New Books in Education

Can libraries be radical positive change agents in their communities?R. David Lenkes offers a guide for librarians who see their profession as a chance to make a positive difference in their communities —librarians who recognize that it is no longer enough to stand behind a desk waiting to serve.Lankes reminds libraries and librarians of their mission: to improve society by facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. In this book, he provides tools, arguments, resources, and ideas for fulfilling this mission. Librarians will be prepared to become radical positive change agents in their communities, and other readers will learn to understand libraries in a new way.The libraries of Ferguson, Missouri, famously became positive change agents in August 2014 when they opened their doors when schools were closed because of civil unrest after the shooting of an unarmed teen by police. Working with other local organizations, they provided children and their parents a space for learning, lunch, and peace. But other libraries serve other communities—students, faculty, scholars, law firms—in other ways. All libraries are about community.In The New Librarianship Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016), Lankes addresses the mission of libraries and explains what constitutes a library. He offers practical advice for librarian training; provides teaching notes for each chapter; and answers “Frequently Argued Questions” about the new librarianship.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: The hidden curriculum of the final year of the PhD program Writing your dissertation when you still have so much left to read about Why the final year of grad school is uniquely challenging How to determine if you should stay in your program or leave Why finishing your degree causes both relief and grief A discussion of the book Your PhD Survival Guide:Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year Our book is: Your PhD Survival Guide: Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year (Routledge, 2020).by Katherine Firth, Liam Connell, and Peta Freestone. Part of the 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' series from Routledge, this book offers practical and realistic guidance to students. Written in short chapters, this book is designed as an accessible toolkit for final year doctoral students. Drawing on an understanding of the intellectual, professional, practical and personal elements of the doctorate to help readers gain insight into what it means to finish a PhD and how to get there, this book covers the common challenges and ways to resolve them. Written for students in all disciplines, and relevant to university systems around the world, this book expertly guides students through the final 6–12 months of the thesis.Our guest is: Dr. Katherine Firth, who manages the academic programs of a residential college at the University of Melbourne, Australia and founded the Research Insiders Blog which has been running since 2013.Our guest is: Dr. Liam Connell, who has worked in research training and education since the late 2000s. He works in research development at La Trobe University, Australia.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode might also be interested in: How to Fix your Academic Writing Trouble (Open University Press) by Inger Mewburn, Katherine Firth and Shaun Lehmann Being Well in Academia: Ways to Feel Stronger, Safe and More Connected by Petra Boynton A Field Guide to Grad School by Jessica Calarco Level Up Your Essays by Katherine Firth Katherine Firth, ‘Should a PhD be hard?’, Research Degree Insiders Peta Freestone, ‘Valuing your writing: making a time budget’ 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. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Hear Dr. Rosina Lippi-Green talk about some of her shocking findings on language discrimination and bias on campus. Lippi-Green and Avi discuss her book English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the US (Routledge, 2011) and what the academic community can do to be more inclusive of scholars with different levels of English. We also discuss Rosina's transition from researcher to popular novelist.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Listen to this interview of Nigel Caplan, Associate Professor at the English Language Institute, University of Delaware. We talk generically.Nigel Caplan : "And this sort of brings us to an important point about knowledge and expertise in a discipline. The great genre scholar Doreen Starke-Meyerring said that academic writing tends to be transparent to experts in the discipline, and they forget how opaque it is to novices. So, if you study engineering, biology, philosophy, whatever it is, and you're immersed in that world all the time, it's very easy to believe that that is the only way of writing, because that's the only type of writing you have done for decades. And it quickly becomes, 'Well, that's obviously good writing.' And the idea is, 'Anything else is bad writing.' But experts don't realize what we see as English teachers, especially as teachers in English for Academic Purposes, where we work with students across the disciplines — what we see is that each discipline does have its own way of creating knowledge and communicating that knowledge. But that can be very opaque to a novice. And I think what novices need are the tools to crack open that opacity, and what experts need is a little reminder now and then that good writing is actually not transparent. It is highly contextual, it is something that needs to be learned, it is not natural in any sense. It is not automatically good writing just because you like it and it works in your field."Visit the Michigan Series in English for Academic and Professional Purposes here. Visit and join the Consortium on Graduate Communication here.Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

