The McNair Program as a Socializing Influence on Doctoral Degree Attainment

The quality of doctoral students’ academic and social experiences is a key element of their success in graduate school programs. These experiences support the completion of doctoral programs, especially for first-generation college students from low-income backgrounds. Framed by Weidman's (1989) undergraduate socialization model, the author interviewed 18 former participants in Ronald McNair Programs (McNair Program),who completed their doctoral studies in order to determine how such programs can serve as a socializing agent to facilitate the successful completion of graduate study. Several themes emerge from the interviews conducted that distinguish McNair Programs from other interventions to promote integration or preparation, including the presence of academic and social integration. Such integration had a positive influence on the participants’ doctoral experience and contributed to the development of their competence, self-confidence, social and academic connectedness, and academic identity. Participants derived the greatest benefits from academic program components and academic counseling. Moreover, social components such as mentoring, cultural activities, and personal encounters in summer research internships also contributed to a positive doctoral experience.     

An organisational perspective on the cluster paradox: Exploring how members of a cluster manage the tension between continuity and renewal

Clusters face what has been referred to as a ‘cluster paradox’; a situation in which a collective identity breeds cohesion and efficiency in inter-organisational collaboration, yet it hinders the variety needed to adapt to disruptive change and prevent lock-in situations. Accordingly, a recurring theme in the literature on cluster evolution and cluster life-cycles is the need for constant renewal to allow clusters to adapt to a changing environment. However, how individual firms enact a process of cluster renewal and consider possible response options is not well understood. Using a French energy cluster as empirical setting, this paper investigates individual members’ enactment of the renewal in terms of how it could affect their current position, both structurally and relationally, and to what extent members felt that they had agency to steer the process to safeguard their position. The findings show that members’ enactment of the proposed change does not only depend on the perceived impact of cluster renewal on the member itself but also on the impact the renewal might have on other members in the firm’s network. The analysis also suggests that cluster renewal leads to a leadership vacuum where it is not clear who, if anyone, will lead the renewal process.     

‘Neurodivergent literacies’: exploring autistic adults' ‘ruling passions’ and embracing neurodiversity through classroom literacies

The concept of neurodiversity has fuelled a social justice movement advocating for the rights of those whose lives diverge from a socially-constructed default. However, deficit understandings of disability persist in educational settings and neurodivergent people continue to face disadvantage and discrimination in organisations constructed on normative understandings of the world. Although New Literacy Studies is concerned with ideas of power, dominance and worth, there is a notable lack of work that connects NLS with issues of neurodiversity. In this paper, I introduce the term ‘neurodivergent literacies’ to propose a field of study that links the ideological model of literacy with the neurodiversity paradigm. From this starting point, I outline a project that examined literacies around what are often referred to as the ‘special interests’ of autistic people. Presenting data from interviews with 13 neurodivergent adults, related to school experiences and the literacies they engage with around their self-defined ‘ruling passions’, I make recommendations for literacies practitioners, arguing that schools need to do more to take account of difference and disability. By describing how ‘neurodivergent literacies’ can help teachers harness their own critical literacy skills to challenge deficit models of difference in the classroom, this paper illuminates how an understanding of neurodiversity is essential for anyone teaching and researching literacies with a commitment to social justice.