Young Lecturer Research Articles

Remembering Walter Rodney

In February 1967 came the Arusha Declaration. The ruling party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), issued the Arusha Declaration and a policy of socialism and self-reliance. Our word in Kiswahili, Ujamaa (translated as extended family or familyhood), became the official policy. A number of companies in the commanding heights of the national economy were nationalized by the government. That started a whole new debate at the university. Walter Rodney had just come from SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) and became a young lecturer here. In the conference on rethinking the role of the university in now socialist Tanzania, he played a very important role.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Becoming a Visual Anthropologist

Histories are full of pitfalls, especially if written by those who have had a part in them.- David MacDougall1I have decided to use biography as the framework for this essay. Ethnographic film has been central to my engagement with anthropology since first coming from University College London to The Australian National University as a graduate student in 1973. My career as an anthropologist has been unusual in that I have always been in environments where ethnographic film was considered an integral part of at least some of my teachers' and colleagues' conception of anthropology.I came to University College London as an undergraduate to study social anthropology. My aim was to learn as much as I could about the ways of life of people of the 'developing' world as preparation for a career helping alleviate hunger and disadvantage. While I like to think I have never lost the motivation to work with people for the betterment of the world, I developed a specialist interest in the anthropology of art and material culture as a result of the courses I studied and the charismatic teaching of a young lecturer, Peter Ucko. The first ethnographic films that I watched were part of the courses that he taught. The films were made under the auspices of the Institut fur den Wissenschaftlichen at Gottingen in Germany. The emphasis of the institute was on scientific purity and the comparative method.2 The films selected focused on technical processes in the manufacture and use of material-culture objects. Science in this context often seemed too objectifying, looking at the technical processes of distant cultures as if they were disconnected from the overall life of the society. Nonetheless, while sitting in the darkened lecture theatre with the films in glistening black and white, I found the magic of film was not entirely absent.I was also able to experience films of a very different genre: John Marshall's The Hunters and Robert Gardner's Dead Birds.3 These films were gripping in their narrative structure and in the raw emotions they conveyed. Belonging to a genre of films influenced by Flaherty's pioneering feature Nanook of the North (1922), they sat on the borders between documentary and narrative cinema, opening up ethnography to a wider audience.4Peter Ucko had close links to the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI). In British anthropology the RAI has always had a dialogical relationship with the academy. The RAI has carried the history of anthropology forward by keeping alive interests that the university academics have left behind. Arguably the RAI maintained the interdisciplinarity of anthropology at times when social anthropologists, archaeologists and biological anthropologists felt they had little in common. Yet the RAI was also sensitive to emerging issues arising from the grassroots of popular interest in areas ranging from child abuse, race relations and human rights to the teaching of anthropology in schools. The RAI maintained close links to museums and libraries and built significant archives of its own. It is not surprising, given its role in British anthropology, that in the 1970s it created two speciahst research panels, one in art and the other in ethnographic film. The leading protagonists included Peter Ucko, Anthony Forge and James Woodburn. The two panels held regular meetings in London and, to an undergraduate student, they provided privileged access to two of the strands of the emerging discipline of visual anthropology. Sometimes they sat jointly as when Adriaan Gerbrands came to show his film Matjemosh.5I saw two films in the early 1970s that had a great impact on me: David and Judith MacDougall's To Live with Herds, on the pastoral Jie of Kenya,6 and Ian Dunlop's Towards Baruya Manhood.7 The MacDougalls' film was of almost transcendent beauty, attuned to the aesthetics of the Jie. More than that it allowed the viewer to see the world from the perspective of the Jie as it emerged in dialogue with the filmmaker - how they coped with the difficulties of life facing drought. …

A Career In The Rare Gases

Most of us remember where we were on the occasion of truly seminal events such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, or the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and the Washington, D.C., area. I recall clearly when I first learned of Neil Bartlett’s revolutionary synthesis of xenon hexafluoroplatinate(V). As science teachers, we view ourselves as open-minded and uninfluenced by authority. We regard our scientific beliefs as tentative hypotheses that we abandon or modify in light of new discoveries. Yet in July 1962, at a conference on Advances in the Chemistry of Coordination Compounds at Ohio State University, my open-mindedness was put to the test—and failed! Someone interrupted one of the lectures to announce that Bartlett, a young lecturer at the University of British Columbia, had prepared a compound of the inert gas xenon. Faced with the news that one of ...

