Month: April 2021

Getting Creative with your Thesis or Dissertation #4

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I have written three previous posts on ‘getting creative with your thesis or dissertation’. Today I am featuring a doctoral dissertation from the US focusing on hip-hop which is presented in rap, a European geography doctoral thesis on how to live ethically in cities, and a Canadian education masters’ thesis presented as a comic.

A.D.Carson is a rap artist and a scholar of hip-hop who did his PhD at Clemson University in South Carolina, US. Clemson has an innovative cross-cultural, transdisciplinary PhD program in rhetorics, communication and information design. Carson joined the program to investigate whether certain voices are treated differently, such as whether an identifiably black voice might be regarded as authentic, or ignored, or accepted as scholarly. It didn’t make sense to Carson to write about this when he could present an actual voice. So he created his PhD dissertation as 34 rap songs and called it Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes and Revolutions. Carson is respectful of hip-hop scholars who listen to and write about hip-hop, rather than creating music. He also thinks there should be a place for scholars who want to rap their scholarship, to present their work through the medium of hip-hop. This is, if you will excuse the pun, music to my ears. Carson has put a short introduction to his doctoral work on YouTube and it is well worth viewing if you are interested – or you can listen to his entire thesis. He is now Assistant Professor of Hip-Hop at the University of Virginia.

Elona Hoover did her PhD at the University of Brighton in the UK. Brighton has a Centre for Research in Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics, which offers interdisciplinary research for environmentally and socially just societies. She investigated ways of living ethically in hard concrete urban environments. Hoover produced a written and audio thesis with a variety of creative elements. She makes use of several different fonts, such as a hand-writing style font for text taken directly from her field notes, and a typewriter font to distinguish notes for the reader. The written thesis has a companion soundtrack composed from her 143 field recordings. Some tracks are to be listened to with full attention, others are to accompany the reading of parts of the written thesis. She uses poetic writing, improvisation, and music-making as both practices and themes in her thesis, and also uses photographs to illustrate her work. Overall, Hoover aims to ‘take seriously the different kinds of knowledges that might be generated through diverse creative practices and sensory engagements’ (p.114).

I think it is interesting that Carson and Hoover both did their PhDs in transdisciplinary spaces. The boundaries and overlaps between disciplines often promote creativity. There is also, though, considerable scope for creativity within disciplines, as our third example shows. And at different levels, too – for the first time in this series of blog posts, I am including a masters’ thesis (as they are called in the US and Canada).

Meghan Parker studied art at masters’ level at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. As she is a high school art teacher, it made sense for her to focus on the teaching of art in her masters’ thesis. An accomplished visual artist herself, Parker chose to draw some of her assignments, and ended up producing a 236-page graphic novel called Art Teacher in Process: An Illustrated Exploration of Art, Education and What Matters. She told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that it is ‘about why visual literacy is important, why art education is important, why the arts are important’, and it also has a strong ethnographic element. Like Carson, she questioned why a thesis has to be written in words on paper. Evidently, it doesn’t!

All three of these scholars have produced research outputs which are enjoyable and accessible to people outside their academic fields. Meghan Parker has now turned her masters’ thesis into a book, Teaching Artfully, which was published this month and which I would recommend. There is much to learn from these examples, not only for people who might want to take similarly big strides, but also for others who may want to take lower-level, but just as creative, approaches in their work.

This blog, and the monthly~CRMethodsChat on Twitter, and my YouTube channel, are funded by my beloved patrons.  It takes me more than one working day per month to post here each week, run the Twitterchat and produce content for YouTube. At the time of writing I’m receiving funding from Patrons of $86 per month. If you think a day of my time is worth more that $86 – you can help!  Ongoing  support would be fantastic but you can also make a one-time donation through the PayPal button on this blog if that works better for you. Support from Patrons and donors also enables me to keep this blog ad-free. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!

Sole author, co-author, or edited collection?

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When you have an idea for a book, before you put pen to paper or finger to keyboard you have some decisions to make. One of those is: should the book be sole-authored, co-authored, or an edited collection? Having now been involved in producing several of both kinds, I have come up with some pointers which I hope may help less experienced writers.

