Samuel sends in a comment which includes a question: “Surely if the government is sponsoring academics, they should want the results of their hard work to be available to a much wider audience?” He also writes that “There’s been a lot of good work done to make journals available to at least current university students, […]
[The last two weeks have been too hectic for me to keep up the pace of regular posting here. Yes, teaching is over but not marking, or BA and MA examining boards. Bureaucracy is, well, eating me alive. Every time friends or relatives ask me whether I’m already on holiday I go ballistic…] Two very […]
For the last three years I have been watching the Eurovision Song Contest with two of my nieces. I think I grew nostalgic of the great fun that watching the show was for me as a little girl, hence the idea to share this with the girls, now 9 and 5. This year the experience […]
I’ve read back to back Frederick Douglass’ autobiography Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892) and Emmeline Pankhurst’s memoirs My Own Story (1914), just by chance. The first page of her volume already shows how closely connected both books are, for Pankhurst (1858-1928) was the daughter of British activists and she writes that […]
We live in the darkest times. As I wait for Putin to start WW III in Crimea, an article in El País catches my attention: “La caída de personal y financiación hace regresar al CSIC una década atrás” (http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2014/02/24/actualidad/1393271163_538095.html). CSIC, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, the sub-heading announces, has lost already 2,200 workers and […]
I recently came across some online form asking for my h-index. The same site explained about the need to open a Google Scholars account, so I opened one and found that my h-index was 0. I’m so stupid I didn’t realise I should have to enter my publications manually one by one for Google to […]
An ex-student who’s now a good friend and a brilliant scholar tells me that he’s about to publish a volume based on his PhD dissertation. So far, so good. What truly scares the bejeesus out of my scholarly self is what he explains next. It seems that his publishing house (a mid-range academic one) warned […]
For the last five weeks I’ve been teaching an MA course with the title of ‘Postmodernity: New Sexualities/New Textualities.’ This was originally called ‘The Discourses of Desire,’ a title I much preferred but that was dropped out to include some reference to the confusing idea that we live in postmodern times (they seem to be […]
Two weeks ago I attended a conference and I found myself listening to a paper which dealt exactly with the topic of one of my publications (a chapter in a collective volume, four years old). I’d rather not mention which topic as part of the self-censorship that I must apply here, or risk losing the […]
Since I managed to open my website –despite the little technical help we get and the odd quirks of the DRUPAL programme– I’ve been wondering about its possibilities for self-publication. My institution insists that self-published work should go to its digital depository, yet where the actual file is placed is ultimately quite irrelevant. What matters […]