Overwhelming Questions: Thoughts on the UNMC Research Priorities Workshop, April 30 2013

Our UNMC Research Priorities Workshop brought into focus many elements of the sheer range of research taking place on the campus. It gave colleagues the opportunity to explore concepts and themes which unite our work across the disparate disciplines and faculties. Coming to the process from an Arts/Social Sciences background, I found a surprising level …

Transgression

The Korean-American graffiti artist David Choe is, perhaps, most well-known now for being a Facebook millionaire, one of the people who were given stock in lieu of cash for work done for the company. In Choe’s case, he painted a mural at the Facebook headquarters in 2005 and instead of taking USD$60,000, he was given a small …

Berhati-hati! Researching While Mat Salleh

Part 1 of a series of posts on the complexities of engaging in political social science in a neo-authoritarian state. Cross-posted to devastatinglyabstract.com Foreign Dissident Western Troublemaker Meddling Mat Salleh Scion of Soros Enemy of the State Until I moved to Malaysia I never knew I was so dangerous. Serius, lah! You probably think I’m …

Shooting Elephants on the International Branch Campus II

In the previous post I began the work of facing up to the existence of some elephants on the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. The first group of elephants were the metaphorical ‘elephants in the room’, those sensitive and intractable issues about life on the international campus which we all know but rarely discuss. The …

Shooting Elephants on the International Branch Campus I

I have recently become preoccupied by two elephants. The first is the ‘elephant in the room’: the enormous problem which everyone knows about but which no-one wants to discuss because it is too vast even to conceive or articulate, much less resolve. Let sleeping elephants lie. The second elephant is the unfortunate beast in George …

Return of the Civilizing Mission

At the recent Observatory on Borderless Higher Education ‘Global Forum’ in Kuala Lumpur, ‘New Players and New Directions: The Challenges of International Branch Campus management’, there was much to digest about current thinking concerning Transnational Education. The delegate list itself was something of an internationalisation ‘Who’s Who’, and the programme offered a rich set of …