Each of these formats has pros and cons. Writing alone requires no negotiation with co-authors, co-editors, or contributors, which saves time and effort. However, you need to be sure that you know enough about your topic to fill 80,000 words, and that you can find out what you need to know to fill any gaps. Also, you need to be sure that you can convey what you know to readers in an engaging way. If the peer review process works as it should, the reviewers will help you with this, but that is not something you can entirely rely on, because despite publishers’ best efforts it can be difficult to find reviewers for books, or to persuade them to write sufficiently detailed reviews. As sole author, all of the responsibility rests on you, so it is essential to be really sure that you’re up to the job.

Co-authoring can be a delight, if you have a co-author who is on your wavelength, and whose working style is similar or complementary to yours. I had this experience with Richard Phillips when we co-wrote Creative Writing for Social Research; we had a lot of fun, as well as some serious debates, and created a book we are both proud to have written. It is sensible to check out whether this will be the case before you take on any co-writing work. Co-authoring that goes wrong is time-consuming and stressful, and this can almost always be pre-empted. Being invited to co-author with someone else can be very flattering, but even so, find out about your co-author’s views and working style before you say ‘yes’. And if you develop misgivings, act on them, particularly at pre-contract stage when you can still pull out. Once you have signed a contract, withdrawing becomes more difficult.

When co-authoring with one other person goes well, it can be a delightful, intimate, enriching experience. There is also an argument for co-authoring in teams. I co-authored Creative Research Methods in Education with three colleagues, Narelle Lemon, Dawn Mannay, and Megan McPherson. Each of us brought different knowledges and experiences to the task, and I think the book is a much better book than it would have been if any two of us had co-authored alone. Also, more authors means less work, overall, for each person. We each led on 2-3 chapters, which meant drafting the chapter and then implementing feedback from our co-authors as we revised. This was a serious chunk of work for each of us, but significantly less work than sole-authoring a book or even co-writing with one other author. But, again, before you take on team writing, you need to have a conversation about working styles and expectations, and ensure you have a sufficiently similar approach. Also, with a team-written book, one member of the team needs to take responsibility for the final polishing stage, to ensure the ‘voice’ of the book is as consistent as possible.

Editing or co-editing a collection is useful when you are dealing with a topic where you want to hear from different voices, and/or different locations, or where nobody knows enough to write a whole book. I have just finished co-editing Qualitative and Digital Research in Times of Crisis: Methods, Reflexivity and Ethics with Su-ming Khoo. Neither of us knew enough about this to write a book, and we wanted to hear from researchers working in different fields and disciplines around the world. So creating an edited collection was the obvious way to go. I wrote a how-to post on editing collections last week so I won’t repeat that here. In brief: it is overall less work than co-writing, but there is still an amount of work to be done, including project management, writing or commissioning a useful introduction and conclusion, and quality control. Even though the bulk of the book will be written by other people, and the publishers will do some copy editing and proof-reading, it is your name which will be on the cover so the buck stops with you.

Disciplinary influences may come into play, as in some disciplines sole authorship is more common, while other fields are more inclined towards co-writing or edited collections. However, if you have a choice, think about what is best for you and for the book. If you are a complete control freak, you may only want to sole-author. If you are a devotee of team-working, you may only want to co-author or co-edit. But you also need to think about what is best for the book. If you have an idea for a book that really needs to be an edited collection, but you can’t stand the thought of creating one of those, you could always pass on the idea to someone else who might want to take it on.

This blog, and the monthly #CRMethodsChat on Twitter, and my YouTube channel, are funded by my beloved Patrons. It takes me more than one working day per month to post here each week, run the Twitterchat and produce content for YouTube. At the time of writing I’m receiving funding from Patrons of $86 per month. If you think a day of my time is worth more than $86 – you can help! Ongoing support would be fantastic but you can also make a one-time donation through the PayPal button on this blog if that works better for you. Support from Patrons and donors also enables me to keep this blog ad-free. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!

Ten Top Tips For Editing A Collection

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I am delighted to say that the print book I have co-edited with Su-ming Khoo from the National University of Ireland has gone into production. Qualitative and Digital Research in Times of Crisis: Methods, Reflexivity and Ethics is due to be published by Policy Press in October. Regular readers will remember that we also co-edited three rapid e-books for Policy Press on Researching in the Age of COVID19 which were published last October. So now, with these experiences fresh in my mind, I have written this blog post to offer advice to others who may wish to create an edited book.