The University as a community of selves: Johan Vilhelm Snellman's “On Academic Studies”

Nowadays we tend to regard the idea of a university as an outdated subject. The world of universities is today so complex and diverse that no general doctrine of the university seems possible. In a recent article Alasdair MacIntyre challenges this view and points out that by giving up the question “What is university?” we also give up the question “What is an educated mind?” In this article I will return to the old discussion on the idea of a university. I will go all the way back to Plato, but my main theme is J. V. Snellman’s essay On Academic Studies (1840). There Snellman, a young university lecturer at the time, defends his view that the university is a community of selves. The essay strongly emphasises that students should not only learn to know but also to act in a responsible way as selves. However, the text also reflects on Snellman’s own activity before the publication. He had defended academic freedom against the rector of the Imperial Alexander University of Finland. As a result, Snellman was in the end sentenced in an open court and forced to leave the university. Snellman’s view is certainly not the final definition of the university, but as it, besides presenting a theoretical view on the essence of the university, also reflects on activity in a university community, it gives us elements for reflecting on the idea of a university and an educated mind.

Review: New Directions in Federalism Studies

This important new book on comparative federalism considers itself as a product of a 'boom' of federal studies. New, possibly emerging cases of federal agreements (Iraq, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Bosnia), the federal reforms of the EU, but also in nation-states like Australia and Germany, in pluricultural Switzerland and plurinational Canada, and the emergence of federally constituted new powers like India and Brazil may have motivated a higher demand for studies in this field. Both editors are young, but already highly renowned experts in federal studies. In order to justify the claim to represent 'new directions,' the list of the authors of the book brings together established full professors like Braun, Singh and Sturm with younger lecturers like Swenden himself, associate professors like Anderson, Colino, Detterbeck and Saxena, research fellows like Gordin, Hepburn and Martinez Herrera, and also some PhD students like Biela, de Miguel and Hennl. The general objective is to provide an analytic framework which transcends the subfields of federalism studies.

SELF'S THE MAN

Philip Larkin's relationship with his exact contemporary Monica Jones began in 1946 when she was a very young lecturer in English at University College, Leicester, he being on the college library staff, and it lasted until his death in 1985. Until near the end they lived apart – Monica in Leicester or at her cottage in Haydon Bridge, and Larkin mostly in Belfast, then Hull, with frequent stops visiting his sister and mother in Loughborough – and wrote to one another several times a week for years on end, often cross-posting in their enthusiasm to put something in the mail. However, when Anthony Thwaite edited Larkin's Selected Letters (1992) only a handful of letters to Monica were included, the rest having apparently gone missing. After Larkin died, she effectively became a version of Miss Havisham: disorganised, ailing, in perpetual mourning for the man who had spent a lifetime refusing to marry her. So it was perhaps not much of a surprise that, following her death in 2001, a vast cache of almost 2,000 letters and postcards from Larkin should be discovered among her belongings, dating from the year they met until the year before he died (though with an inexplicable gap from 1973 to 1982). This was a major discovery, for as Thwaite notes in his introduction to the present volume: ‘they form the most important correspondence of his life. Certainly they mark his most important relationship’.

