1,720,989 research outputs found
Echoes of my father: an autoethnographic exploration of fatherhood, memory, and learning
No full textThis thesis is an autoethnographic exploration of fatherhood, memory, and learning in post-revolutionary Iran. Rooted in personal narrative, it traces how my relationship with my father, at once historian, teacher, and companion in thought, shaped my identity as a daughter and a learner. Through storytelling, reflection, and cultural analysis, I examine how his quiet presence, emotional attentiveness, and trust in my intellectual abilities challenged conventional expectations of gender and authority in our society. Rather than offering a general account of Iranian fatherhood or womanhood, this thesis traces the singular yet resonant story of one man whose gentle, curious, and steadfast way of being opened space for dignity, mobility, and learning. It considers how memory becomes a method of both inquiry and connection, allowing the past to speak not only through facts, but through gestures, silences, bookshelves, and everyday rituals of care. The work culminates in a return to my hometown of Tabriz, where I hope to fulfill my father's long-held dream of opening a public library in his name. In doing so, I reflect on how private histories can offer quiet resistance to dominant narratives and how acts of remembrance can become forms of continuity, rooted not in nostalgia but in commitment. This thesis contributes to broader conversations about education, cultural memory, and identity by foregrounding lived experience, especially the ways in which learning takes shape through relationships that honor presence, trust, and mutual growth
Agency and Articulation in Doctoral Writing:Building the Messy Research Journey into a Well-Constructed Thesis
Full text linkThe research journey is a messy one, full of surprises, difficulties, discoveries, hard work, beginnings and some form of closure. The thesis, whether a monograph or published/publishable articles and a theorised "wrap", is well organised and lucidly articulated; it evidences consistent theories and themes; asks questions and analyses findings; presents a coherent argument and story; and is readable, its points clear, its contribution original (enough), its quality publishable (Winter, 2000; Holbrook et al., 2006; Kiley & Wisker, 2011). In this chapter I am interested in exploring how doctoral students and supervisors transition in an iterative way between the messy rich journey and the well-built thesis, and how this well-conceptualised, well-articulated work is recognised by students, supervisors and examiners
Exploring Post/Graduate Academic Writing Practices, Research Literacies and Writing Identities
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Re-imagining Doctoral Writings as Emergent Open Systems
Full text linkDrawing on critical realism, complexity theory, and emergence, this chapter supports the call to re-imagine doctoral writing by arguing that academic writing in general is a complex open and emergent social system that can change. Several reasons to re-imagine doctoral writing are discussed. The first reason is that academic writings already exhibit considerable diversity. This suggests that the conditions of possibility for re-imagining them are already in place and provide a conceptual space from which to further imagine. Second, there are
epistemic reasons for re-thinking how we write, as evidenced by research on socio-semiotics. Several examples of doctoral writers
who have re-imagined their writing for epistemic reasons are given. To explain how change in social phenomena is possible and how it can continue to be justified, I draw on the theory of complex permeable open systems. These systems are emergent and, as such, allow us to think of social phenomena, such as writing, as non-reductive organic unities whose characteristics emerge from but cannot be reduced to any single constituent feature (such as grammar or lexis). By re-thinking academic writings in this way, we can provide a rationale to explain how they can continue to change. The chapter concludes by sharing the work of scholars engaged in re-imagining doctoral writings. The significance for writing studies is that critical realism offers a systematic and critical space within which to explain change
in social phenomena and provides a theoretical foundation for continuing to re-imagine conditions of possibility
V? and Veitapui as Decolonial Potential: Ongoing Talatalanoa and Re-imagining Doctoral Being and Becoming
Full text linkKo e taumuʻa ʻo e tohi ni ke tau talatalanoa fekauʻaki moe vā moe veitapui. This chapter is centered on vā and veitapui, Tongan concepts grounded in Indigenous Pacific philosophies linked to relational spaces. I articulate how the decolonial potentialities of doctoral being and becoming require intimate navigation and negotiation, highlighting the fluid, rich, and nuanced knowledges within vā and veitapui. Doctoral writing, as understood within vā and veitapui, provided a critical space for me to legitimize and value Indigenous Pacific thought in relation to dominant western knowledge. By employing Tongan concepts, I share how, through doctoral learning and writing, the encounters and experiences strengthened and affirmed my fatongia— an obligation and responsibility to honour and safeguard our cultural knowledges. For me, engaging in my own doctoral writing project was a matter of socio–political struggle and epistemic disobedience, because the academic traditions linked to perceived “proper” writing conventions were not what I adhered to in my own doctoral writing (McDowall & Ramos, 2017). In this chapter, I share how the concepts of vā and veitapui aided me in uncovering time-spaces within doctoral learning and education, and I re-imagine how Tongan ideas, language, and practices could be re-presented through writing
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Ph.D. by Publication or Monograph Thesis?:Supervisors and candidates Negotiating the Purpose of the Thesis when Choosing Between Formats
Full text linkIn this chapter, I investigate how the Ph.D. by publication has become more and more prevalent within the humanities and the social sciences over the last couple of de-cades in Denmark. Based on interviews with Ph.D. supervisors and doctoral candidates at two Danish universities, I analyze how they articulate, construct, and imagine the thesis when they legitimize their choice of and preference for thesis format, be it the monograph thesis or the Ph.D. by publication. This analysis shows how the choice of thesis format is most often legitimized through instrumental discourses, emphasizing what it does for individuals or institutions rather than what it does for disciplines and knowledge. Terms like completion, re-sults, competency, career, status, statistics, and return on invest-ment are common—foregrounding how the thesis contributes to individual or institutional performance. Interestingly, within this instrumental way of talking and thinking about the thesis, the monograph thesis is beginning to be seen as a less ideal or legitimate format and the Ph.D. by publication is being seen as a more obvious choice. Alongside these instrumental ideas and imaginings, there are other discourses at work imagining the thesis in terms of being an intellectual endeavor, a process of inquiry and knowledge transformation, and a contributor to knowledge and disciplines. Nevertheless, in this chapter I show how drawing on intellectual discourses alone is insuffi-cient when it comes to arguing for participants’ choice of thesis format regardless if it is the monograph thesis or the Ph.D. by publication
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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