Proposals Accepted and International Antarctic Centre

Academic Proposals Accepted

I have some good academic news: I have been fortunate to have three proposals accepted in the last few weeks! I will explain how the process works for those not in academia. Usually, journal editors and conference organizers put out a "call for proposals" or "call for papers" (CFP) several months in advance of the publication or conference date. This CFP gives the specifications of what they are looking for and what they want submitted. The standard is to ask for a brief abstract and bio. The interested scholar then submits an abstract which addresses the topic and shows their particular analysis of it. This saves them from having to write a full-length paper which then might not get accepted. A blind peer-review panel (blind means they don't receive your name or bio attached to the abstract so they can be impartial) then reads all of the submissions and chooses which ones it wants to accept.

So, my best news is that I submitted an abstract for a special issue of a U.S. academic journal issue on science fiction and fantasy and was accepted! I also was given the comments from the blind peer-review panel and they were very positive and said my proposal was well-written and sounded very interesting. Now I have a few months to take the short abstract that I wrote and turn it into an actual, full-length article of academic quality good enough for publication. It will be reviewed again by the editors and if they have any corrections or changes they want made, I will have a chance to fix them and resubmit. Publishing is the name of the game in academia, especially nowadays with so much competition for jobs, so having my first proposal accepted is really exciting! And it is on my research topic too, which is even better.

Of the other two proposals accepted, one was for a feminist conference being held in Dunedin, New Zealand, at the end of the year. I will be presenting on the gender imbalance of Wikipedia editors (mostly high-school-age white males) and how various groups are trying to encourage other women to edit and contribute to Wikipedia through events like Storming Wikipedia. Considering how many of us use Wikipedia as a go-to reference, it is a pressing issue.

My other proposal was for an exclusive new-scholars conference for postgrads and early career researchers before the main Digital Humanities Conference we are going to in Sydney in a couple months. We aren't presenting papers, but we will be brainstorming before the conference on our digital humanities projects and what we want to work on together. It is designed to be an opportunity for a small group of us to network and share ideas and resources. It also comes with a small chunk of funding which will help cover my expenses getting to Australia. Double win!

Tutoring Adventures Continue

With only two tutoring weeks left, the number of students is dwindling fast. Assuming they wouldn't have read or finished Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, I prepared for more general discussion topics. This last week we discussed single-sex education and some of the essentialist arguments for it (girls and boys have different learning styles and needs). Single-sex education is a lot more common in NZ, coming from the British system, than I am used to, and one young man in each class had actually gone to a single-sex school. One liked it and the other didn't. The students had quite strong feelings against single-sex education, and I hope I helped them think a little more critically about education and the decisions they might face if they end up in charge of sending a child to school.

In my tutoring at the tutoring center, I had to be observed by one of my bosses to see how I was doing (all of my peers did too). I don't remember the last time I was observed in a job situation, and it was a bit uncomfortable. She said I did fine but still had some things that I could do better. You definitely are a lot more aware of what you are saying when someone is taking notes.

We also had additional training on the differences between the students at the Education campus and the main campus (the School of Education only recently merged with the University for budget reasons, but their student demographics are noticeably different), as well as the different philosophies. The Education lecturers emphasize the bicultural aspects of New Zealand and use Maori words quite often in their assignments and lectures. Apparently, the government has a goal of a bicultural, bilingual country by 2040. I think the South Island will have more difficulty reaching this goal since there are significantly fewer Maori present.

International Antarctic Centre

Since our buy-one-get-one-free coupon to the famous International Antarctic Centre was about to expire, we finally visited it. It had a lot of interactive things and quite interesting information on all of the research going on down there, as well as the harsh living conditions. I froze in the simulated Antarctic storm, enjoyed the penguin feeding, rode on a Hagglunds all-terrain vehicle up hills at 26 degrees and through water that went halfway up my door, watched some of the HD film of the beautiful landscapes, and got splashed a lot in the 4-D movie experience.

Training, Visiting Scholars, Chinese New Year's, and Macbeth

Yesterday we went blueberry-picking on one of the farms about 25 minutes drive away. It was quite enjoyable and the berries are tasty. D suggested I make a blueberry pie (for me, not him), so I might do that this week. In the evening, we saw an "Open Air Summer Shakespeare" performance of Macbeth. It's one of my favorites and was performed very well.