Charlie Ellington FRS retires

In 1973, a young student from Duke University arrived at the Department of Zoology in the University of Cambridge to begin his PhD with Torkel Weis-Fogh. The young student was Charlie Ellington, and he was destined to ‘rewrite the book’ on insect flight aerodynamics. Charlie recalls his arrival

The Impact of the Holocaust in America: The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, Volume 6 (review)

The Impact of the in America: The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, Volume 6, edited by Zev Garber. W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press for the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, University of Southern California, 2008. 230 pp. $25.00. Not long ago I was present at a meeting of scholars at Yad Vashem discussing contemporary research among graduate students and young lecturers. Almost none of them are actually dealing with the these days, sighed one of the senior historians, himself a survivor. they study history, they write about the impact of the after the war. If they study memory, then they usually choose something about representation in the arts. And if they deal with comprehension then they end up writing about post-Holocaust philosophy, theology or education. No one deals any more with the actual event which brought about the impact, the memory, the philosophy or the education! he moaned. Although all of us present understood and empathized with what he was saying a few reminded him that it wasn't only the lack of knowledge of European languages or the difficulty of traveling for long periods to archives throughout Europe that was drawing scholars towards topics of post-war impact and aftermath. And it wasn't only young scholars who were drawn towards these topics. Every Man is close to Himself, states the author of Ecclesiastes, and so, many scholars were drawn to writing about their present, the impact of the on the world in which they lived in the recent past and in which they live today. This choice in no way diminishes the importance of the or detracts from its horror; instead it provides an additional perspective to the tremendous depth and scope of its impact, showing how it continues to affect various aspects of our lives today in countries far away from the killing grounds or even those who had been under Nazi domination. The most recent volume of the Casden Annual Review, The Impact of the in America, is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Ten articles, most of which were based on papers delivered at the Association of Jewish Studies conference held in San Diego in 2006, provide the reader with a broad vista of topics, all related to how the major Jewish cataclysm of the twentieth century affected various areas of thought, action, education, media, economy, theology, sociology, and history in the United States. Although all the articles are worthy of note, I will focus on three which were of particular interest to me and I think are especially deserving of further discussion. The first is Beth Cohen's excellent analysis of the survivor's first years in America. Based on the research for her book on the subject, Case Closed, Cohen paints a vivid picture of what life was really like for some of the 140,000 European Jewish who resettled in the United States between 1946 and 1954. Citing poignant case studies of families who were brought from Europe to the United States during the immediate post-war years, Cohen depicts the complex and often multifaceted process through which refugees became new Americans. It would still take years before they could be identified publicly as Holocaust survivors, she shows us, and meanwhile, to their American-Jewish relatives, to the organizations that cared for them, and to the Jewish community in general they were often just poor refugees, some with severe emotional difficulties which they were unable to overcome in the war's aftermath. Cohen paints a very different picture than that described in most existing studies regarding the life of survivors in America, primarily because she concentrates on the immediate post-war years, those in which various survivors who came to America were still quite far from being success stories. …

REKAYASA PERANGKAT LUNAK BERBASIS SUMBER TERBUKA UNTUK MEMBANTU PELAKSANAAN AUDIT SISTEM INFORMASI

This research was conducted on one budget period in 2009 funded by DIKTI young lecturer research project grant. The main research location is Bina Nusantara University. Due to tight research schedule, it was necessary to take some strategic steps to fulfill research goals. One of the strategic steps was to invite several experts in software industry to give advices regarding open source software engineering issues. The first achievement was findings of some open source software that could assist on auditing information systems. Afterwards, comparison from technical and functional aspects resulted in the best software to be tested for implementation and usage, namely ZenossCore. The final output of this research is successful reengineering of the source code for virtual file testing.Keywords: open source software, audit implementation, information system

Buckley's! Ken Buckley; Historian, Author and Civil Libertarian. An Autobiography – By Ken Buckley

Buckley's! Ken Buckley; Historian, Author and Civil Libertarian. An Autobiography – By Ken Buckley

Agreeing on Problems, Where are the Solutions? A Reply to Quattrone

Theodor Adorno once said that ‘if you want to impress people, make sure you write things they do not understand’. Because I was fairly young lecturer, I took it seriously. I have been successful, a...

Of the making of books: Biochemistry textbooks: are they getting better?

