Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Managing your energy The academic year varies in intensity. The typical structure of an academic year has 2 teaching semesters, or 3 teaching terms with shorter breaks between them and then a long break in the summer. Everyone involved needs time to recover and recharge, and to integrate knowledge. […]
Read More »Academic Context
How things work in academic institutions, academic disciplines, and other spaces where you find yourself. The unwritten rules, assumptions, and ways of being that make the difference in everyday academic life.
This category has been somewhat neglected. Older posts in this category will be edited and possibly recategorized beginning in July 2015.
The value of intellectual engagement
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Valuing Intellectual Engagement Burnout and stress are not just about the quantity of work you have to do. Lack of control and a sense of meaninglessness are major contributors to burnout. It has become very clear that your difficulty managing your workload is not a personal failing. You are […]
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Email overwhelm as a collective problem
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Email Overwhelm as a Collective Problem This post was prompted by the renowned classicist, Mary Beard, stoking up the embers of email stress recently over on Twitter. for all you guys (women and men) recommending 'delay delivery',. do you know what that means? It means that at 9.00 my […]
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Optimism in the face of uncertainty
There is a difference between optimism and positivity, or at least the kind of positivity that tries to pretend that bad things never happen, or never happen to good people. I am an optimist. I read something recently that helped me clarify what that looks like for me. It’s a bit like “It’ll be okay […]
Read More »Peer review supports academic writing!
The 4th book in my Short Guides series, Peer Review (A Short Guide), was published on 15 November 2019. I occasionally offer a class, Dealing With Reviewer Comments, based on the principles elaborated in this book. The main thing I want this Short Guide to do is transform your view of peer review. Too often […]
Read More »The value of voluntary peer review labour
What follows is a draft of one section of my next Short Guide, Peer Review. I approach peer review as primarily editorial labour with the goal of improving scholarship. I question the use of “gate keeping” as a metaphor for the role of peer reviewers in making recommendations to editors regarding publishing decisions while recognising […]
Read More »Accountability vs Community
I’ve been reading Rowena Murray’s Writing in Social Spaces, and it has helped me articulate something that underpins a lot of my work. Community is important to your ability to do this work. This got long, if what you really want are suggestions for creating writing community, jump here. When I talk about A Meeting […]
Read More »Thoughts on “Untangling Academic Publishing”
I have written before about communication and validation in your publishing decisions and encouraged you to prioritize communication in your decision making process. In this post, I want to extend that argument using a recently published scholarly report as a jumping off point. (you can go read it and come back) Fyfe, A., et al. […]
Read More »Do you need to be excellent?
I have written before about “best” being a distraction and encouraged you to focus on doing good work. In this post, I want to extend that argument using a recently published scholarly article as a jumping off point. (you can go read it and come back) “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of […]
Read More »What is “administration” anyway?
I find the use of “administration” and “administrators” in academic circles increasingly problematic. In particular, there is a lack of precision in the use of the term. The term “administration” seems to be applied to everything from clerical work to running the institution. It has become a catch-all category for any work done in the […]
Read More »Maternity leave & your publication record
Note: The information in this post is relevant to those evaluating the scholarship of others (for hiring, promotion, funding, etc) as well as to those having their scholarship evaluated. Your publication record is one of the most important ways that you will be evaluated throughout your career. A huge concern, especially for women, is how […]
Read More »What it means to make a contribution to knowledge
The primary purpose of academic publishing is to communicate with other scholars. This form of communication is rather formal. The bar for acceptance into the conversation is high. This conversation is asynchronous and takes place over very long time periods. What happens once you’ve published your article? By publishing your article in a scholarly journal […]
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