Editing a book means soliciting chapters from others, arranging them into a collection, and writing or soliciting introductory and concluding chapters. It also means a whole bunch of project management. You need to write a proposal for a publisher, which will go through peer review and so may need more work depending on the reviewers’ comments. You need to write a call for chapters that you can circulate via your networks and social media to attract contributors. You need to review and assess proposals for chapters, and – if you’re lucky enough to receive more proposals than you need – decide which to include and which to reject, and why. Even if you only receive as many as you need, it is not sensible to publish poor quality work simply to fill space; it would be better to seek more proposals. If you don’t receive enough good quality proposals, you may have to revise or abandon your idea for the book.

Sending out a call for chapters is always a little bit nerve-racking because you simply have no idea what will come back. Su-ming and I, and our editor at Policy Press, originally planned one rapid e-book; we thought we had a good chance of getting 15 proposals of high enough quality. In fact we received over 100 submissions, many of a very high standard – and we didn’t want to waste those good submissions, which is why we now have three e-books and a print book.

So, here are my ten top tips for successful editing or co-editing a collection of chapters into a book.

  1. Figure out your timescales. You need to work out when you will issue your call for chapters; when you want submissions; when you will respond to those submissions; when you want draft chapters; when you will respond to those draft chapters; and so on. Factor in peer review, holiday periods, and time for contingencies.
  • In your call for chapters, be clear about the theme or themes you want the book to address; how you expect the submissions to be structured; and give a word limit – we asked for 500 words.
  • Be prepared to receive submissions that don’t address the theme, are not structured as you have asked, and ignore your word count. We received at least one ‘submission’ which was several thousand words long and seemed to be a rejected journal article. We didn’t accept it either.
  • Deliver bad news as kindly as you can. Give a little feedback on why you didn’t accept the submission, if you have the capacity to do so. We had to turn down around 50 submissions so we were not able to give individual feedback – but we gave some generic feedback, and a couple of people emailed back to ask for individual feedback so we did what we could to help.
  • Make sure you plan your own time carefully so you can meet your own obligations to the collection. Publishers work to tight production schedules and missing their deadlines is unhelpful.
  • Either commission, or write, as good an introduction as you can. This should set the scene for the collection, drawing lightly on relevant literature to orient readers for what is to come. It is a helpful convention to give a short overview of the content of each chapter, but do keep this as brief and readable as possible.
  • Either commission, or write, as good a conclusion as you can. The conclusion should draw together the threads from the various chapters, maybe offer some advice on learning or good practice, and point the way to the future, perhaps by identifying gaps that still need to be filled or scope for development of the work done to date.
  • Be prepared to offer extra support to authors who are inexperienced or disadvantaged – or both. Make time for this in your schedule and/or ask them to submit drafts early for feedback.
  • Read all the draft chapters carefully and give feedback alongside the peer reviewers. Peer reviewers’ input can be invaluable, but they are reviewing the whole book and the amount of attention they will pay to individual chapters is highly variable. Also, their name will not be on the book’s cover, and yours will, so do whatever you need to do to ensure that the quality of the book is good.
  1. Also check the final versions – don’t assume that the chapter authors will have implemented the suggestions appropriately, or that their final versions will be free of errors. Yes, the chapters will be copy-edited and proof-read by the publishers, but, again, you have a role here in quality control.

Co-editing means you can share the workload, which can be a huge help. Also, when you need to deliver bad news, being able to say we have decided to reject your submission, we are not happy with the standard of your work, and suchlike means there is much less scope for the recipient to view the rejection as a personal insult. I guess the downside is you also have to share the royalties, but those are highly unlikely ever to amount to much on an academic edited collection, so in most cases the benefits of co-editing will far outweigh the disadvantages.

This blog, and the monthly #CRMethodsChat on Twitter, and my YouTube channel, are funded by my beloved Patrons. It takes me more than one working day per month to post here each week, run the Twitterchat and produce content for YouTube. At the time of writing I’m receiving funding from Patrons of $86 per month. If you think a day of my time is worth more than $86 – you can help! Ongoing support would be fantastic but you can also make a one-time donation through the PayPal button on this blog if that works better for you. Support from Patrons and donors also enables me to keep this blog ad-free. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!