The pandemic has rapidly changed the world, making it one rife with online activity and information abundance. Education systems must be modified to match this new world. It must cater to the entrepreneurial, competitive, and independent generation that thrives in this world.In this podcast, Susana Gonçalves and Suzanne Majhanovich discuss their book Pandemic, Disruption and Adjustment in Higher Education and talk about the changing needs of students today, the challenges of tailoring higher education to be in tandem with the growing world of technology, and how to maintain integrity and mental health in the face of it all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness (MIT Press, 2021), social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good.Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including the futilitarian condition, homo futilitus, and semio-futility--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness.This urgent and provocative book chimes with the mood of the time by at once mapping the historical relationship between utilitarianism and capitalism, developing an original framework for understanding neoliberalism, and recounting the lived experience of uselessness in the early twenty-first century. At a time of epoch-defining disasters, from climate emergencies to deadly pandemics, countering the futility of neoliberal existence is essential to building an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.Neil Vallelly is a political and social theorist based at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research has appeared in journals such as Rethinking Marxism, Angelaki, and Poetics Today, and magazines, including New Internationalist and ROAR. In 2022, he will take up a two-year Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Otago, working on a history of capitalism and migrant detention. An Italian translation of Futilitarianism will be published in March 2022.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: What the two-body problem is Dr. Kelly Baker’s experience on the academic job market as a wife and mother How gender bias can play out in academic job searches Why the three-body problem is a more accurate framing of this issue How Kelly reimagined herself and her skill set for jobs outside the professoriate Kelly and Chris’s advice to other dual-career academic couples Our guests are: Dr. Kelly J. Baker and Dr. Chris Baker. Kelly is a religious studies Ph.D. and writer. She's the author of five books, including Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia, and the co-editor of Succeeding Outside the Academy with Joseph Fruscione. Her chapter, “What Would Your Poor Husband Do? Living with the Two-Body Problem” is the basis of this episode. Currently, she's the editor of Women in Higher Education and The National Teaching and Learning Forum.Chris has been a researcher and software developer in academia, industry, and government for over 20 years. Previously a scientist for the US Department of Energy, he developed software for the world’s largest supercomputers and published research in leading international journals. At ServiceMesh, and later CSC, Chris worked to streamline development and IT operations for numerous Fortune 1000 companies. After developing and leading the Nomad ecosystem team at HashiCorp, Chris joined Amazon Web Services as a Principal Engineer in the Core Container Technology group. Chris holds a Ph.D. in Computational Science from Florida State University.Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana enjoys engaging conversations, delicious food, practicing yoga, and wandering the Jersey shore.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: The Freelance Academic by Katie Pryal Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia by Kelly J. Baker From PhD to Life Women in Higher Education Succeeding Outside the Academy: Career Paths beyond the Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM, edited by Joseph Fruscione and Kelly J. Baker, The University Press of Kansas Dr. Frank Martela episode: Stop Chasing Happiness and Make a Meaningful Life You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Bijal Shah shares story of the meteoric rise of Guild Education, the Denver-based ed tech firm that has quickly emerged as the leading marketplace for corporate education. True to its B-Corporation status, Guild focuses on building shared success for its corporate partners, adult learners and education and training providers. As a new start-up, Guild was able to sign up the U.S.'s largest private employer, Wal-Mart to provide tuition-free learning opportunities to its more than 2 million employees. This helped attract other leading employers, like Target, Chipotle, Macy's and Waste Management, and has enabled Guild to grow from 75 to more than 1300 employees in the last 4 years. Shah discusses the keys to Guild's success and whether every college and university needs a Chief Experience Officer.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

This interview was recorded and first published in early 2020 when the NBN had about a million downloads a month. Since then the downloads have increased more than four-fold to just below 5 million monthly downloads at the end of 2021 and the number of hosts has increased greatly as well. On the New Books Network authors to talk about their books with a specialist host. Founded in 2007 by Marshall Poe, formerly a Russian history professor from the US. The NBN has grown to be the most downloaded podcast of its type in the world.  New Books Network website NBN on Stitcher NBN on Apple Podcasts NBN on Spotify Marshal Poe on Wikipedia About your host Richard LucasRichard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded, led and/or invested in more than 30 businesses, Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre-schools to leading business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

If one were to devise a motto for the art school of today, the choice between 'you too are an artist' and 'abandon all hope you who enter here' would be difficult. Despite significant changes in mainstream art education in recent decades, many anglophone art schools have not abandoned the principal tools of the masterclass or the crit that stem from some stubborn 18th-century ideas and the belief that creativity is the preserve of the artistic genius. Considering these histories can shed light on the role of the art school in the 21st century.Research on art schools has been largely occupied with the facts of particular schools and teachers. Michael Newall's A Philosophy of the Art School (Routledge, 2021) presents a philosophical account of the underlying practices and ideas that have come to shape contemporary art school teaching in the UK, US and Europe. It analyses two models that, hidden beneath the diversity of contemporary artist training, have come to dominate art schools. The book draws on first-hand accounts of art school teaching and is deeply informed by disciplines ranging from art history and art theory to the philosophy of art, education and creativity.Michael Newall speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the masterclass and the crit, the pervasive idea of the Romantic genius, creative disagreements with Kant, and the lessons for the future that a historical perspective may offer.Michael Newall is a programme leader in art and philosophy at the University of Kent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education