Speak to me
March 18, 2013
In 2003, when I first went to Japan, I had only intended to stay for a year and then return to the US to do an MFA in Creative Writing. I ended up staying five years, in part because I became infatuated with the language and obsessed with becoming, as much as I could, ‘fluent’. …
Looking at and past
February 18, 2013
Happy to find this blog, happy to be a new member of the Nottingham community, and happy to do some thinking about the complexity of my presence as a white Westerner (American, but educated in England, with a Japanese wife–we get triple imperial points, I think) in Malaysia. I will be blogging here intermittently, but …
International projects – a university’s vast untapped potential
February 15, 2013
This is the first in a series of special blogs about setting up and supervising international and inter-campus projects based on the experiences of staff at the Nottingham University Business School (NUBS) in the UK and Malaysia. This first blog post looks at setting up an international project from a UK perspective based on the experiences of …
Shooting Elephants on the International Branch Campus II
February 1, 2013
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 …
Towards a pedagogy of capacity development
December 3, 2012
This third post reflecting on issues of inequalities of global knowledge production owes its existence to a coincidence. Sitting down earlier this week to start collecting my thoughts for a day to be spent with Michael Crossley from Bristol honing a research bid on our planned partnership with the University of the South Pacific, I …
Mapping the uneven landscape of academic knowledge production
November 15, 2012
In my previous KWBN blog reflecting on my recent visit to Fiji, I argued that we should see the global South as sites of theory generation, not just as providing exotic exceptions to “universal” Northern theory. However, I noted that this was far from the norm. Indeed, my starting point for my reflection was the …
Shooting Elephants on the International Branch Campus I
November 2, 2012
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 …
Do we want knowledge without borders?
October 30, 2012
Preparing a workshop on writing for journals in Suva, Fiji, and working on a research bid with Pacific Island colleagues, I was struck by the realisation that I could only think of one journal article in the leading international and comparative education journals that had been written by an author from the region, and that …
Total Campus (TM)
October 4, 2012
In the previous post, ‘Post-Purchase Dissonance and the Higher Education Product’ we began to think about, specifically, international campus activity in relation to the unusually long and changing experience of the educational product. Interviews with student informants have consistently given even greater emphasis than we had anticipated to the importance of peer-to-peer support networks (formal …
Post-Purchase Dissonance and the Higher Education ‘Product’
The research literature on ‘Buyer Behaviour’, particularly in marketing studies, consistently draws attention to the whole buying process rather than just the moment of purchase decision. The function of marketing is to ‘prepare’ the buyer for the purchase, by informing or educating about choices, and steering towards the vendor’s own product. Once the product is …
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