Author: Helen Kara

Conference Registration Open!

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I may have mentioned that I’ve been involved in organising a conference on Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences, where my next book will be launched. This conference will be on 8 May 2015 at the British Library Conference Centre in central London. I’m delighted to say that registration for this conference is now open.

This means I can also reveal the line-up. The keynote speech will be given by Professor David Gauntlett, author of several books including Creative Explorations and Making is Connecting. Then we have four subject experts who have agreed to chair the workshop streams and form a final panel:

Dr Kitrina Douglas, champion golfer, broadcaster, sports researcher at Leeds Beckett University (formerly Leeds Met), poet and songwriter, will chair the arts-based research workshop stream
Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, will chair the research using technology workshop stream
Matt Barnard, Head of Evaluation at NSPCC, will chair the mixed method research workshop stream
Dr Molly Warrington, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Cambridge University, will chair the transformative research frameworks stream

There is an ‘early bird’ discount of 10% on bookings made before the end of January. Don’t miss out! Hope to see you there.

AcWriMo Progress Report

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Over a week into AcWriMo and how is it going? For me: not too well so far.

My target is to finish and submit one sole-authored paper and one joint-authored paper. The joint-authored paper I planned to work on has mostly been drafted by a colleague, who asked me to write a couple of sections in return for a second authorship. We talked about this back in the summer, I said I’d be happy to help, and my colleague agreed to email me all the necessary information by the end of October. It hasn’t arrived.

I’m not surprised; I know my colleague is over-stretched. Nor do I mind, as I have another joint-authored paper to work on instead. This one has been in the doldrums for months, after a rejection from a journal, and again I’m second author so haven’t been able to move it along. I did offer some gentle encouragement, but that didn’t make any difference, and there’s a fine line between gentle encouragement and nagging which I didn’t want to cross. However, we now have the opportunity to publish in an edited collection instead of an academic journal, which is much easier, so that’s a good incentive for the lead author to get cracking. I’ve already given feedback on a couple of drafts, and am hoping a nearly-final version will appear in my inbox very soon.

The sole authored paper features a co-produced evaluation I led around a year ago. If we can, it would be good to publish this in an open-access journal, but that requires a budget. So I’m waiting to find out whether the commissioners of the evaluation want to pay for publication, as I don’t have a spare three thousand pounds myself. I have started work on this paper: I’ve downloaded quite a bit of relevant literature, and begun reading and thinking. But I don’t yet know which journal we’ll submit to first, and I would like some idea of the required word count and style, and likely readership, before I write anything substantive.

Luckily, there are still three more weeks of November. So there’s every chance I’ll get both papers done. Either way, I’ll let you know.

And if you’re doing AcWriMo: how is it going for you?

Four weeks to go!

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I am already very excited about the 8th of May 2015. Because, on that day, I will be at a conference on Creative Research Methods, run by the Social Research Association, at the British Library. And my next book will be launched there!

So why am I saying ‘four weeks to go’ when it’s clearly six months away? Because there is just one month to go to get your abstracts in, if you want to present your work at this conference and earn yourself a hefty discount on the cost in the process.

I’ll let you know when we’re open for registration – should be in the next week or two.

#Vitaehangout

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I took part in a live online “hangout” on 23 October, for Vitae, an international programme dedicated to the professional development of postgraduate and early career researchers. I was part of a panel of doctoral researchers and PhD graduates discussing things we wish we’d known when we started out. It was great fun, with questions pouring in about how to be original, when to start writing, how to manage relationships with supervisors, how much data to collect – all the kinds of preoccupations of early-stage doctoral students. The panel had loads of ideas for ways to address these topics, and the time seemed to go past in a flash. We weren’t able to deal with all the questions during the panel, so the nice people at Vitae put the rest into a document and we’ve made some more suggestions there.

Find out more on the Vitae website, or just watch the video below:

A sweet tweet

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These are the kinds of tweets that warm an author’s heart – thank you, Amanda Taylor!

(It also shows one of my lovely bookplates, designed by Carol Burns. If you’ve got a copy of my book and would like a signed bookplate, please get in touch and let me know. No charge.)

Previous blog posts

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For the last couple of years I have been a blog cuckoo, laying my wordy eggs in other people’s blog nests.  Here is a round-up of the posts I’ve made elsewhere.

I began on the British Library‘s Social Science blog, writing on ‘What do practitioners need to know about research?’

Then I went to the Policy Press blog and wrote about the covert censorship of Gold Open Access.

On Eva Langsoght’s blog, PhD Talk, I wrote about managing the research process.

Then on Sukh Pabial’s blog I wrote on how to unlearn separatist learning.

On the NVivo blog I wrote about how to add value to your research with diagrams and models.

Most recently I’ve been back on the Policy Press blog, beginning a series on ‘a year in the life of an academic writer’.  So far I’ve covered me and my books, why another blog on academic writing?, where a book begins, how much pre-writing research you need to do, three compromises you have to make when writing a book, the difficult second book in a genre, dealing with reviewers’ comments, and impostor syndrome. And now I intend to continue that series here. Though I may still write for other blogs from time to time. Maybe even yours.