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The importance of being REF-able: academic writing under pressure from a culture of counting<http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/02/09/the-importance-of-being-ref-able-academic-writing-under-pressure-from-a-culture-of-counting/> Writing is crucial to an academic’s role of producing, shaping and distributing knowledge. However, academic writing itself is increasingly being shaped by the contemporary university’s managerial practices and evaluation frameworks. Sharon McCulloch describes how her research on academics’ writing practices has revealed tensions around the ways in which managerial practices interact with academics’ individual career goals, disciplinary values and sense of scholarly identity. ................... 'The picture that emerges is one in which academics are positioned as managed professionals whose personal goals are expected to be closely aligned with the university’s objectives to perform well in the REF, move up the league tables, attract students and secure income. In a neoliberal culture of measuring outputs, the range of forms of knowledge creation that are valued appears to be narrowing. High-prestige journal articles are seen as essential to career success, and should be ranked at three or four-star to secure rewards such as promotion or time for writing. The academics in this study strived to shape their writing around these targets, even though they saw them as unrealistic or out of sync with disciplinary values. Because scholarly writing and disciplinary identity are so closely intertwined, for many academics, this pressure engendered something of an existential crisis about the true purpose of their writing.' http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/02/09/the-importance-of-being-ref-able-academic-writing-under-pressure-from-a-culture-of-counting/ And that wider Project - http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/acadswriting/ The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation | Academics’ writing ...<http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/acadswriting/> wp.lancs.ac.uk At the beginning of December, I went to Leiden in the Netherlands to present a paper on behalf of the Academics Writing project. The conference was the Accelerated ... Work like you don't need money Love like you've never been hurt and dance like no-one's watching "Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)