Smart is sexy: Studying gender, work & technology

13 Responses to “Smart is sexy: Studying gender, work & technology”

1. Mark Bahnisch
   November 14th, 2005 @ 3:34 pm

   Sounds interesting, Mel.

   Just a tip from a few people I spoke to at Griffith about ARC applications - now that Paddy McGuiness is on a committee set up by Nelson to scrutinise the titles and abstracts of grants, it’s considered wise to leave the word “gender” out of proposal titles and write the abstract in plain English or social science-ese.

   So it goes in the brave new Howardian world of academe.

2. Glen
   November 14th, 2005 @ 5:31 pm

   Wow, Mark, if that is true, well, that is the stupidest thing I have heard for a long time. “1984″ anyone? Oh, yes, lets go through all the archives and cross out ‘gender’… I mean it isn’t a term that has been in use for at least 50 years or anything…

   Mel, I think you should put “gender” as the first word in your title and apply to somewhere in the US.

3. clif
   November 15th, 2005 @ 8:35 am

   Glen, are you saying put the word “gender” in anyway?

   because if you do that you may not get the funding, and then not get to do the research at all - which would suck considering the calibre of Melissa’s work.

   (but you probably didn’t mean that anyway, again my misreading)

   having just wrtten an arc proposal, or been involved in the process, there is as mark says, a need to be social scienceeeeeeeeeeeee. You can do it Mel, go grrrl.

4. melgregg
   November 15th, 2005 @ 10:20 am

   Thanks fellas. But Mark, I find your suggestion pretty ridiculous, not only because it reeks of a tiresome Australian academic paranoia but it reflects a very limited view of how the ARC works. I realise you probably can’t be any more specific in a public forum like this, but if you’re going to make conspiratorial claims which other researchers might be tempted to believe, you need to be. I am aware of people who have had work shut down or scrutinised because they are working on non-normative sexuality and sex practices, but not gender per se. What are your sources proposing to study? A myriad of things could have affected their application. They are bloody hard to get.

   And of course applications have to be written in plain English. It’s an expectation of any funding request, particularly when evaluations are made by those outside your field, as they are in this case.

5. Mark Bahnisch
   November 15th, 2005 @ 12:31 pm

   Mel - last year Nelson personally vetoed 3 approved grants - all from Humanities and Social Sciences - and this year it’s been reported that he vetoed more. Under the legislation, his reasons and the grants vetoed don’t have to be revealed, only the fact that he’s intervened.

   It’s also difficult to see why a committee with P.P. McGuiness was established specifically to scrutinise grant titles without drawing obvious conclusions from it.

   I can’t be specific about the Griffith info - except to say that the project is in the area of gender and working life.

   So I’m sorry - it’s not paranoia - I wish it was.

6. melgregg
   November 15th, 2005 @ 2:54 pm

   Mark, where is it reported? It is paranoia if you prefer a conspiracy theory to a discussion of specific circumstances. I’m not trying to be naive or optimistic, but on a subject this important I would like to be told things I don’t already know.

7. Mark Bahnisch
   November 15th, 2005 @ 4:56 pm

   Mel -

   on last year’s rejection of grants:

   Labor accused the ARC funding process of lacking transparency, particularly when considering Dr Nelson exercised unprecedented power in 2004 when he vetoed three ARC grants approved by the peer review process.

   “The minister has had total power over how $370 million in ARC grants have been allocated over the next five years,” Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin said.

   “Peer review and meaningful community consultation must prevail over any political opportunism by the Howard government.”

   The press release from which that quote is drawn is at the ALP’s site where Jenny Macklin also highlights the role of P. P. McGuiness’ committee.

   The context for McGuiness’ appointment, and Nelson’s interference in vetoing grants which passed all the hurdles, is an ongoing campaign by Andrew Bolt targetting grants which fit into either a perception of opposition to the government or the usual culture war targets. It’s been reported that McGuiness is seeking more power than just scrutinising grant titles.

