Marcus Harmes

Producing pleasure in the contemporary university

Academics working in contemporary universities are experiencing unprecedented and unsustainable pressure in an environment of hyper-performativity, metrics and accountability. From this perspective, the university produces multiple tensions and moments of crises, where it seems that there is limited space left for the intrinsic enjoyment arising from scholarly practices. This book offers a global perspective on how pleasure is central to the endeavours of academics working in the contemporary university, with contributors evaluating the opportunities for the strategic refusal of the quantifying, stultifying and stupefying delimiters of what is possible for academic production. The aim of this book is to open up spaces for conversation, reflection and thought, in order to think, to be and to do differently – pleasurably. Contributors rupture the bounds of what is permissible and possible within their daily lives, habits and practices. As such, this book addresses increasingly significant questions. What are some of the multiple and different ways that we can reclaim pleasure and enhance the durations and intensities of our passions, desires and becomings within the contemporary university? How might these aspirations be realised? What are the spaces for the pleasurable production of research that might be opened up? How might we reconfigure the neoliberal university to be a place of more affect, where desire, laughter and joy join with the work that we seek to undertake and the communities whom we serve?

Caps, Shrouds, Lawn and Tackle: English Bishops and their Dress from the Sixteenth Century to the Restoration

The vestiarian controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England have attracted an extensive scholarly literature. This literature has tended to show the ways the Church of England could be condemned as inadequately reformed through attacks against its external trappings. Much less has been written about how the targets of attack - the clothing that bishops wore - could in fact be transformed into a means of defending the Church. This paper analyses George Hoopers 1683 tract The Church of England Free from the Imputation of Popery, within the context of disputation concerning episcopal government. Hooper appreciated that attacks on vesture were part of more penetrating attacks against religious hierarchies. By turns mocking and serious, Hooper compared the Church of England to reformed confessions and the Church of Rome, arguing that far from being popish, the dress of bishops stood out distinctively as Protestant trappings and provided positive examples of how English bishops differed from their Roman counterparts.

Partaking of Pleasure

Universities are fascinating places to work. A “provocative social cocktail” (Symes, 2004, p. 395) is one particularly apt description, although for some, the fascination could be ironically expressed as a reaction to the giddying changes and restructures and revisionings that define the contemporary university.

Postgraduate education in higher education

This handbook brings together contributors from the United States, Australasia and Europe who use theoretical insights and empirical data to examine current practices as well as possible future directions of postgraduate education. A full range of postgraduate study options are explored, including PhD and professional doctorates, masters awards, and taught coursework programs. The contributions of key stakeholders to the delivery of postgraduate education are addressed, including students, supervisors and university administrators. From this collection, university managers, higher education scholars, and anyone interested in establishing a centre for higher education are given comprehensive overviews of academic leadership, doctoral education, and supervisory relationships. Topics examined in detail in this collection are little discussed in the available literature, including supervisory relationships between colleagues, the emergence of the “second-career academic”, and academic blogging and social networking. The external pressures that universities around the world are experiencing, including neoliberalism, the massification of student numbers, disruptive innovations, and external quality benchmarking, are considered in terms of the ways that they are prompting change in how postgraduate study is administered and delivered. Many chapters contain specific recommendations to meet organisational and student needs, including for specific demographics such as international students or specific programs. The professional, employment, and information literacy needs of students and the professional development of supervisors and processes for examination are also considered.

Education in the Fourth Dimension: Time Travel and Teachers in the TARDIS

Doctor Who began in a school and now after more than 50 years has ended up back in one. The first scenes of the long-running science fiction series Doctor Who were set in a science lab and a history classroom in an East End secondary modern. From that opening, the program has returned again and again to educational themes and to power relationships in which the educated instruct the “ignorant.” The Doctor’s first companions were teachers, and since then he has travelled with astrophysicists, mathematicians, school students and dropouts, doctors, university students, scientists and yet more teachers. Similarly, his deadliest foes have included villains appearing in guises as headmasters, school nurses, and professors. This chapter considers the recurring preoccupation with education that runs through the 50 years of the show, assessing the program’s origin and continuing importance as an educational endeavor by a public broadcaster. It traces the shifting, sometimes implicit but enduring emphasis on learning, and suggests that its narratives based on pedagogy are often problematic and ambiguous. While the educational goal (as part of a Public Service mission to inform, educate and entertain) that was part of the earliest development of Doctor Who arguably came to very little, the program does make contributions to understanding the way education can be perceived and portrayed.

Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London by Anna Bayman (review)

is Karl der Grosse at Aachen in 2014 to commemorate 1,200 years since Charlemagne’s death. I have one minor quibble: it is unfortunate that the deep threedimensionality of the cast figures in Bishop Bernward’s doors are not brought out more clearly in the photographs, which are all taken from the front. That said, the catalogue, printed in Italy, is a high quality production. The text is well informed, written in a clear style, with a detailed index and bibliography and enables the reader to place the exhibits in context. Medieval Treasures is highly recommended for those interested in cathedral treasures placed in context by a well-illustrated, scholarly text. PeneloPe naSH, The University of Sydney

Proverbs and princes in post-reformation England

Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700) addresses historians and literary scholars. It aims to recapture oral culture in a variety of literary and non-literary sources, tracking the echo of women’s voices, on trial, or bantering and gossiping in literary works, and recapturing those of princes and magistrates, townsmen, villagers, mariners, bandits, and songsmiths. Almost all medieval and early modern writing was marked by the oral. Spoken words and turns of phrase are bedded in writings, and the mental habits of a speaking world shaped texts. Writing also shaped speech; the oral and the written zones had a porous, busy boundary. Cross-border traffic is central to this study, as is the power, range, utility, and suppleness of speech.

Demythologizing Teaching and Learning in Education: Towards a Research Agenda

Myths occupy an enduringly powerful position in teaching and learning objectives, in activities and in outcomes in contemporary education. Myths also generate a range of responses from education researchers: some researchers seek to challenge and transform persistent myths associated with disempowering stereotypes; some focus on interrogating myths understood as popular mis/conceptions about teaching and learning; and some researchers conceptualize teaching and learning as sets of powerful narratives and stories that evoke timely or timeless messages about current educational practice that need to be comprehended. Finally, myths can be productive learning tools in themselves, as they create (and sometimes recreate) narratives that are neatly wrapped around culturally based messages and ‘truths’. The following chapters interrogate assumptions upon which teaching in a variety of contexts is based, drawing together a rich array of perspectives and methodologies. Some chapters are based on scrupulous empirical research and others on the critically alert interpretation of theory. The chapters take up the idea of a ‘myth’ in different ways. Of course in any rationalist sense, anything ‘mythical’ is ‘untrue’, but arguably something mythic also crosses into areas of faith and belief. In some chapters, the authors argue that there is critical scrutiny of faith which is sometimes misplaced, in aspects of practice and scholarship and also in technology.

The Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution ed. by Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon (review)

Review(s) of: The agreements of the people, the levellers, and the constitutional crisis of the English revolution, by Baker, Philip and Elliot Vernon, eds, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; hardback, pp. 288, R.R.P. 60.00 pounds, ISBN 9780230542709.

Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell, SJ ed. by Peter Holmes (review)

Review(s) of: Caroline casuistry: The cases of conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell, SJ (Catholic Record Society: Records), by Holmes, Peter, ed., Woodbridge and Rochester, Boydell, 2012, hardback pp. 358, 1 b/w illustration, R.R.P 45.00 pounds, ISBN 9780902832275.