Research and Politics

It’s taken a while to get around to it but you can’t talk about research for long without getting on to the topic of politics. Yes, research, just like everything else is bogged down in politics both organizationally and at the national level.

Organizationally, your Faculty can either talk you up or talk you down, it’s as simple as that. Often when you are starting out and little or no threat to anyone then you may find you are talked up more often than talked down. As you find your feet in research, get promoted a couple of times, you will find you are talked down more and more. Your research is not high quality enough, you don’t work with enough with other staff, you don’t produce enough, you don’t obtain enough funding and the list goes on and on …..

The lack of resources for research is one of the main reasons for the politics. People will try to obtain an advantage by creating a perception about your work and so it is largely personally driven. It has been said that university politics is so heated because the stakes are just so low!

PhDs and Coursework

PhDs in Australia are usually threeyears of full-time research. Recently several universities have introduced coursework in the first year covering research methods and research philosophy.What are your views on these two kinds of PhDs? Do you think the coursework is valuable?


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What Motivates You To conduct Research?

I think I asked this before but what motivates you to do research? How much is it externally driven by your university? Do you think you are supported in your research? What are your plans for your research?


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Research Proposal Presentations

Students presenting their PhD proposals often end up developing a lot of slides for a 30 to 40 minute presentation. My suggestion is to cut it down to 9 or 10 maximum.

1 Title slide
2 Practice or theory problem being addressed and significance of this
3 Literature or key theories
4 Research model
5 Research questions
6 Research design
7 Research design (sometimes only one is needed)
8 Expected contribution
9 Timeline for project
10 Any questions slide?

This way the presenter doesn't have to rush through many slides and can spend time making eye contact with the audience.

The key point is that the student should answer the questions and not the supervisor. It is research training and after all the student's project and it is good to get used to answering questions and thinking on your feet.

I hope this helps? Has anyone any suggestions for students presenting proposals? I think they often get very nervous because it is the first time they have presented as a researcher. I was nervous the first time I stood up infront of an audience to talk about research. Even though I was a lecturer and had presented for years my knees were knocking together lol.

Conversations on Research

I have been reminded recently that a good conversation about research has many benefits. It is enjoyable for starters to be able to discuss things that are on one's mind. One enhances one's knowledge because of what is said but also because of the chance to articulate partially formed ideas. Without these chances to discuss research, ideas are often left partially formed. It takes a certain level of trust between participants to have a good research conversation.

I'd like to see more comments appearing on the blog but they remain sparse. The numbers visiting the blog average around 40 or so a week. This is pretty good as I don't promote it much. Any suggestions on how to get more traffic would be appreciated. The more people that visit hopefully the better the dialogue we can have.


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Asking the Hard Questions: Contrasting Mobile Technology in Developed and Developing Economies (Elsie Gakere)

The ResearchGap Website features two interesting discussions on Mobile Technology. One paper examines Mobile technology in healthcare, while the other focuses on Mobile technology within banking, developing economies (a case of mobile banking culture in Ghana). These papers engage the paradox of why Mobile Technology, despite being relatively inexpensive, sufficiently sophisticated and seemingly well-positioned, has persisted in being of limited use particularly in healthcare. Fundamental systemic issues are attributed as the underlying obstacle to adoption of Mobile technology in the healthcare sector.

In my view, when placed side by side, mobile technology seems to yield differential outcomes in developing economies, contrasted with developed economies. I tend to agree that Systemic differences are the likely culprit behind the variance. In the case of developing economies, basic mobile technology has only recently become rapidly ubiquitous. For example in parts of Latin America, India’s and Africa’s technological hubs, much of the populace has access to basic mobile technology. Therefore systemic challenges for extension of mobile telephony for healthcare and banking to the underserved are rapidly becoming a well-occupied frontier, where funding remains the key constraint. Granted, such applications are at a very basic level. But again, such is compatible with resource-poor contexts. At a systemic level, perhaps rapid uptake of mobile technology in resource-poor contexts engages because there is an inherent consistency of basic architectures across the social and technological systems; Mainly the ‘basics’ of the mobile technologies are deployed in ‘basic ways’ for ‘basic’ healthcare and ‘basic’ banking, etc: In a word, ‘Keeping It Simple’!

So how is it that well-resourced developed economies, despite having highly sophisticated mobile telephony industries, and similarly highly techno-savvy healthcare and banking sectors, appear to struggle to establish convergences as effortlessly as we would expect? Is it possible that when technology is so highly advanced, competing alternatives as well as spikes in complexity, come into play to complicate the systemic puzzle? Is the crux of the systemic challenge of couched in the mandate to establish convergence across already mature, complex technologies that were originally designed for divergence?
True, in recent times electronic devices are increasingly being designed for convergence, but the complexities of social systems may yet have some catching up to do.

Elsie Gakere

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Doing Research and Having Fun ....yes we can! New Poster - Elsie Gakere

For many researchers undertaking their PhD, doing research is serious! Doing research and having fun are incompatible, right? Wrong! The Researchfocus Website has an article titled “Research as a social process” – a must read if it’s been a while since you had fun with your PhD. The article features a humorous account almost 3 decades old, but whose witty admonition on the vagaries of research work is not lost.

I would speak for researchers who work externally, in saying that isolated ponderings must quickly be accommodated as the norm. But reading through this article leaves one not only smiling, but also more aware of the importance of creating fun opportunities to make casual conversation out of one’s otherwise ‘serious research’. After all, until our research work can touch the real world, it remains utopian and unproductive. Also, the funny side of all-things-research can become a useful resource for critique and reality check (– in addition to being a curious ‘research archive’ that can span across the decades :)

Elsie Gakere