Danielle Miller

Surviving (thriving) in academia: feminist support networks and women ECRs

In this paper, we reflect upon our experiences and those of our peers as doctoral students and early career researchers in an Australian Political Science department. We seek to explain and understand the diverse ways that participating in an unofficial Feminist Reading Group in our department affected our experiences. We contend that informal peer support networks like reading groups do more than is conventionally assumed, and may provide important avenues for sustaining feminist research in times of austerity, as well as supporting and enabling women and emerging feminist scholars in academia. Participating in the group created a community of belonging and resistance, providing women with personal validation, information and material support, as well as intellectual and political resources to understand and resist our position within the often hostile spaces of the University. While these experiences are specific to our context, time and location, they signal that peer networks may offer critical political resources for responding to the ways that womens bodies and concerns are marginalised in increasingly competitive and corporatised university environments.

Interviewing the Interviewers: Difference, Knowledge Sharing, and Cohesion within the Queensland Speaks Interviewing Team

Abstract The Queensland Speaks oral history project sits at the crossroad between history and political science. The interview team comes from a range of professional backgrounds and career stages. Although guided by the overall goals of the project, the interviewers have considerable autonomy over whom they interview and the questions they ask. The implications of this flexible approach for the overall cohesion of the project provided the impetus for us to write this article. The literature on oral history and interviewing clarified a preexisting appreciation of the role of the interviewer in the outcomes of interviews, a situation that has particular implications for the Queensland Speaks oral history project in light of the above-mentioned autonomy. In this article, we draw on the literature relating to oral history and interviewing in order to explore how a coherent oral history project has emerged without the boundaries imposed by having a dominant research question and/or a team of interviewers originating from the same discipline. The experiences of the key interviewers were examined to establish likely influences on their interviewing skills and to investigate the differences across the team. We also wanted to gain an understanding of how each individual conceptualized the project. After conducting these interviews with the team and listening to interviews that they had already conducted for the Queensland Speaks project, we found that each interviewer did bring his or her own style and research interests to bear. Even so, the differences between their individual approaches and the subsequent interview outcomes were not as great as we had anticipated, and we found that extensive research undertaken by the less experienced members of the team acted to balance existing knowledge and skill gaps between the early career researchers and those interviewers who are either former Queensland public servants themselves and/or have extensive knowledge of Queensland political history. Through informal communication and teamwork, a high degree of cohesion within the Queensland Speaks interviewing team has emerged.

Political Chronicles: Queensland: January to June 2010 (Page 649)

The year 2010 was to be another historic year for the state, celebrating the sesquicentenary of Queenslands parliament in May, but it was not these celebrations that dominated the first half of the year. Instead attention was more often focused on the falling stocks of Anna Blighs Labor government. The fallout from Labors privatisation plans continued to trouble the government. The announcement that the states financial position was not as dire as previously thought did not improve the governments electoral standing, but instead was used to reignite the dialogue about the necessity of the sales. The governments position was not helped by the collapse of the new payroll system for the states hospital employees. Health was not the only troubled area. The release of a Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) report criticising the police investigation into the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee in 2004 ensured that police culture remained in the public eye. Despite the troubled position of the Bligh Labor government the Liberal National Party (LNP) was unable to unambiguously capitalise on Labors failings - instead it suffered from its own internal problems, including several high-profile defections. All of this meant that leading into the federal election campaign period neither party was in a dominant position.