Academic Voices Research Articles

Resisting epistemic racism in UK academia? Challenges and risks in the age of Islamophobia: the voices of Muslim academics

ABSTRACT The Western seizure of ‘legitimate’ knowledge has been widely criticised and seen the growth of initiatives such as Decolonising the Curriculum Movement. Challenging Eurocentric knowledge has always been onerous, given its entanglement with power structures. Using semi-structured interviews with nine Muslim academics working in British academia within Social Science disciplines on issues related to Islam and Muslims, this article discusses their experiences in attempting to challenge Eurocentrism that ‘other’ Muslim worldviews. ‘Epistemic racism’ is used to unravel the entanglement between Islamophobia and knowledge creation. The findings underscore the risks and limited opportunities particpants face in addressing debates on Muslims and Islam amidst ongoing cultural and systemic Islamophobia. By discussing their experiences referencing encounters with other Muslim and minority academics in Western universities, the article concludes that the globalised Islamophobia, fuelled by epistemic racism, is successfully thwarting attempts to effectively deconstruct Eurocentrism that has fostered the alterity of Muslim worldviews.

Decoding South African lecturers’ frustrations with neoliberal governance approaches

Corporate norms and values, characterised by an enterprise ethos, became the new parameters that defined the academic environment. Academics are increasingly becoming concerned about the commodification of higher education and its impact on academic quality and the standards of quality graduates. The voices of South African academics and their experiences within the neoliberal university governance remain underexplored in the current literature. This study aimed to enhance understanding and contribute to knowledge by exploring lecturers’ experiences within a corporatised academic work environment. This study took place across public and private higher education institutions in South Africa. A cross-sectional, qualitative, interpretative phenomenological research design was employed. Data was collected by means of semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of 20 lecturers. The data analysis followed the principles of interpretative phenomenological analysis. The findings of the study identified three key areas that triggered feelings of frustration with management: (1) participants experienced a lack of management’s understanding of governing academic work environments, (2) an erosion of their collegial culture, and (3) a lack of transparent communication.Contribution: A key contribution of this study, which set it apart from other studies, was lecturers’ perceptions that their professional identity, collegiality, autonomy, and academic freedom were in crisis.

‘It Changed My Thinking Around, Okay, What Is Really Key?’: Academic Voices of Delivering Intensive Teaching in Higher Education

‘It Changed My Thinking Around, Okay, What Is Really Key?’: Academic Voices of Delivering Intensive Teaching in Higher Education

Gender Based Violence: Reflections on the World Envisaged in “After Dark” by Jayne Cowie: Using Literature to Critically Explore Current Legal Responses to GBV in the Home and in Public

This special issue of The International Journal of Gender, Sexuality and Law, edited by Claire Bessant and Kayliegh Richardson, brings together academic voices from across law and criminology in discussion of the issue of gender-based violence (GBV). Many of the ideas included in this special issue were presented previously at a 2022 conference funded by the Society of Legal Scholars, titled ‘Gender Based Violence: Reflections on the world envisaged in “After Dark” by Jayne Cowie’. That conference sought to use the book ‘After Dark’ as a focal point for a multi-disciplinary discussion about how society and the law should respond to tragedies such as the deaths of Sarah Everard and Ashling Murphy but also to the issue of violence against women. Building on the academic discussion that took place at that conference, this special edition firstly considers some of the legal interventions discussed in After Dark and their potential application within the real world. The second part of the special edition, then considers the potential benefits of using literature and other fictional works to stimulate discussion around legal issues.

Reshaping Education Curriculum Landscape: Lessons from Unprecedented Past

Experiences may be obsolete in the days of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), but lessons to learn are fresh and essential. This study aimed to explore the academic voices of teachers during VUCA period to find their needs and aspirations as essential inputs in reshaping the academic landscape of the education curriculum. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, seven teachers were purposely selected as participants in the study. Findings revealed that a) teachers’ mental anxiety was raised to a higher level; b) they suffered physical illness resulting from psychological stress and c) they experienced instructional frustration such as anxiety in the use of technology, dissatisfaction with virtual classes, and writing course pack as an added burden. As such, they needed a) mental wellness preservation, b) physical health protection, c) spiritual and moral boosters, d) personal quality time and, e) assessing student outcomes was a great challenge. This study recommends to reshape the landscape of the present education curriculum by integrating courses that address the lessons of the unprecedented past like innovative mental anxiety management, catastrophic crisis management, spiritual boosters, work-life balance, hygiene and sanitation, and the new ways of doing things for assessing student outcomes with futuristic approach.

