The Emerging Scholars Blog

On the road to listen to* Faculty & Student/Post-Doc’s at a major research university discuss Trusting in the Lord in a Secular Workplace or Job Security in Academia over lunch, description below.  If you were present for the conversation, what would you share?  Some of my thoughts later, gotta run. …

Proverbs 3:5 and Psalm 18:2 speak to the importance of trusting in the Lord in times of trial.  The recent Veritas Forum topic on truth and academia and the tragedy at the University of Alabama-Huntsville over a tenure denial bring up the important question as to whether trust in the Lord can give meaning, comfort, and contentment in the remorselessly results-driven academic profession.  Does (and should) faith make a difference while facing the zero-sum game of tenure review, funding applications, the supervision/mentoring of graduate students, and/or running a lab, particularly in a period of economic recession?

*and participate in as appropriate :-)

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1. New online journal for student research: The Chronicle reports on Student Pulse, a new online journal for student research. Some good points from the Chronicle’s commenters about copyright and usage issues, but still an interesting and inspiring idea for sharing early academic work.

2.  Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally (Natalie Angier, NY Times, February 1, 2010).  Leaning forward with anticipation regarding what we might learn from the immensely popular field called embodied cognition or reclining (even if only a little bit) and giving it a quizzical look?

3.   Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching (David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 24, 2010). Any suggestions or encouraging case studies to share?

4.  Teaching Matters: Rethinking the Hybrid Course (Steve Fox, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 2010).  What do you think of Fox’s suggestions regarding Hybrid courses?  Have you taken or taught any Hybrid courses?  What recommendations would you add, in particular with regard to the management of a classroom blog?  Any encouraging case studies to share?

Books

5. “The most important person in the world”: I (Mike) was not familiar with the HeLa cell line until I read Dwight Garner’s NYTimes review of the new book by Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Ms. Lacks, an uneducated, African American Virginia tobacco farmer who died of cervical cancer at the age of 31, contributed the famously immortal cells that have

helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization,” Ms. Skloot writes. HeLa cells were used to learn how nuclear bombs affect humans, and to study herpes, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS. They were sent up in the first space missions, to see what becomes of human cells in zero gravity.

The problem? Ms. Lacks never gave permission for her cells to be used for scientific experiments, and researchers continued to draw samples from her descendants without explaining why, one part of the tragic legacy of American medical treatment of African Americans. From Garner’s review:

As one of Mrs. Lacks’s sons says: “She’s the most important person in the world, and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

This looks like an important – and discussion-provoking – book.

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1. Alan Jacobs’ Grad School Thoughts: Should you go to grad school? “Probably not,” writes Alan Jacobs, Wheaton English professor and author of Original Sin, The Narnian, A Theology of Reading, and many other excellent things.  But if you insist, he’s got some good advice. (Also check out Alan’s contribution to our ESN article, “Why Get a PhD in the Humanities?”)

2.  James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom ties for OUR MOST AUDACIOUS CLAIM: THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK OF THE YEAR with Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft:  An Inquiry Into the Value of Work in Best Books of 2009 Part I by Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds Bookstore.  Take a few minutes to review the list, keep an eye out for two more parts going up next week, and let us know what books you’re interested in discussing this year.

3.  In The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (W.W. Norton, 2010), Louis “Menand asks four questions: Why is it so hard to create a general-education curriculum? Why have the humanities undergone a crisis of legitimacy? Why has ‘interdisciplinarity’ been seen—and ultimately failed—as a magic wand? Why do professors share the same politics?” — Oxygenating Academe: The Unpublic Intellectual (By Karen J. Winkler, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10, 2010)

4.  ‘Baby Einstein’ Founder Goes to Court (By Tamar Lewin, NY Times, January 12, 2010):  Raises the question of access to and reproducibility of research in relationship to marketing and consumer concerns.  Do you know anyone who watched or advocated Baby Einstein?

5. Proof (or at least Evidence) That Mentoring Matters (by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed): A study presented the American Economic Association’s annual meeting found that mentoring had a significant impact on the number of grants and publications for female economists.

Your Mind Matters

In the section entitled thinking God’s thoughts, John Stott argues Psalm 19:1-4 and Romans 1:18-21

refer to God’s self-revelation through the created order.  Although it is a proclamation without speech, a voice without words, yet as a result of it all men to some degree “know God.”  This assumed ability of man to read what God has written in the universe is extremely important.  All scientific research depends upon it, upon a correspondence between the character of what is being investigated and the mind of the investigator.  This correspondence is rationality. Man is able to comprehend the processes of nature.  They are not mysterious.  They are logically explicable in terms of cause and effect.  Christians believe that this common rationality between man’s mind and observable phenomena is due to the Creator who has expressed his mind in both.  As a result, in the astronomer Kepler’s famous words, men can “think God’s thoughts after him.” — Your Mind Matters, p.28

Do you agree?  Can human beings think God’s thoughts after him? Is this the basis of science and possibly even the use of the mind in general?  Is that how you approach decision making, research, teaching, and writing?

