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This paper aims to explore sonic play in close proximity to a music, literacy and songwriting for social change community-based initiative. The authors leverage ideas about time, space and narrative under the concept of sonic flux to understand youth’s sonic and aural play on digital beatmaking technologies. In doing so, the authors break from a fixation on the written and spoken word and address sound, aurality and Blacktronika creative technologies that are often present but muted in literacies and songwriting scholarship.

The authors’ team consisted of three community-based teaching artists who situated this inquiry around their own practice with youth. The authors conducted this inquiry through a qualitative, participatory and community-engaged research approach. As such, the authors codeveloped and carried out research questions and sense-making protocols that balance the power of interpretation and epistemologies among us.

The findings address how the joy, laughter and play of one young musician, Malik, moved across different conceptions of time while learning to make beats in proximity to peers writing lyrics for songs. Specifically, the authors unpack how Malik’s play with mobile sound-making technologies moved across linear and nonlinear time that characterize sonic space and sound art, not music and lyric writing. In doing so, the loops and durations of his sonic play were sometimes unbound by narrative structures that often code literacy and songwriting initiatives.

The authors’ inquiry speaks into literacy and songwriting initiatives that privilege spoken, written and performed word over sound. The authors ask what kind of participating structures, collaborations, ontologies and youth epistemologies open up if we think of youth in these spaces not only as performers but as programmers tinkering with time in the machine. In addition, the authors ask what literacy and songwriting spaces might look like when the duration, loops and drones of sonic space and not music are the structuring codes over narratives and linearity.

The introductory chapter in the volume offers a rationale for bringing together, in an edited collection, contributions from authors who emphasize the continued relevance of mentoring in academia. The focus of mentoring in the volume is on enabling academics to orient their practice towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); the introduction highlights the selection of SDGs discussed, as well as critically reflective responses to these in existing literature. The structure of the volume and of individual chapters is mapped for the benefit of readers. The volume is a hybrid text, combining academic scholarly reflection with narrative vignettes and with dialogue excerpts, to illustrate more fully SDG-oriented mentoring practices and experiences. The principles underpinning the writing methodology and the sources which have helped shape these principles are discussed here. As well as unpacking the writing methodology, the introductory chapter spotlights three core texts on mentoring which informed the volume at proposal stage and throughout the writing process. A personal note on mentoring from the volume editor is followed by a ‘pause and reflect’ section, which offers questions for the reader to consider when engaging with some or all the chapters in the volume.

This study aims to investigate basic/core principles and practical tools behind successful manuscript writing for education journals. Drawing on the insights of journal editors and related literature, this paper seeks to clarify the craft of preparing quality manuscripts to meet the expectations of academic journals.

This paper uses an interpretivist framework by incorporating a qualitative analysis of the literature with the authors’ experiences to identify key principles and issues in academic publishing. These narratives provide an empirical basis for understanding the mechanics and essence of effective manuscript crafting. The study integrates theoretical knowledge with actionable strategies, focusing on identifying the objectives and processes of writing, determining common challenges and directing readers toward comprehensive resources for guidance in article writing.

This study reveals that manuscript rejections often transcend technical shortcomings. Issues that are central to nonacceptance include misalignment with a journal’s thematic focus, absence of a coherent and persuasive argument, methodological weaknesses and insufficient evidence underpinning the assertions. Successful publication depends not just on data presentation and adherence to submission norms but also on developing a narrative that enriches the prevailing scholarly discourse. Our findings advocate for manuscripts that strike an appropriate balance between lucidity and analytical rigor, avoid superfluous technical language and express a mix of assertiveness and scholarly modesty.

Although there is literature on academic writing, very few recent articles have been uncovered that probe the intricacies of crafting education manuscripts and point to resources.

This paper aims to tentatively explore the benefits of placing art’s knowledge-building tradition, with its capacity to disrupt and reframe, at the centre of how we look at alternative organizing and alternative economic spaces, positioning lived experience, its uncertainties intact, at the heart of researching and practicing social enterprise (SE).

The paper explores indeterminacy through two case-study narratives, one of an academic arts-based research project and the other of a unique organization it encountered.

The paper describes the way juxtaposition, encounter and drift value indeterminacy as central to generative processes, challenging the control central to management and its research.

The paper proposes that adopting an arts-based approach that challenges control can create a research instrument sensitive to similar tendencies in case studies, thus highlighting what is different and alternative about them. This responds to concerns about the diminishing centrality of SE’s democratizing ethic expressed in its scholarship, about creativity in its research and about its socially transformative potential.

The practice, by SEs of an approach welcoming chance, encounter, meandering paths and place-making with porous boundaries, proliferates transformative possibilities and is linked to democratization and participation.

Though dangerously challenging to accepted notions of academic rigour, this paper proposes an unusual thought experiment tied in with lived experiences, in themselves experimental in practice.

Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of postcolonial critique, that is, the continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of newly independent countries (NICs) on ex-colonizers as pointed out by neocolonialism, dependency theory, and postcolonial theory, respectively. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic literature as a “failed nation” and a state dominated by the military and plagued by religious extremism. As opposed to this, through the literary and activists writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, this chapter will try to illustrate how cultural contestation of the nation-building project postindependence from British rule was a lot more complex and interesting in Pakistan. This was so because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian, and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constituent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the marginalized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical, and literary insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan, which paralleled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early Subaltern Studies influenced by the Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan's literary and cultural sphere. This chapter not only tries to give a different postcolonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan but, though at a preliminary level, is an attempt to separate the original postcolonial theory in its radical tradition from contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory marked with pessimism and resignation.

As emerging scholars of color with transnational backgrounds, we collectively recount our socialization experiences in US higher education institutes. We explore moments of betweenness as catalysts for envisioning a more inclusive academia that operates beyond the tokenism of diversity.

Employing betweener autoethnography (Diversi and Moreira, 2018), we inquire into the sense of impasse encountered by South Korean female emerging scholars in the field of education in becoming an outsider within the academic system.

Chronicling our shifts in perspectives of our positionality, we interweave inquiries motivating us to challenge normative pressures and map our betweener experiences onto the Wiedman and DeAngelo’s (2020) socialization model. Through this process, we wedge open in-between spaces in the socialization process that accommodate the nuanced positionality of transnational scholars.

Integrating postcolonial critiques on the Western-centric meritocratic academia, this piece sheds light on the complexity and fluidity of emerging transnational scholars’ socialization processes. The thick, nuanced description deepens the understanding of the complexity of their identity negotiation within the dominant logics of academia. Our inquiries interwoven through betweener autoethnography serve as guidance for mentoring international graduate students and transnational scholars.

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.