FOSTERING COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT TO ADDRESS RACISM: DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A SERVICE-LEARNING CURRICULUM FOR PEDIATRIC RESIDENTS.

In recent years, there has been a call for Academic Health Centers to increase community engagement to address racism. 1 Blanchard A.K. Blanchard J.C. Suah A. et al. Reflect and reset: Black academic voices call the graduate medical education community to action. Acad Med. 2022; 97: 967-972 Crossref PubMed Scopus (6) Google Scholar Alongside didactic education and building a diverse learning environment, community engagement allows trainees to better understand the structural underpinnings of inequities and better recognize their own biases to create a framework for how to improve care for marginalized populations. 2 Khazanchi R. Keeler H. Strong S. et al. Building structural competency through community engagement. Clin Teach. 2021; 18: 535-541 Crossref PubMed Scopus (8) Google Scholar Community-based service learning (CBSL), a teaching strategy that combines community service with “explicit learning objectives, preparation, and reflection,” 3 Seifer S.D. Hermanns K. Lewis J. Creating community-responsive physicians: Concepts and models for service-learning in medical education. American Association for Higher Education, 2000〈https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED449734.pdf〉 Google Scholar is one methodology that can be used to give participants the opportunity to engage with the local community while also learning about the context in which the service is provided.

Women Academic Voices on Organisational Climate Leader's Views in Malaysia's Public Universities

Higher education institutions in Malaysia should be able to provide an ecosystem that is conducive to the career development of women's leadership. Diverse and inappropriate leadership styles make a female leader less effective when appointed to a leadership position. Furthermore, when the organizational climate of the university is not supportive and positive toward women leaders' development, it demotivates them from assuming leadership. As a result, the type of organizational climate deemed appropriate is required.The goal of this study is (i) to investigate the dimensions of organisational climate among women academic leaders & (ii) to examine the link between organisational climate and transformational leadership. This study used a mixed method, which is a sequential exploratory design involving six informants from top management and 365 respondents from middle management in 20 public universities. Atlas Ti version 23 and SEM PLS version 4 are being used to analyze data. The findings of the study reveal that the organizational climate is perceived as supportive and constructive by women in academic careers. The thematic analysis also listed 12 themes and dimensions for the organizational climate construct. The research findings also found that the organizational climate and transformational leadership are positively correlated. This research also listed several initiatives that need to be taken by university management to improve the organizational climate and empower women's leadership, especially involving women academic leaders. This research also fulfills the SDG5 agenda regarding women in leadership and decision-making at the top management level.

“Doing Just Enough to Get By”: Voices of Black Women Early Career Academics on Navigating the Publish or Perish Discourse in South Africa

In this article, we focus on the narratives of black women early career academics (ECAs) who are confronting and negotiating the “publish or perish” discourse in their professional lives in the university. Through a qualitative interpretivist case study, we purposively recruited and interviewed 10 education academics in one research-intensive university in South Africa. We relied on Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework to think through and to theorise the complex positionality of black women academics in a South African university. The findings reveal that black women ECAs often have challenges when it comes to research and publication, with some of the participants rejecting the publish or perish mantra, questioning the usefulness of publishing, and to what extent their own research will make a societal impact. The findings also reveal the deeply embedded patriarchal and gendered nature of the publish or perish discourse in how it disregards the role of wife/motherly/societal care work that women academics often perform. We end the article with broader reflections on the emergence of the publish and perish discourse in the South African higher education system and its implications for the attraction, retention, and wellbeing of black women ECAs in the sector.

Introducing Black Academic Voices

This special issue is part of efforts by the Department of Leadership and Transformation, at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria, to make a contribution towards the building of the scholarship of transformation in an effort to continue the work to making our universities our own. Again, this special issue builds on the work started in the 2019 award winning edited volume Black Academic Voices: The South African Experience to share the multiple stories of experiences of the higher education sector. The only exception in this issue is that the experiences shared include those from other parts of the world. From the multiple launch seminars hosted for Black Academic Voices (2019) it became clearer that there are multiple Black academic voices in the university that require our ear, thus this special issue provides the much-needed reflective space for the unpacking of the politics of being black in the academy. In South Africa such reflective undertakings are recent and timely (Mabokela and Magubane, 2004; Khunou, Canham, Khoza-Shangase, Phaswana, 2019; Magoqwana, Maqabuka, and Tshoaedi, 2019).