When I was a young lecturer at Birmingham in the 1970s each student had to write a review of a book chosen from a list of four or five possibilities during the summer vacation after completing the second year of biochemistry. At least half of them chose to write about the same book, always saying how clear and understandable it was. After 2 or 3 years of reading these essays I decided that I ought to read it myself, and found it to fall far short of what I expected. Still available more than 30 years later, it is not the worst book on biochemistry ever written, but it is cheap and short, and has sold many thousands of copies. I started asking students who had reviewed it favourably to check some factual information with me. It would have been too easy to choose a topic that I know well, such as enzyme kinetics, or one that everyone finds difficult, such as thermodynamics; however, I usually chose to look at the stereochemistry of simple sugars, a subject where I have no more knowledge than every teacher of biochemistry can be expected to have. With a little coaxing (or in some cases a lot) they were then able to find the mistakes in the use of the Fischer convention, in the meanings of the stereo chemical prefixes and their relationship (or lack of one) to the polarization of light, and so on, and I told them to reread the whole book in a proper critical spirit.

The enduring asylum

‘Loonies’, they shouted from the back of the coach. ‘Loonies!’ I can't remember if we had reached the gates of the mental hospital yet, but I was excruciatingly embarrassed, and I prayed that they would stop. It didn't help me very much that I understood, to an extent, what had provoked some of the students in my year to such cruel mockery. It was 1974. Sociology had just become a compulsory subject at our medical school in London. The young sociology lecturers had arrived with a mission to radicalize the next generation of doctors, offering us the latest critiques of medicine and of psychiatry. An instructive coach trip into the countryside, to visit one of the vast Victorian ‘bins’ that still peppered Hertfordshire, Essex and Surrey, was not proving to be helpful. In retrospect, we were all caught up a painful historical drama concerning views of madness. The sociologists were fired with a conviction that everything we were about to see was a demonstration of how society oppressed and imprisoned free spirits in the name of medical treatment. The students felt provoked by this, and were no doubt fearful as well, and they regressed into viciousness. …

Mathematics of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's adventures in wonderland, the captivating book first published in 1865, began as a story told by a young mathematics lecturer to the three Liddell sisters, ages 8 to 13, during an afternoon of rowing on the river. The story might have evaporated into the summer's air but for Alice Liddell, then aged 10, who asked Charles Lutwidge Dodgson to write it down for her. Although Dodgson himself illustrated the first copy, which he gave to Alice as a Christmas gift in 1864, he later expanded the story, had it illustrated by the famous artist John Tenniel, and published it under the name of Lewis Carroll (Cohen 1995).

How Should Scholars Behave?

46 Historically Speaking · September/October 2005 How Should Scholars Behave? Jeremy Black Maybe I'm one of those simpleminded souls who can only best grasp an issue when it affects them directly, but a couple ofepisodes have led me to think about how scholars should behave. I'm not referring here to relations with colleagues in the same institution, though many years ago, as a young lecturer at Durham, I can remember being unsure how to respond when I went to the bar for a fortifying drink during a performance by the Scottish Opera at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle to see, at the other end, a (married) senior colleague holding hands with a student: the university's induction course had provided no guidance on whether to say hello or to pretend not to notice. I dare say it still doesn't. No, my concern is the problem of conferences and how to respond to arguments one feels misguided. I may be totally wrong, I'm certainly confused (rather like the train I'm writing this in which appears to find the timetable way too confusing to keep to), but here are two cases for starters. Last November, I was very kindly invited to the excellent Mershon Center at Ohio State University to take part in a symposium on how best to teach military history. Very trying in the midst ofterm, but great fun—interesting people, good papers, great hospitality. I gave my paper, essentially on the global theme, and, in the questions, someone says why haven't you mentioned John Keegan, and I made a critical remark: Face ofBattle is very Anglocentric. The tone of my remark was possibly overly abrasive, but the content was spot on. Subsequently, a colleague who is a good friend and whom I much admire, wrote to me to say he thought I'd been too harsh and to ask would I make my remark to Keegan in person. My response was yes, but, more generally , that it struck me as very odd that we feel it perfectly appropriate to judge critically students, academics seeking posts and promotion , and other academics in the smallchange ofconversation, but that there seemed to be a reluctance to make such judgments publicly. This leads to the second episode, one in which I inadvertently fell foul of America's culture wars. In 2003 I was invited to the Ian Fleming conference hosted by the English department at the University ofIndiana. I was to be the keynote closer, speaking on "Changing Views of America in the James Bond Corpus," and my hosts kindly paid all my expenses and gave me a most welcome honorarium. The quality of the papers alas was very mixed: from first rate to inaccurate and tendentious. I had been given over an hour for my talk, so thought I would spare five minutes at the start to review what we'd heard. Trying to be fair, I remarked, in a light tone, that historians had to offer chronological precision, while literary critics had to try to anchor themselves in the texts, and that it was of only limited interest to hear lesbian readings of Bond unless it could be shown that lesbianism was an important theme in the corpus or lesbians a key element among the readers. This led to a furor described by Andrew Lycett in the Sunday Times ofJune 8, 2003. A roundtable in which I was due to talk was boycotted by several participants, I was criticized in a letter from which excerpts were read out in the business meeting next day, and my paper was dropped from the proceedings. The organizer refusedto show me the letter or to return my calls. Tantpis you may well say. I certainly did. The English department at Bloomington is not exactly prominent on my radar screen of intellectual endeavor, and, anyway, they paid my costs and honorarium in full, so I'd had a paid trip that had enabled me to see a couple ofold friends (Bill Thompson at Indiana, and James Chapman, the other keynote speaker), to hear four good papers, to work on useful Townshend material in the Lilly Library, and to eat my...

