Kaylene Sampson

Making place: identity construction and community formation through "sense of place" in westland, New Zealand.

How do “community” and the attributes of landscape and setting shape personal identity and the way in which individuals develop an attachment to place? An exploration of the relationship between these ideas within two New Zealand West Coast rural communities revealed the need for a more inclusive conceptual understanding of “sense of place.” By drawing upon the seemingly mutually exclusive scholarly contributions of both social constructionists and environmental reductionists, we make a case for the inclusion of both approaches within the understanding of localized identity and its relationship with place. We argue that communities carry with them a specificity that binds them to particular locales, while locales provide a set of parameters, or boundaries, to the possibilities of what can be symbolically drawn upon. In this way identity is still culturally reproduced (constructed) but it draws upon particularized attributes within particularized landscapes.

When the Governmental Tail Wags the Disciplinary Dog: Some Consequences of National Funding Policy on Doctoral Research in New Zealand.

This paper explores disciplinary approaches to knowledge production and the supervision of doctoral students in the context of New Zealand’s current Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF). In the last decade New Zealand has experienced significant changes to the way doctoral students are funded by central government. Funding has moved away from a ‘head count’ model to one that rewards specific performance criteria of staff and timely completion of students. In the new regime, research outputs by way of peer reviewed publications, conference presentations, grant awards, postgraduate completions and so forth constitute the significant markers of such performance. Yet in general terms, the production of knowledge varies considerably by academic discipline. This paper uses qualitative methods to explore the potential for the PBRF to privilege some approaches to knowledge production (and models of doctoral supervision) while challenging the viability of others.

A social assessment of community response to forest policy change in South Westland, New Zealand.

Studies of closures illustrate that the removal of a core industry tends to have detrimental impacts on the local dependent communities. This ex post study examined the effects of the cessation of logging in old-growth forests on two small resource-dependent communities on the West Coast of the South Island, New Zealand. Data analysis, incorporating webbing and chaining, revealed shifts in patterns of work and social organization that could not be fully understood by examining changes in the forestry sector alone. Growth in tourism and changes to farming practices have contributed to the ability of these communities to mitigate forest industry loss and community decline. In this study, attempting to separate specific effects from wider social change processes would have been counterproductive to sound social impact assessment practice. This research demonstrates the need for interpreting change processes within their wider social, economic, and historic locales.

Using Doctoral Experience Survey Data to Support Developments in Postgraduate Supervision and Support

Provision of both high standards of thesis supervision and high quality research environments are required for doctoral candidates to flourish. An important component of ensuring quality provision of research resources is the soliciting of feedback from research students and the provision from research supervisors and institutions of timely and constructive responses to such feedback. In this manuscript we describe the use of locally developed survey instruments to elicit student feedback. We then demonstrate how actions taken in response to this student feedback can help establish a virtuous circle that enhances doctoral students’ research experiences. We provide examples of changes to supervisory practice and resource allocation based on feedback and show the positive impact on subsequent student evaluations. While the examples included here are local, the issues considered and the methods and interventions developed are applicable to all institutions offering research degrees.

Developing Evidence for Action on the Postgraduate Experience: An Effective Local Instrument to Move beyond Benchmarking.

ABSTRACT Summative and benchmarking surveys to measure the postgraduate student research experience are well reported in the literature. While useful, we argue that local instruments that provide formative resources with an academic development focus are also required. If higher education institutions are to move beyond the identification of issues and benchmarking practices, the scope of survey results and their reporting need to enable and foster appropriate changes in disciplinary practices. Robust, locally developed instruments can provide detailed, programme-specific information and foster timely changes in practice with direct benefits for postgraduate respondents. Unlike benchmarked surveys, local tools can adapt to explore and examine specific concerns of students, supervisors and academic developers. Coupling high-response rates and follow-on engagement with participant feedback, well-designed local instruments provide clear and irrefutable indicators to programme and university administrators of specific disciplinary strengths and weaknesses in postgraduate pathways. In this paper, we discuss the development of a research student survey specifically designed to support academic development purposes in strengthening and enhancing the postgraduate experience.