Challenging male homophily and bias in academic research and practice

This opinion piece focuses on the nature of male homophily and bias in academic research, publishing and practice, and how homophilic practices in writing, reviewing and publishing academic research disproportionately advantage the academic work and voices of male academics while disenfranchising those of women within ‘the academy’ and academic institutions. After first briefly considering the nature of male homophily and relevant historical dimensions, attention then turns to the practices that prevail today including the stark realities presented by recent research. Pragmatic responses to tackling male homophily and bias in academic work, cultures and practices are then considered, in areas including the work of journals and their editorial boards, research leadership and supervision, academic leadership and in learning and teaching.

The Importance of Digital Learning and Teaching in the Era of COVID-19

We are pleased to publish the second regular issue (Volume 12, Issue 2) of <em>Higher Learning Research Communications (HLRC)</em> for 2022. This year, we published two regular issues and a special issue, <em>Education Technologies and COVID-19: Experiences and Lessons Learned</em>. COVID-19 and the implications of the switch to emergency online teaching continue to capture the interest of researchers. In the present issue, some of the manuscripts focus directly on COVID-19; still others examine different aspects of digital teaching and learning. As is typical with the HLRC, articles represent the voices of academics from various parts of the globe, demonstrating the importance and reach of digital education. The focus of the HLRC is on digital teaching and learning, higher education and the public good, and the preparation of students in key 21st-century employability skills, and the present issue reflects each of these focus areas. Summaries of the manuscripts for this issue are provided below.

Consensus moderation: the voices of expert academics

Consensus moderation, where collaboration and discussion take place to reach an agreement on mark allocation, is a frequently used approach to quality assurance in higher education. This study explored expert academics’ perceptions of consensus moderation through 12 semi-structured open-ended interviews. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and resulted in six themes: accept that marking is subjective; consensus moderation is a learning process; use calibration to develop and maintain standards; moderation is core academic work; resources are needed to enable consensus moderation; and different moderation practices are needed for different moderation purposes. Consensus moderation is a complex activity with many challenges, and the findings from this study contribute to our current understanding of consensus moderation. The findings have implications for policy and practice, and have identified ways in which we can enhance consensus moderation practice.

Comments on Keyan Tomaselli’s "The 2022 Copyright Amendment Bill: Implications for the South African universities’ Research Economy"

The tragedy of the deliberations on the Copyright Amendment Bill is the absence of critical and dispassionate engagement on the issues that are being raised by different interest groups. The interest groups have retreated to their laagers and are defending their positions, ferociously and without regard for other perspectives and interests. The clamour from the interest groups is mainly by way of loud slogans on anecdotal experiences, sometimes in sectors that are irrelevant to the discussion.
 The absence of academic voices on the matter is unfortunate in two ways. One is the rigour and structure that they could have brought to the debate. The other is giving attention to the disregarded interests of academics as custodians of knowledge production, innovation and nurturing respect for own and others’ work of the mind. The consequence of this lack of engagement is that legislators have had very little access to critical engagement and have tended to base their decisions on untested slogans. On the other hand, academics and universities have essentially allowed a process that has such a strong bearing on them to almost reach conclusion without their input.

The Strategy of Interpretation Al Qur'an and Hadith with Virtual Data-Based Learning Approach at Institut Agama Islam Negeri Fattahul Muluk Papua

The article gained experience through interviews with six academics from Institut Agama Islam Negeri Fattahul Muluk Papua through the voices of academics, gained the understanding and experience of using virtual data to understand the Al-Quran and Hadith. The data was processed by using a phenomenological approach involved data coding, evaluation, and drawing relevant conclusions. The result showed that the strategy of interpreting the Qur'an and Hadith by relying on virtual data as part of a learning approach in the 21st-century has illustrated how important it is to understand both Arabic as a foreign language, technology applications to interpret religious content, especially the Quran and Hadith. The transformation of the writing of the Qur'an from printing on paper has also been transformed into virtual data and followed by an interpretation by digital methods. It was one of the developments in the interpretation study methodology, considering that virtual data has entered various aspects of life, including the world of education and research. Keywords: Strategy Interpretation Al-Quran, Strategy Interpretation Hadith,Virtual Data Learning

