A number of interesting articles on current conditions in the university have been published. To keep a record of these and to disseminate them to others I will be posting the titles and abstracts on this blog. Academic freedom is currently under threat – not just in the countries one would expect it to be …
More discussion in a radio program with views from a variety of experts, researchers and workers around the problems of open plan. Is open plan a good way to work? – Life Matters – ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). 6 July 2015 “Open plan is a popular in home design and offices but is …
An example of the kind of building which is currently being constructed by universities in Australia. Interestingly, in this rendering, nobody actually seems to be doing any real work. And unless I missed it, there is a glaring absence of reference to the space that staff will be spending most of their time working in. …
Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
Sam Kinsley has compiled a list of Geographers that blog, and followed this with a post questioning their focus, an excerpt of which was: It was a surprise to me how quite a few of those blogs, with some honourable exceptions, are tightly focussed conduits for personal research and are not…
The intellectual par excellence used to be the writer: as a universal consciousness, a free subject, he was counterpoised to those intellectuals who were merely competent instances in the service of the state or capital — technicians, magistrates, teachers. Since the time when each individual’s specific activity begun to serve as the basis for politicization, …
O’Farrell, Clare (1996). ‘Restoring the Scholarly Balance’ Campus Review, Comment, Jan 18-24, p.8. The text below was published in Campus Review in 1996. I think 20 years on, it may be too late to save the kind of university I am referring to in this piece – that is, a university which was essentially a …
I have put together a general – but still very select – bibliography of material on open-plan office design, which you can download as a PDF. All items have links for easy consultation. The bibliography includes the following subheadings: Academic articles on open-plan: General Academic articles on open-plan: Universities Online newspaper and magazine articles/Websites: General …
Academic Office Space: An argument against open-plan Clare O’Farrell May 2015 This post is also available as a PDF Additional general bibliography on open-plan office design Note: all the references in this text are listed at the end of this paper with hyperlinks for easy consultation. The anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally …
In doing research on the whole question of open-plan offices for academics, I have come across an enormous amount of material which exposes the problems across all sectors and globally of the open-plan workplace. A particularly well-titled article by Oliver Burkeman appeared in The Guardian in November 2013: Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in …
I have been doing some research around the increasing trend towards constructing open-plan offices for academics in the UK, the USA and Australia and thought this passage from Discipline and Punish might be apposite. Open-plan office design is now widespread across all industry sectors and around the globe and universities are starting to follow suit. …
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