Dr. Sarah Olive: To research, or not to research? Some dilemmas of insider-outsider research on Shakespeare in South East/East Asian higher education

Sarah Olive is a Lecturer in English in Education at the University of York, where she is a member of the York Asia Research Network. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her monograph Shakespeare Valued: education policy and pedagogy, 1989-2009 was published by Intellect in 2015.   I…

Reflections on ‘Breaking our Silences on the Neoliberal Academy’ Workshop

Poster by Chloe Parkes On 26th October 2016, PhD students at Warwick University organised a workshop entitled 'Breaking Our Silences on the Neoliberal Academy'. In this blog post,  organisers  Elizabeth Ablett, Heather Griffiths and Kate Mahoney reflect on what PhD students everywhere can learn from the discussions. As PhD students, we often hear the refrain…

William Outhwaite, Newcastle University

1) What/Who inspired you to become a researcher in the first place? This was more or less automatic, with a heavy dose of luck, as I moved from my undergraduate degree to an MA and then PhD. For my MA I chose to go from Oxford to Sociology at Sussex, rather than doing more philosophy…

Rob MacDonald, Teesside University

"An Accidental Sociologist"  Rob discusses with Katy in this short podcast the joy, connection and frustrations of research. Including how reading a sociologists words in a newspaper inspired him and the advice he'd give to a researcher starting out today. Twitter: @RFMacDonald  Tees Research Repository For those with accessibility issues, a transcript can be downloaded…

Les Back: Scholarly Life and the University in Ruins

At the 2015 Autumn Postgraduate forum event on The Making of the Sociological Researcher, Les Back gave this thought provoking keynote. He has kindly agreed to share the text in full in addition to the podcast of his talk which can be found below.   Ros Gill has argued that the neo-liberal university, with its…