   In the 1980s, a grant made to a UQ academic in Classics and Ancient History for research on motherhood in Ancient Rome was held up to ridicule in the Senate by Liberal Senators. It seems reasonable - in light of the fact that Nelson’s caved in to the ravings of people like Bolt - to think that such scrutiny is being revived in train with the associated attacks on Universities as hotbeds of “leftism”, “postmodernism” and “feminism” etc which appear to be one of the current fronts in the culture wars.

   I expect something about the latest round of grants will turn up in the Higher Ed. I have it on good authority that Nelson rejected at least 4 this time.

   The context for my original comment was not trying to score points against the government or push conspiracy theories, but to highlight what I’ve been told in conversation by researchers, and also people involved in the education policy community. The difficulty with discussing these issues lies in the fact that under the legislation there is no transparency, as Jenny Macklin correclty highlights. Nelson is required to report to Parliament as to how many grants recommended to him by the ARC he has disallowed, but not to identify them or the researchers, or to give reasons for his decisions.

8. Josh
   November 15th, 2005 @ 5:46 pm

   What you present is interesting Mark. I have to agree with Mel though; to extrapolate from the failure or rejection of a specific yet unspecified case to the assertion that “it’s considered wise to leave the word “gender” out of proposal titles” does smell of conspiracy theory. There is a difference between appointments designed to turn the research priorities of an organisation like the ARC towards preferred outcomes and the suggestion anything with “gender” in the title will necessarily fail. I’m not defending the current research priorities of the ARC, Nelson or McGuinnes and I agree with Jenny Macklin’s call for transparency (which seems missing in many activities of the current administration); I don’t think your case is strengthened when you suggest Nelson “caved in to the ravings of people like Bolt”, however. Perhaps the proposal you mention failed did so because it wasn’t written “in English and social-ese”?

9. Mark Bahnisch
   November 15th, 2005 @ 5:51 pm

   To clarify, Josh, the proposal didn’t fail - and given that it’s a Linkage proposal with significant support from an industry partner in the hundreds of thousands from a researcher with a well established grant record.

   The advice was given to the researcher.

   I don’t honestly think I’m drawing a long bow with Nelson and Bolt - it’s very difficult to explain the mysterious committee and the appointment of P.P. McGuiness except as demonstrating the intention of politically interfering - which was clear enough anyway from Nelson’s unprecedent vetoes of approved grants last year.

   I’m honestly not trying to be alarmist.

10. Mark Bahnisch
    November 15th, 2005 @ 5:52 pm

    Sorry - I should have added to the end of the first para “it’s likely to succeed in the next round”.

11. Mark Bahnisch
    November 15th, 2005 @ 6:16 pm

    I’ve just had a look around a database that indexes Australian media content - I can’t provide hyperlinks in the absence of permalinks given that Fairfax also has its archives as pay for view now. So I’ll paste in an op/ed by David Lemmings on these issues - and the related one of the abolition of the ARC Board which adds to the concerns about political interference. I’ll then bow out of the discussion - perhaps I shouldn’t have posted a comment about this - but I did want to alert Mel and others to some real concerns about the way the grants process is being subverted.

    The triumph of ignorance

    Edition: 1 - All-round Country
    Section: Features, pg. 039

    Brendan Nelson puts real research at real risk, writes David Lemmings

    THE decision of Brendan Nelson, the federal Education Minister, to
    abolish the board of the Australian Research Council is especially
    alarming for researchers in the humanities and social sciences.
    It is well known that Nelson rejected three grants in these areas
    last year, despite their inclusion in the list of projects recommended
    for funding.

    It is common knowledge that he is sensitive to media commentators
    who delight in taking pot shots at what they regard as wacky research.
    Researchers are entitled to be concerned that under the proposed
    executive management model, ARC grant applications will be
    more exposed to ministerial intervention on the basis of uninformed
    prejudices. Indeed, the upshot may be a narrowing of ARC-funded
    research to avoid what may be regarded as controversial topics
    in favour of strictly utilitarian research that can easily be defended
    as immediately relevant to the national interest.

    These are not uninformed speculations. I write as a chief investigator
    on a history project that was funded by the ARC last year but
    criticised by Andrew Bolt in his syndicated Herald Sun column.
    The project is about moral panics, public opinion and the law in
    18th-century England.

