The following study examines two researchers' perspectives on play in the lives of children from diverse cultural contexts. Two questions guided this study: (1) how do researchers conceptualize children's play and (2) what shapes their understanding of play. In order to answer these questions, a critical discourse was established between two…

This response to Vassiliki Papatsiba's article on collaboration draws attention to structural barriers to collaborative research: for example, increased competition for scarce resources, increased steering of research, and the casualisation of research workers. It draws on experience of collaborative work in a large, EU-funded project to…

This paper investigates the interactions between policy drivers and academic practice in international research collaboration. It draws on the case of the Open Research Area (ORA), a funding scheme in the social sciences across four national research agencies, seeking to boost collaboration by supporting "integrated" projects. The paper…

Access to current research materials, pedagogical best practices, and relevant knowledge has become problematic as journal subscription costs have increased. Increasing delays in the traditional publication timeline, coupled with high subscription costs, have resulted in a diminished ability for IS faculty and their students to access the most…

Drawing upon findings from a UK-based and -funded study of academic leadership provided by (full) professors, this article focuses on research leadership as perceived by those on the receiving end of it. Research leadership is defined as the influence of one or more people on the research-related behaviour, attitudes or intellectual capacity of…

Internationally, the increasing emphasis in universities on the quality of teaching, on student employability and on a corporate approach to entrepreneurial income generation has created a tension around the primacy afforded to published research outputs as a focus for academic work and status. In this study, a framework for academic socialisation…

This article describes the discovery of action research by a "conscious incompetent" in higher education. The influences on the development of an action researcher's individual philosophy are discussed. These shape a specific investigation into the implementation of international staff exchange in a post-1992 UK university from the…

Recent developments in digital scholarship point out that academic practices supported by technologies may not only be transformed through the obvious process of digitization, but also renovated through distributed knowledge networks that digital technologies enable, and the practices of openness that such networks develop. Yet, this apparent…

Among the many external forces that have impacted upon institutions, league tables have been the dynamic to which universities across the world are now responding. Following the appointment of a new vice-chancellor at one post-92 UK university, a modernisation project was introduced aimed at maximising the institutions' research standing. For the…

Transnational and multilingual families have become commonplace in the twenty-first century. Yet relatively few attempts have been made from applied and socio-linguistic perspectives to understand what is going on "within" such families; how their transnational and multilingual experiences impact on the family dynamics and their everyday…

In this paper, I theorize fantasies of idealization at work in narratives of educational research. I take as an example one of the very first psychoanalytically oriented studies in the field: Marion Milner's, "The Human Problem in Schools," published in 1938. Evidence is drawn from Milner's published book as well as from the historical…

A number of recent surveys of public opinion claim that there is now widespread acceptance of the need for sustainable development, and that the general public, through its social and consumer activity is already successfully engaged. However, in all this, the focus has primarily been on individual and family behaviours such as recycling and…

"How helpful and how necessary is it for at least some of us to see ourselves as professional educational researchers?" asked Donald McIntyre in his 1996 presidential address to the British Educational Research Association. Still pertinent to consideration of the direction in which the British educational research community ought to…

Introduction: We report an investigation on collaboration practices in research papers published in the most prestigious English-medium astrophysics journals. Method: We propose an evaluation method based on three numerical indicators to study and compare, in absolute terms, three different types of collaboration (international, national and…

This lecture considers how it might be possible to make a career as a university scholar at a time when the university is becoming increasingly corporatised. Consistent with the intent of the Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy (PESP) Special Interest Group (SIG) Scholar Lecture, I draw on personal experiences from my own career as a university…