Research @ OU Graduate School

Macadamia is an important lucrative crop globally, especially among rural smallholder producers in Malawi. However, climate change threatens production & productivity. As such smallholders will be required to adapt and become resilience to climate change. Agroforestry provides a viable option for climate change mitigation and adaptation. In this episode we explore the benefits associated with climate smart macadamia agroforestry in Malawi. This episode has been created by Emmanuel Zuza, climate science researcher doing his PhD in the Department of Environment, Earth & Ecosystem Sciences at the Open University.

NMT - The Neno Macadamia Trust https://www.nenomacadamiatrust.org/home.html

Agroforestry for climate adaptation https://chooseliberation.com/blogs/journal/agroforestry-for-climate-adaptation

Nutcellars

https://www.nutcellars.com/blog

Emmanuel Zuza | OU people profiles https://www.open.ac.uk/people/zx789244

Emmanuel Zuza-Google Scholar https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=ItRHcXMAAAAJ&hl=en

Emmanuel Zuza-Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmanuel-junior-zuza-76028275/

Emmanuel Zuza Jnr (@EJEYZiE) / Twitter https://twitter.com/EJEYZiE

What is corporate crime? How “true” are true crime podcasts? This episode is brought to you by Jana Macfarlane Horn who tries to answer these questions to give you more insight into her research about corporate crime discourses in documentaries and podcasts. She will cover some basic concepts of Criminology, crime media research, and true crime podcasting. Jana will also discuss some of the most prominent corporate crime cases, such as the LIBOR manipulation, Deepwater Horizon, and the Rana Plaza factory collapse to give you more context to the criminological theories she will cover.

Jana’s OU profile:

https://www.open.ac.uk/people/js37449

Twitter: @JanaMH___

Suggested reading/references:

Barak, G. (1988) Newsmaking criminology: Reflections of the media, intellectuals, and crime. Justice Quarterly, 5(4), pp. 565-587.

Friedrichs, D.O. (2010) Trusted criminals: white collar crime in contemporary society. 4th Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Tombs, S. and Whyte, D. (2015) The corporate criminal: why corporations must be abolished. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Yardley, E., Kelly, E. and Robinson-Edwards, S. (2019) “Forever trapped in the imaginary of late capitalism? The serialized true crime podcast as a wake-up call in times of criminological slumber,” Crime Media Culture, 15(3), pp. 503–521.

The OU changes lives, and is more than a place to get a degree while you work. I am an first generation LGBT scientist, and I couldn’t have got my education anywhere else. I thought I’d never achieve this due to my circumstances and the homophobia I faced growing up, but with the help of my husband James, my brilliant friends and the progressive and admirable philosophical approach to education at the OU I am now studying a PhD in butterfly conservation. In this podcast, I’m going to discuss my educational journey through a poor performance at GCSE to getting DTP funding with CENTA at the OU.

Further info:

Bradley Neal | OU people profiles https://www.open.ac.uk/people/bn925

CENTA – The Central England NERC Training Alliance http://centa.ac.uk/

In this episode, Sarah Huxley, a third year PhD student at the OU, speaks with one of her research participants, Nora Dooley, a staff member with the not for profit, Coaches Across Continents (CAC). They discuss Nora’s advice for qualitative researchers, especially those considering/ already engaged with an online ethnography. The conversation covers Nora’s ‘do’s and don’ts’ for researchers, as well as her reflections on surprises during data gathering, challenges, and ultimately if she found the research process fun? Sarah sums up the episode by reflecting upon her approach to the research process as one of ‘disciplined improvisation’ (based on the notion by RK Sawyer, 2004). As well as the possibilities that the pandemic has catalysed in relation to thinking about online embodied ethnography. Enjoy!

A special thanks to: Nora Dooley from Coaches Across Continents https://coachesacrosscontinents.org/ for contributing her ideas and voice, and to Mark Childs from Pedagodzilla https://www.pedagodzilla.com/ for providing podcasting advice and support! It was much needed.

Reference: Sawyer, R. K. (2004) ‘Creative Teaching: Collaborative Discussion as Disciplined Improvisation’, Educational Researcher, 33(2), pp. 12–20. doi: 10.3102/0013189X033002012.

Sarah's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AidHoover

What is it like to do a PhD while starting your family? How can you get practical and emotional support while writing your thesis or launching your academic career when you have small children?

Recent OU PhD graduates Dr Emilie Giles and Dr Jade Levell talk about having and raising their children during their doctorates and beyond, the trials and tribulations, how they made it work and how the ‘perfect’ thesis is a done thesis.

Further reading

Theses

Giles, Emilie (2021). E-textiles for Self-Expression: Participatory Making with Blind and Visually Impaired People. PhD thesis The Open University http://oro.open.ac.uk/77859/

Levell, Jade (2020). The Road Home: Masculinity, Vulnerability, And Violence : A Narrative Study Using Music Elicitation With Men Who Had Childhood Experience Of Domestic Violence/Abuse And On-Road/Gang-Involvement. PhD thesis The Open University http://oro.open.ac.uk/70991/

Support groups and resources

Brearley, J. (2021) Pregnant Then Screwed: The Truth About the Motherhood Penalty and How to Fix It, Simon and Schuster.

