether that means you get more done, or just get through a day with less distraction, it just depends on what you want in life.

I thought I’d share some of them here - maybe I’ll need to remind myself when I get back to work in 2020…

You're the boss of your Inbox

Be ruthless about unsubscribing from lists and events that are no longer relevant. For everything else, set up filters. I have a filter for blog stuff, one for the podcast, another for mailing lists that aren't so important I need to see them immediately (but I do like to check them). I have a boss who gets CC'd into so many things that he doesn't necessarily need to act on but should at least see or know about that he filters them off to a separate folder. This way, he doesn't miss important things that he does have to actually think about.