    In the section of the application that addresses anticipated national
    benefit we wrote that by revealing the origins of that well-established
    contemporary process by which the media generates scares
    about threatening “others” (eg, criminals, juvenile delinquents,
    independently minded women, immigrants) which are then taken
    up by law makers, we hoped to provide “a critical perspective on
    modern politics, especially the perception that governments legitimise
    their authority by helping to constitute popular anxiety
    about threats to moral and personal security”.

    Bolt cited this as an example of several “pathetic” attempts to
    justify the expense to the community and blithely suggested we should
    study modern Australia. At the time I was rather flattered at
    the attention that the grant received, and simply dismissed the
    criticism as a cheap jibe that could be safely ignored, but I now
    realise this kind of attack has rather serious implications, given
    Nelson’s plans for the ARC.

    Here it is important to understand more fully the perspective on research
    that is taken by conservative columnists such as Bolt. To
    give him his due, Bolt did have some positive things to say about
    some of last year’s ARC-funded projects. Practically useful scientific
    research came in for high praise, and even some social science
    grants were accepted as money well spent.

    The criteria for approval are telling, however. Studies of suicide
    bombers, the elements of successful school education, the prospects
    for a democratic China, and the regulation of online investment
    won Bolt’s endorsement, but he condemned projects on sex, race,
    reconciliation and global warming as “faddish obsessions”, and
    studies of genocide and queer studies were singled out for obloquy.

    In other words, social science should conform to a conservative research
    agenda whereby it is driven by contemporary applications,
    rather than blue-sky curiosity, and it must avoid anything that smacks
    of social or political radicalism.

    Attitudes such as these constitute a general threat to legitimate
    research in the humanities and the social sciences, wherein scholars
    routinely seek new knowledge that informs reflections upon

    the human condition, irrespective of its contemporary application.

    Certainly, academics have learned to live with conservative assaults,
    and are generally intellectually robust enough to defend their
    practices. However, the changes to the ARC’s structure threaten
    to apply such prejudices directly to the processes by which research
    is funded in Australia, with potentially serious consequences
    for the scope of scholarly investigation.

    Why do I say this? Well, in the first place Bolt himself has embellished
    his general criticism of “pointless” research projects with
    specific and personal attacks on the ARC’s discipline panels,
    especially the one responsible for awarding grants in the humanities
    and social sciences.

    He sees its members as a “mates club.” And he has trashed the whole
    process of peer review — the heart and soul of the ARC’s decision-making
    machinery — as an expensive waste of time and taxpayers’
    money.

    Second, with the removal of the ARC board, a body constituted of eminent
    persons chosen, in the words of the ARC Act, to “reflect
    the breadth of academic, industry and community interests in the
    outcomes of research”, the deliberations of the ARC will be much
    more vulnerable to the kind of uninformed opinion that Nelson appears
    anxious to appease.

    Like everyone else, academics are rightly accountable to the community
    and its political leaders for their use of public money. Indeed,
    funded researchers are held to account by the ARC for the outcomes
    of their research, and the ARC is presently answerable to
    the minister and to parliament for its processes and decisions.

    But the abolition of the board removes a strong body that stood between
    informed academic decision-making and narrowly political judgments,
    and on past evidence it does seem likely that this will
    undermine the integrity and independence of the ARC.

    Of course, the existence of the board did not protect the three research
    projects knocked out last year. But there will be more scope
    for intervention of this kind in the future, and the humanities
    and social sciences are especially vulnerable.

    David Lemmings is an associate professor in history at the University
    of Newcastle.

    Copyright 2005 / The Australian

12. Mark Bahnisch
    November 16th, 2005 @ 8:56 am

    In today’s Age, Melbourne Dean of Arts writes about political interference in the ARC grant process - here.

13. home cooked theory » Blog Archive » Working from home
    December 23rd, 2005 @ 10:46 am

    [...] he inane stage - time to start on the ARC application. I need some serious help with this, as I’ve said before. I’m still looking for some help with the [...]

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