New Books in Higher Education

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: How both of today’s guests became involved in higher education in prison. Why this work is personal to them. Funding and representation issues in higher education in prison. The complexities of supporting students who are incarcerated without supporting the carceral system. And a discussion of the Journal of Higher Education in Prison. Our guest is: Dr. Erin Corbett, who earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation examined the relationship between educational attainment level and post-release employment outcomes for formerly incarcerated people in Connecticut. While pursuing her doctorate, Erin launched a nonprofit that provides not-for-credit, postsecondary level courses in three correctional facilities in Connecticut. She has also taught in correctional facilities in Rhode Island with College Unbound, and guest lectured to incarcerated students in the Iowa through the University of Iowa Liberal Arts Beyond Bars (UI LABB) program. Erin was the Assistant Director for Applied Research at the Institute for Higher Education Policy focusing on federal policy related to the intersection of higher education policy and policy related to educational access for justice-impacted people; and she was the Director of Policy at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice before transitioning to working with SCEA full time and consulting.Our guest is: Dr. Breea Willingham, incoming Associate Professor of Criminology at UNC Wilmington. Dr. Willingham earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Willingham’s research examines the intersections of race, gender, higher education, and the injustice system. She is particularly interested in examining Black women’s pathways to incarceration, their experiences with higher education in prison, and providing a platform for Black women impacted by the injustice system to tell their stories. Influenced by her experiences as a sister and aunt of two men serving life sentences, Dr. Willingham’s research also focuses on the societal ramifications of mass incarceration, especially its impact on families. Her work on incarcerated fathers and their children, Black women’s prison narratives, teaching in women’s prisons, and Black women and police violence has been published in academic journals and edited collections. In 2020, Dr. Willingham was appointed Managing Editor of the Journal for Higher Education in Prison, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes on the topics and issues in higher education in prison.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator of the Academic Life.Listeners to this episode might also be interested in: The Journal of Higher Education in Prison The Alliance for Higher Education in Prison Ear Hustle, a podcast hosted by persons who are incarcerated at San Quentin  A conversation about the Emerson Prison Initiative Dr. Erin Corbett on Beyond Prisons Abolition. Feminism. Now. edited by Angela Davis et al. Punishment and Society, by Breea Willingham Privilege and Punishment, by Matthew Clair No Mercy Here, by Sarah Haley You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Providing your children with a good education is one of the best gifts you can give. But it’s not straightforward.Education costs and student loan debt are skyrocketing. In some cases, college costs upwards of $300,000 for four years. And calculations for financial aid and merit awards are complex and opaque.How do you find the best education options that fit your budget and are right for your child? And how do you save for your kids’ college without wrecking your own retirement, or putting your other goals completely out of reach?Ann Garcia―known as The College Financial Lady―is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and college finance expert, and is here to help.In How to Pay for College, Ann shows you how to develop a financial plan for college that really works, including: How to save and how much to save. How to find good college choices that fit your budget. How to get scholarships and tax benefits. How to talk to your kids about the costs and benefits of going to college. Plus invaluable information and inside tricks to help you crack the college financial challenge.Detailed explanations of the key elements in planning for college―the FAFSA’s methodology, merit awards, 529 plans, AP credits, student loans, financial aid awards, budgeting, and more―are paired with worksheets and exercises to give you a full picture of your family’s college financial position.This definitive guide gives you everything you need to give your children the best education possible, at a price you can all afford.John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scholars want to decolonize everything, and universities say they are doing the hard work of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. But is anything really being done, or is it all for show?In this episode, we approach these questions through three words that are common inside and outside of academia: decolonize, reconciliation, and colonialism.—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————-You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.——————-ABOUT THE SHOW——————For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Archives are much more than silent repositories of historical material. They are rich sites for teaching and learning, for collaboration and for creative and critical exploration of our past, present and future. In their new book, Teaching through the Archives: Text, Collaboration, and Activism (Southern Illinois University Press, 2022), Tarez Samra Graban and Wendy Hayden bring together 37 contributors to explore the many possible uses of archival collections in the teaching of writing and history and in generating scholarly collaboration, pedagogical experimentation and community building within and beyond the university.Section I focuses on how approaching the archive primarily as text fosters habits of mind essential for creating and using archives, for critiquing or inventing knowledge-making practices, and for being good stewards of private and public collections.Section II argues for conducting archival projects as collaboration through experiential learning and for developing a preservationist consciousness through disciplined research.Section III details praxis for revealing, critiquing, and intervening in historic racial omissions and gaps in the archives.The book’s contributors see archives as sites of activism, as places where students can develop critical skills, test and question established research methodologies while also learning to appreciate the specialist knowledge of archivists.Educators in disciplines including rhetoric and composition, literature, history and archival studies will find many inspiring ideas in this book. While the chapters offer university-based case studies, many of the ideas could also be adapted to the secondary classroom and to non-institutional educational settings.In this episode, Alice Garner interviews Tarez Graban about the genesis of the book, the important lessons and possibilities she and Wendy Hayden sought to draw out from the contributors’ research, as well as Dr Graban’s recent work in transnational and postcolonial Southern African archival research and repatriation.More on the editors:Tarez Samra Graban, associate professor in the English department at Florida State University, is the author of Women’s Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories and coauthor of GenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the Twenty-First Century.Wendy Hayden, associate professor at Hunter College, CUNY, is the author of Evolutionary Rhetoric: Sex, Science, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Feminism.Alice Garner is a historian, teacher and performer with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview with Jo Mackiewicz, professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University, and with Isabelle Thompson, emerita professor of technical and professional communication and former coordinator of the English Center at Auburn University. We talk about their book Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors (Routledge, 2018) and writing.Jo Mackiewicz : "The more I think about writing center interactions and write books about it, the more I think that the value a tutor brings to learning is this: to show students a thinking process, to show students an analysis process about writing — to show them a self-questioning of yourself as writer, and also a questioning of any sort of text, a questioning of your relationship to the text, a questioning of what you know about the subject matter, of how you evaluate your handling of that subject matter. Tutors model this process for student writers."Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Nicholas Rowe, researcher and educator based in Finland. We talk his book The Realities of Completing a PhD: How to Plan for Success (Routledge, 2021) and about what needs to change.Nicholas Rowe : "Writing for different purposes, for different audiences is a huge skill, because people are going to need this communication skill in their research proposal when they present their ideas to advisors, but also in their publications when they share their ideas with colleagues. Now, of courses, everybody's systems and processes are different, but the key communicative skills that you need are fairly much the same, and if you don't need them at one stage of a project, you're going to need them at another."Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A special opportunity to hear from Sara Custer, editor of The Campus (Times Higher Education), about the role of journalism and reporting in higher education. Avi and Sara cover topics ranging from the role of media in increasing cross-institution collaboration and sharing during the pandemic to how universities can do a better job supporting their junior scholars. Also, don't miss out on the opportunity to learn how you can publish in Times Higher Education yourself!Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope (Stanford University Press, 2022), sociologist Victoria Reyes combines her personal experiences with research findings to examine how academia creates conditional citizenship for its marginalized members. Reyes draws from her family background, experiences during routine university life, and academic scholarship to theorize the academic outsiders as those who "are constantly reminded that our presence in the academy is contingent and in constant flux" (10-11). She elaborates on how love and worth are assessed in the university and her experiences as a mother in the academy. The final chapter calls for academic justice and offers practical strategies to combat the academy's exclusionary practices. In this book Reyes contributes to important conversations in the university on the experiences of people of color, women, and those from marginalized backgrounds. This book will be of interest to those who experience the academy's conditional citizenship, those who want to understand how the university perpetuates inequality, and those who want to challenge these conditions. Victoria Reyes is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Global Borderlands (Stanford, 2019).Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (Illinois, 2022).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul A. Djupe, Anand Edward Sokhey, and Amy Erica Smith, The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences (Oxford UP, 2022) explores a more holistic understanding of knowledge production in the social sciences, moving beyond the publication process often required by those in tenure/tenure-track positions to thinking about the role of community in the construction of knowledge. Political Scientists Paul A. Djupe (Denison University), Anand Edward Sokhey (University of Colorado-Boulder), and Amy Erica Smith (Iowa State University) emphasize the idea of academics as citizens in communities and institutions, endowed with certain rights and responsibilities with regard to knowledge production, exchange, and promotion. These actions go beyond simply research; knowledge production incorporates teaching, reviewing, blogging, podcasting, commenting, mentoring, and other similar actions, all of which inherently depend on collaboration and community.Djupe, Smith, and Sokhey all have first-hand experience in the “publication pipeline” process. They accurately and intricately detail aspects of community that are overlooked within the academia. The collaborative nature of The Knowledge Polity speaks to the power of co-authorship in political science and sociology. The research indicates that building relationships with peers and mentors alike provides scholars with access to people whose advice is trusted, people who they consider friends, and people who know other scholars whose advice can also be trusted and valued. Similar to co-authorship, peer review is another dimension of knowledge exchange, collaboration, and the rights and responsibilities of the knowledge polity. The review process is reciprocal, and there is an innate sense that it is a duty, especially when the authors discuss “reviewer debt” (reviewing fewer papers than one is submitting) and how it is usually “paid off” when scholars reach tenure and have more time and capacity to give back to the community. Most academics would like to do more reviews, proving there is a powerful desire to participate in this important act of knowledge production.The authors use data from an extensive Professional Activity in the Social Sciences (PASS) study, which sampled responses from 1,700 sociology and political science faculty about their publications, and experiences with regard to the process. They integrate different aspects of all of these findings in each chapter, examining for differences across disciplines, methodology, gender, race, and age, among other variables. The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences integrates a diversity of empirical research, qualitative inputs, and sophisticated analysis to better understand knowledge production within the social sciences. It becomes clear that the idea of the solitary scholar, alone in his/her office, creating knowledge is much more of a myth, since the reality is that knowledge production is much more of a collective undertaking and experience.Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality (Routledge, 2021) is about methods for using observational data to make causal inferences. It provides an extensive discussion of causality and the variety of both obvious and subtle challenges to inferring a causal relationship between the variables, using causal diagrams. It then goes through the major techniques that economists use to address these challenges, including regression, matching, simulation, fixed effects, event studies, differences-in-differences, instrumental variables, and regression discontinuity. The book is designed to be accessible to students or practitioners without the extensive math background that is taken for granted in typical econometrics textbooks. Instead, the emphasis is on the intuition behind the techniques and how to implement them with the widely-used programming languages R, Stata, and Python.Nick C. Huntington-Klein is an Assistant Professor at Seattle University. His research focuses on econometrics and higher education. His work has been published in the Economics of Education Review, AEA Papers and Proceedings, Economic Inquiry, Empirical Economics, and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. His book can be read online for free or purchased in print, and is accompanied by a wealth of teaching materials on the same website. Nick can also be found on Youtube and on Twitter.Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focus is the political economy of governance in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices