Negotiating the challenge of collaborative writing: learning from one writing group's mutiny

With continuing pressure to publish or perish, interventions such as writing groups are increasingly part of the academic landscape. In this paper, we discuss our writing group's experiment with collaborative writing, which came unstuck as simmering concerns led to a mutiny within the group. The mutiny provided insights into tensions that are inevitably present in writing groups and collaborative writing exercises but are seldom written about. We explore these tensions via a collaborative autoethnography, drawing on published literature on writing groups and collaborative writing. The mutiny revealed three key dynamics. Experienced voices can have an important role to play but these voices need to be moderated so that other voices might be recognised and valued. Pleasure and productivity are two necessary components for sustaining writing groups and writing collaborations. Finally, hierarchies in the academic context are inescapable but they can be renegotiated so that more enabling power relations can be generated.     

Unpacking the narrative of non-positional leadership in academia: Hero and/or victim?

This article, based on narrative inquiry, explores how academics with/out formal leadership positions experience and understand themselves as leaders in their everyday working contexts. A single case of a fixed-term academic was chosen to illustrate how different analytical lenses – ‘plot analysis’ and ‘discourse analysis’ – can unpack the complexities of experience associated with non-positional leadership, a topic scarcely represented in studies of leadership in higher education. Two interdependent plots – the heroic plot and the victimised plot – were found to recur throughout the participant's narrative. These plots signified the conflictual dynamics and the unique subjectivity in which this person made sense of himself as a leader. The analytical lens was then shifted to pay greater attention to the ways in which broader networks of discourses were at play within this participant's narrative. Using discourse analysis, the discourses of autonomy and masculinity, among others, were present in constituting the unique subject positions the participant took up. The article concludes with a summary of methodological contributions this study offers to the field of leadership in higher education.     

Dielectrophoretic spectra of translational velocity and critical frequency for a spheroid in traveling electric field

An analysis has been made of the dielectrophoretic (DEP) forces acting on a spheroidal particle in a traveling alternating electric field. The traveling field can be generated by application of alternating current signals to an octapair electrode array arranged in phase quadrature sequence. The frequency dependent force can be resolved into two orthogonal forces that are determined by the real and the imaginary parts of the Clausius–Mossotti factor. The former is determined by the gradient in the electric field and directs the particle either toward or away from the tip of the electrodes in the electrode array. The force determined by the imaginary component is in a direction along the track of the octapair interdigitated electrode array. The DEP forces are related to the dielectric properties of the particle. Experiments were conducted to determine the DEP forces in such an electrode arrangement using yeast cells (Saccharomyces cervisiate TISTR 5088) with media of various conductivities. Experimental data are presented for both viable and nonviable cells. The dielectric properties so obtained were similar to those previously reported in literature using other DEP techniques.