Wellbeing: How we make sense of it and what this means for teachers

In this paper, the authors discuss their grounded research carried out with teachers about the wellbeing of teachers. They explore the importance of making the concept of wellbeing more intimate and consider hedonic and eudaimonic ways of looking at wellbeing. They present a model of layered reflection which illuminates key factors that have an impact on the wellbeing of teachers.     

A Typology of State Financial Aid Grant Programs Using Latent Class Analysis

Research in Higher Education - State financial aid grant programs are commonly categorized as either need-based, merit-based, or both, but their initial eligibility requirements include many more...     

Mela: festival scenes in South Asian cinema

This article examines a recurrent film motif across a number of South Asian films, mostly called Mela. It also offers some observations on melas, actual and allegorical, as represented in films but often seeming to exceed their containment in context so as to say more about the conviviality of life, where this is at issue, where life is at a juncture in need of resolution within the cycle of becoming. The issues of violence, loss, national identity, politics of interpretation and repetition in ideology are canvassed. While the essay is focused upon Mela films themselves, and South Asian film more broadly, it has of course been important to note work by scholars such as M. Madhava Prasad, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Anjali Gera Roy, Tejaswini Niranjana, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the help of my students, some of whom are named below.     

Olfaction and emotion: The quest for olfactory restoration in two speech communities

ABSTRACT

Olfaction has been described as one of the least studied of the senses. This has certainly proven true in Communication. This project applies Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis to examine the role that olfaction plays in the cultural meaning systems of two speech communities: residents surrounding the Gowanus Canal and bereaved parents. The cultural hub used to explore the cultural significance of olfaction in both speech communities is feeling. The analyses illustrate how emotions are tied to associated sensations and further become activated through radiants of dwelling, relating and acting. The analysis also shows how olfaction may serve to unify and separate members of a community. The significance of this research encourages stretching the boundaries of communication studies by examining the less studied physical senses and the boundaries of Cultural Discourse Analysis by providing distinctions that others can incorporate when examining feelings.     

Occupational Knowledge and Practice amongst UK University Research Administrators

With the exception of lecturing staff, research on occupational groups and cultures within the UK higher education system is relatively sparse. This paper focuses upon one specialist group, to-date under-researched but which plays a central role in contemporary higher education administration: graduate research administrators. This occupational group is of particular interest as its members administer and manage an increasing complex and key area of university life, which in many cases appears to span the putative occupational divide between 'academic' and 'administrative' work. Based upon qualitative interviews with 27 research administrators, and using some of Bourdieu's conceptual devices, the paper analyses particular kinds of informal occupational knowledge and practice, necessary in order effectively to 'do' the complex task of research administration in the pressurized environment of contemporary British higher education.