Reviews: Thomas Young's Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts

Reviews: Thomas Young's Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts

The Life of Frank Cole Phillips (1902-1982) and the Structural Geology of the Moine Petrofabric Controversy

The Life of Frank Cole Phillips (1902-1982) and the Structural Geology of the Moine Petrofabric Controversy

The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations

The task is indeed urgent, for the white man’s prestige in the old sense of the word, has become greatly weakened...Well do I remember, as though it were yesterday, the impression made upon my mind when, as a young lecturer in Ancient History at Oxford, I read of the first great victory of the Japanese over the Russians. I went into my class and told them I was going to lay aside Greek history for that morning, ‘because’, I said, ‘I feel I must speak to you about the most important historical event which has happened, or is likely to happen, in our lifetime, the victory of a non-white people over a white people’.

Information-seeking Behaviour among University of Botswana Science Faculty

The study used a survey method to investigate the information seeking behaviour of science academics at the University of Botswana. A questionnaire was used to gather data. The response rate was 56 percent. The study showed that the UBL science academics develop new ideas through thinking and reading. Twenty seven percent of them reported that they find out about the existence of information by reading reviews. While all the respondents reported that they do need information, 74 percent and 72 percent reported that they generate new ideas for research through thinking and reading, respectively. Fifty percent reported that they seek information to develop their careers. The study concludes by providing some recommendations on how the UB academics can be encouraged to make use of available library resources to their benefit with emphasis on the young junior lecturers.

The Integrated Response to Hypoxia: From Circulation to Cells

I guess everyone who is asked to give one of the Physiological Society's Prize Lectures feels honoured, but I feel particularly honoured to have been asked to give the Joan Mott Prize Lecture. I first met Joan Mott in 1980 at the Oxford meeting of the Physiological Society. I had just given a communication on baro‐ and chemoreceptor influences on the cardiovascular system and she came to introduce herself to me. I was a young lecturer at the time, and still felt a rather junior member of the Society. I had seen Joan Mott at many Physiological Society meetings. I had heard her give communications and had heard her entering into lively discussions after papers, and I knew she was a well respected scientist. I was therefore flattered that she should have come to talk to me about my work. After that we met at many Physiological Society meetings and she always made a point of asking how our research was going and we would talk of common interests. To me this is one of the most important aspects of Physiological Society meetings, that young and older members of the Society can rub shoulders with one a nother and discuss science openly with no barriers. Joan Mott had an influence on me that I have tried to remember as I have become a more senior member of the Society.