Reflect and Reset: Black Academic Voices Call the Graduate Medical Education Community to Action.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the great achievements that the biomedical community can accomplish, but raised the question: Can the same medical community that developed a complex vaccine in less than a year during a pandemic help to defeat social injustice and ameliorate the epidemic of health inequity? In this article, the authors, a group of Black academics, call on the graduate medical education (GME) community to reset its trajectory toward solutions for achieving diversity, improving inclusion, and combating racism using education as the new vector. Sponsoring institutions, which include universities, academic medical centers, teaching hospitals, and teaching health centers, are the center of the creation and dissemination of scholarship. They are often the main sources of care for many historically marginalized communities. The GME learning environment must provide the next generation of medical professionals with an understanding of how racism continues to have a destructive influence on health care professionals and their patients. Residents have the practical experience of longitudinal patient care, and a significant portion of an individual’s professional identity is formed during GME; therefore, this is a key time to address explicit stereotyping and to identify implicit bias at the individual level. The authors propose 3 main reset strategies for GME—incorporating inclusive pedagogy and structural competency into education, building a diverse and inclusive learning environment, and activating community engagement—as well as tactics that sponsoring institutions can adapt to address racism at the individual learner, medical education program, and institutional levels. Sustained, comprehensive, and systematic implementation of multiple tactics could make a significant impact. It is an academic and moral imperative for the medical community to contribute to the design and implementation of solutions that directly address racism, shifting how resident physicians are educated and modeling just and inclusive behaviors for the next generation of medical leaders.

The voice lessons

In this text I invite you to join me in a series of voice lessons, where I shares stories from my embodied experiences as a soprano, teacher, and researcher in the Western sociocultural context of singing. If you are expecting a traditional voice lesson, of ‘How to sing, 1, 2, 3’ you might be disappointed. But, if you are interested in how voicing (auto)ethnographies might be one way of producing, analyzing, and representing voice, I will happily dive into the voice lessons with you. For me, writing stories has become a way of knowing as a researcher, as through my writing I was able to discover new perspectives of voice – ultimately allowing me space to rethink notions of voice. Through the voice lessons I show how I zigzag through the worlds of the material voice and theoretical-philosophical-‘academic’ voice, guided by new materialism and performative autoethnography. My voice lessons can be seen as a performative utterance, which rests on the belief in the embodiment and the materiality of the writing body, an open-ended way of (re)thinking voice. Voice lessons for singing voices and academic voices.

Apart, but together: Voices of women academics working from home

New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource DevelopmentVolume 34, Issue 3 p. 1-4 EDITORIAL Apart, but together: Voices of women academics working from home Oliver Crocco, Oliver CroccoSearch for more papers by this authorRobin Grenier, Robin GrenierSearch for more papers by this authorDorothy Kemp, Dorothy KempSearch for more papers by this author Oliver Crocco, Oliver CroccoSearch for more papers by this authorRobin Grenier, Robin GrenierSearch for more papers by this authorDorothy Kemp, Dorothy KempSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 November 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/nha3.20365Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume34, Issue3Special Issue: Apart, but Together: Voices of Women Academics Working from HomeSummer 2022Pages 1-4 RelatedInformation

Introduction: Close-to-Practice research in Holocaust Education

ABSTRACT The fields of Holocaust Education and Holocaust Studies almost exclusively foreground the voices of professional academics. Practitioners are often the subjects of research, or the anticipated audience for it. The collection of papers gathered in this Special Edition aims to go some way to address this imbalance through foregrounding the voices of practitioner researchers (specifically teachers of students aged 11–18). The papers present good examples of practice, to offer an important contribution to the conversations that take place (or should take place) between the academy and practice, for their mutual benefit and the benefit of young learners.

Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today

Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today

Neoliberalism and the social imaginary: interpreting study abroad policy in Japanese higher education

ABSTRACT With internationalisation continuing at an ever-increasing pace, Japan incentivises student mobility via study abroad (SA) programmes in the hope of cultivating the global human resources necessary for future economic growth. Against this background, proficiency in English emerges as a dominant linguistic and epistemic model, increasingly viewed as prerequisite to high-level employment. Seeking to address the sociological foundations of this practice, this inquiry incorporates ‘Western’ philosophical perspectives with Japanese academic voices to explore the market-driven imaginaries driving Japanese SA. Regarding behaviour, pressure falls on Japanese SA participants to follow implicit socialisation rules, whereby avoidance of co-national sojourners holds the potential to undermine deeply-held ways of being. Concerning learning, it is shown that, while ostensibly multicultural, the Japanese State maintains a preference for English when describing ‘the further development of Japan as a nation’, reinforcing essentialist-culturalist interpretations of SA and, indeed, foreign language. Finally, discourses surrounding post-sojourn benefits suffer from a lack of clarity and unrealistic targets that, in turn, subtly produce an informal–and, for many, unpayable–social debt between actor and state.