Evans, E. and Grant, C. (eds) (2008) Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, Rutgers University Press. Facebook group Mama, PhD https://www.facebook.com/groups/26883644770

Mother Pukka - For people who happen to be parents https://www.motherpukka.co.uk/

Doctoral Mom Life https://www.facebook.com/Doctoral-Mom-Life-1448686481853569/

Is intelligence fixed and predetermined by genes? Is fun a distraction that should just be used as a reward after learning? Learning styles aren’t really as effective as they appear to be and misconceptions are more difficult to overcome than you might think. In this podcast episode, PhD student Katherine Langford https://fass.open.ac.uk/psychology/phd-student/katherine-langford#ou-org discusses four misconceptions about learning with interviews from Emily Dowdeswell from the RUMPUS research group https://wels.open.ac.uk/rumpus and Dr Liz FitzGerald https://iet.open.ac.uk/people/elizabeth.fitzgerald.

Suggested further reading:

Brown, P.C., Roediger III, H.L. and McDaniel, M.A. (2014) Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Belknap Press.

Dowdeswell, E. & Langford, K. (2021) Tricky Physics: What’s Fun Got to Do with It? https://blog.eera-ecer.de/author/emily-dowdeswell-katherine-langford/

Hattie, J. (2012) Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximising Impact on Learning. Routledge.

Willingham, D.T. (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. Jossey-Bass.

In this episode OU WELS Postgraduate Researchers Bukola Oyinloye and Mel Green discuss Mel’s EdD project exploring the effects of teacher identity on online pedagogical practice within Higher Education. Mel talks about the decision to take the EdD route to perform her ‘action research’ and how the pandemic has influenced her project. They discuss how Mel presents herself as a black woman in her online tutorials, and how she juggles her many hats, as mother, teacher and student. Her tips for other busy researchers are to stay on top of your organisation, be honest with yourself and others, and treat yourself with compassion.

Further reading:

Yao, C. W. and Boss, G. J. (2020), '“A Hard Space to Manage”: The Experiences of Women of Color Faculty Teaching Online', Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education, (13 (1)), pp1-15, DOI: 10.1080/19407882.2019.1639197

This episode of the 'Research @ OU Graduate School' Podcast is an informal introduction of the OU's Posthuman Collective research group. In the podcast the Posthumanist Collective members, students and academics, will talk about how and why the group started and how the weaving, thinking, and becoming with each other, their PhD experiences and their research led to different, positive, and productive ways of working and researching in the academia. The group will discuss several key Posthumanist and New Materialist concepts and modes of inquiry, such as diffraction or the processes of making-with, to provide a window into and start a discussion around these significant theories. More importantly, they will talk about what Posthumanist/New Materialist concepts do for our daily struggles, in the academic and personal life and at times of a pandemic, and how they can be harnessed towards rebuilding and rethinking what next in relation to academic career and personal life. The following content therefore engages, entangles, and thinks-with Posthumanist and New Materialist theories as they are lived and enacted by a group of OU researchers in their personal and academics contexts. To contact the group please email [email protected] or reach them individually through their respective institutional emails.

AUTHORS

Petra Vackova is a fourth-year PhD student at the Open University and a member of a Children's Research Centre. She has recently completed her PhD thesis that engages feminist new materialist theories to explore socio-material interactions in and around artmaking beyond processes of social inclusion and exclusion and towards educational justice to come in early-years settings working with historically disadvantaged children and families.

Donata Puntil is studying for a Doctorate in Education at the Open University as part of the Language Acts and Worldmaking Project. She is also the Programme Director for the Modern language Centre at KCL, and she has an extensive teaching and research experience in Second Language Acquisition, Intercultural Studies and Applied Linguistics, with a particular focus on using cinema and literature in language teaching.

Carolyn Cooke has recently, successfully completed her PhD at the University of Aberdeen focused on music student teachers' experiences of 'living' pedagogy. She has worked as a music teacher, a head of music in a large secondary school, and is now working as a Lecturer at the Open University with particular responsibilities for the music PGCE course and generic aspects of PGCE courses for six secondary subjects.

Emily Dowdeswell is a second-year PhD student at the Open University and her doctoral research explores the role of fun in learning. In her research she focuses on the perspectives of primary schools pupils to learn how they understand fun and learning to develop and build an innovative model for the role of fun in learning in primary education.

READING LIST

1. Haraway, D. (2013). When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

2. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.Duke University Press.

3. Braidotti, R. (2006). Affirming the Affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity. Rhizomes, Fall 2005/(11/12), 1–19. Retrieved from http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/

4. Burnett, C, Merchant and Neumann, M. (2020). Closing the gap? Overcoming limitations in sociomaterial accounts of early literacy. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 20:1, pp. 111-133.

5. Braidotti, R. (2011) Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press.

6. Haraway, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: the Science Questions in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies, 14:3, pp. 575-599.

7. Tsing, A. (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

8. Tsing, A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Open University Postgraduate researchers Natalie Tegama and Angela Charles discuss Angela's PhD project 'Black Women's Experiences in Prison through an Intersectional Lens'.

Reading list:

Cardale, et al 2017

Counted out: black, asian and minority ethnic women in the criminal justice system. Prison Reform Trust

Ruth Chigwanda Bailey, ( 1997)

Black Women's Experiences of Criminal Justice : A discourse on disadvantage

Angela Devlin, (1998)

Invisible Women: What's Wrong with Women's Prisons?

Open University Postgraduate researcher Natalie Tegama is joined by Natalia-Nana Lester-Bush to exchange ideas and discuss Natalia’s work in equality, diversity and inclusion; whiteness as a construct; ‘development’ work; and how decolonialisation might work, among other things.

Natalia's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womanup7/?hl=en

Reading list:

On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis

Book by Catherine E. Walsh and Walter Mignolo

Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice

Book by Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization

Book by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader

by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Editor)