Let’s begin chatting. … In a few days I’ll throw out a couple more questions from the Chapter 2.

In our next Emerging Scholars Review, we’re planning on highlighting accomplishments of ESN members, as a way of recognizing your personal achievements and encouraging other ESN members who are still in the middle of their degree, research project, or tenure process. Read the rest of this entry »

Questions inspired by and related to You’ve Read the Headlines. Now, Quick, Read the Book (by Motoko Rich, NY Times, 3/29/2009, posted at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/books/30quic.html)

Questions: 

1. How does this necessity/predisposition for more, deeper material ASAP affect popular writing by academics and academic publishing in cutting edge fields of technology?  
2. Are there particular topics, themes, fields which deserve (possibly even demand) a longer time frame for consideration during the writing process, the community of scholars, and the wider public? 

Quote from the article:

“People can’t wait a year to get timely information on critical subjects,” said Amy Neidlinger, associate publisher of FT Press. “Especially today it’s dated 10 minutes after you’ve just received the first installation.”

Of course many publishers and authors suggest that taking time to produce a reflective work is what books are about, and that they should not succumb to the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle.

Read the rest of this entry »

You might remember various Technology in Higher Education posts exploring:

“Creepy Treehouse”? Friending Your Professors or Students

New Technology and Academic Research
 
Who do you trust? Google and information gathering

What Tools Do You Use?

Should we not leave Twitter out as a tool for a new generation of academic conversation? A brief piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on how Ed Techie, an education blogger, finds On Twitter, Academic Debates Fall Short.  Note:  Comments on the The Chronicle of Higher Education post, include suggestions for sharpening the use of Twitter for such excercises. Read all about it (and more) on Ed Techie’s blog.

What do you think of Twitter as a tool for educational conversation AND creating virality in education?  Something you’d be interested in trying w/ESN?

ESN member Madelaine Hron, assistant professor in the Department of English and Film at Wilfrid Lauriern University (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), just announced the release of Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature & Culture (University of Toronto Press, February 12, 2009).

The book cover, the book title, and previous conversations with the author (extending back to her 2004-2005 post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University), led me to ask her whether she would be willing to share about her work with ESN.  Madelaine quickly responded by passing along the below summary and commenting that she would be happy to answer any questions folks may have regarding her new book. So if you have questions, post them.  Also, if you’d have interest in an on-line ESN reading group, let me know.  Note to faculty:  you might consider ordering it as an academic resource.

Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature & Culture

In the post–Cold War, post–9/11 era, the immigrant experience has changed dramatically. Despite the recent successes of immigrant and world literatures, there has been little scholarship on how the hardships of immigration are conveyed in immigrant narratives. Translating Pain fills this gap by examining literature from Muslim North Africa, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe to reveal the representation of immigrant suffering in fiction.

Applying immigrant psychology to literary analysis, Madelaine Hron examines the ways in which different forms of physical and psychological pain are expressed in a wide variety of texts. She juxtaposes post-colonial and post-communist concerns about immigration, and contrasts Muslim world views with those of Caribbean creolité and post–Cold War ethics. Demonstrating how pain is translated into literature, she explores the ways in which it also shapes narrative, culture, history, and politics.

A compelling and accessible study, Translating Pain is a groundbreaking work of literary and postcolonial studies. Read the rest of this entry »

Inside Higher Ed spoke with anthropologists at a “Mothering (in) the Field” panel discussion at the recent American Anthropological Association annual meeting. The topic: how do they conduct their fieldwork and be mothers at the same time? It’s an interesting article, with lots of great quotes.

So, how do you balance your research commitments with your commitments as a mother or father?

Tom’s recent post about online materials got me to think about tools to organize that research.

With the glut of information now available, what do you use to keep it all organized?

I’ll start. First, a disclaimer: I use a Mac, and I think all of the tools I use are Mac-specific. Here are the tools that I use:

• For news and RSS feeds, I use NetNewsWire.
• For research material (quotes, docs, notes, etc.), DEVONthink Pro.
• For larger writing projects, Scrivener.
• To keep track of my library, Books.
• To keep track of people, organizations, to-do items, projects, etc., Daylite.

So, what tools do you use?