Job Training

I had six hours of training for my jobs this past week. It is a bit confusing because what their system calls a "tutor" is similar to what we call a "teaching assistant (TA)" in the U.S. And they call the 1-on-1 tutors "peer learning advisors". So it seems like I have two tutoring jobs and it is hard to differentiate them with the terminology. I have never had a TA/Tutor before, so I'm not sure what to expect. I will be tutoring a literature class twice a week, which involves having a smaller group of students than are in the main lecture class in order to be able to facilitate discussion and delve into the material more deeply. At least, that's the ideal. Thankfully, the teachers for the class have prepared the material and some questions for me to use in the sessions, so I don't have to start from scratch.
I have to hold an office hour where students can come in for help with the essays or material. I also will be responsible for grading the two essays that make up most of the students' grade. Admittedly, it is a bit worrying thinking about being in charge of a classroom for the first time, but hopefully it gets easier as the semester proceeds.

The training for the tutoring was basic and emphasized how to create a good classroom environment where students feel comfortable enough to participate. It also included a lot of what not to do. They said students will form an opinion of you in the first 2 minutes, so you have to be careful how you present yourself at the beginning because first impressions are hard to change. The training for the 1-on-1 tutoring had us role-playing with a partner how to go over a piece of writing. My partner brought in her biology lab report and the terminology made almost no sense to me. It was good practice though, because we will have science students coming in for help. She was equally baffled by my Arts essay, saying she can't remember the last time she wrote an essay. It was shocking to hear someone who didn't know what a thesis statement was. It was a reminder of the big divide here (and elsewhere) between the Sciences and the Arts. Without a general education requirement, students don't have to cross over and do something outside of their discipline. And yet, the employers have made such a protest over Science students graduating without communication skills, the school is finally adding a writing component to the Engineering students' coursework, at least. Their writing assignments will be what I grade for my other job.

Visiting Scholars

Professor Charles Husband, visiting from the University of Helsinki, gave an interesting lecture on neo-liberalism and education. It focused on how the current culture of having to do everything for profit is shifting academics away from pursuing research benefiting society and the greater public good. They are now consumed with research grants, marketing their research, and having to tick the boxes on getting publications and prestige to meet their department/school benchmarks. Everything becomes about their own selfish career goals. Academics are increasingly devalued as the jobs dry up and funders don’t want to put money into things that don’t have immediate value. It was all really relevant to what D and I have been dealing with and reading about recently with regards to liberal education and the Arts. We both spoke up about our experiences, and I said that academics are afraid to organize because the employers are in control with so few jobs available. It was weird hearing the professor say that a few decades ago, if you said you were doing a PhD in the Humanities, you would have been applauded. He lamented that faculty increasingly don’t want to socialize with each other or with students, instead holing up and working on research proposals, spending 3-6 months of a 2-year fellowship searching after the next funding (almost like a politician campaigning at the end of their term). I thanked the professor afterward and remarked how different it was now from the 1960s, which were all about protesting, and he agreed that that spirit is largely gone. I know if we end up going in academia, we will have to face the pressure he discussed, and it is a disheartening prospect.

Then the English department had its first seminar since I've been here by visiting scholar Dr. David Gillott on his research interest, Samuel Butler, a Victorian writer who critiqued Darwin and wrote a utopian satire, Erewhon, which I haven't yet encountered. His presentation focused on Butler's anti-professionalism. The main point I took away from it was that Butler criticized Darwin for deliberately cultivating a public persona of a humble "every man" character while underneath being an ambitious, career-oriented fellow. Butler notes that Darwin used a certain kind of language in his writings to endear himself to regular people and make them more willing to accept his controversial ideas on evolution. Butler was also against artists who worked for money and patronage rather than making art because they felt compelled and inspired to. He said that art created in the former way lacked something essential and could never be as good as art for art's sake. 

Chinese New Year's

I finally finagled an invitation to eat homemade Chinese food by our Chinese friend and his girlfriend. They invited us over for Chinese New Year's Eve and prepared six dishes for us (certain numbers are unlucky, so you have to make an even number of dishes; but four is also out because it is associated with death). We had a nice time discussing differences between China and the U.S. For dessert, we brought pumpkin bread and they had bought balls of a gelatine substance coated with coconut and filled with bean paste. We ate one out of politeness, and they were better than the pumpkin things from the restaurant, but still so different than our concept of dessert.