Women in academia – are we the problem?

As a female academic, I have received many opportunities for support. I have been offered mentors and courses on presentation technique and mindfulness. Still, I am not sure that the disadvantage of being a woman in academia is really that we aren’t able to present, publish or network. I here present my advise for improving the situation of gender bias and structural inequalities in academia.

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Why podcasts make excellent syllabi

Photo by David De la Rosa from Pixabay

My students asked me to convince more teachers to make a podcast syllabus for their course, so here goes.

Academic writing duos

Photo: Mia Blakstad

Most of my work is co-authored, which is not that common in philosophy or the humanities. In a feature article from Times Higher Education (THE), Matthew Reisz interviews a number of academic duos about their partnership. Stephen Mumford and I are also interviewed here about our 10 year collaboration as Team MumJum. Reading it, we were surprised to learn that so many of our own experiences – positive and negative – were shared by the other writing duos.

9 years of philosophy Twitter

Today is my 9th anniversary on Twitter. Back in 2009, when I first signed up, I was at the end of my Postdoc period in UK and heading back to Norway.

New Philosophy Resource

Struggle to keep updated on the latest philosophy papers in your research area? Despair no longer! Andrea Raimondi has developed a resource called The Philosophy Paperboy. This is a webpage that ‘publishes the latest contents from philosophy journals around the world’ and it is super easy to search for keywords. I tested it with a quick search for ‘causation’ and then ‘risk’, and I found several papers that would be useful for what I am currently working on. So give it a go and send a grateful thought to Andrea and web- & graphic designer Lorenzo Cataldi, who have spent their time making philosophy research easier for the rest of us.

The Mumford-Anjum Official Statement of Authorship

Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum. Photo: Kristine Løwe, NMBU

1. Why a statement?

Our writing partnership in philosophy began in 2007, when Anjum arrived at Nottingham as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Since then, we have written three books and around 40 papers together, which seems rare, especially in philosophy. We think it’s time to issue a statement about our writing partnership, for at least four reasons.

How I stopped worrying about privacy and learned to love Twitter

This is an old post that I wrote before I had a blog. It is about my transformation from hating social media to loving it, and about who and what made me change my mind.

Ways to ruin universities and academic values

Much has been said about the academic’s burden of balancing teaching and research. Is the new university model helping?

“Good” or “bad” students?

Universities tend to pride themselves in having “the best students” or the most “competitive programs”. An assumption is that this is achieved by keeping the acceptance rate as low as possible, only allowing those with top grades to enter the programs. Is this the best practice? Since I started teaching again last semester, I have thought more about how we judge the quality of our students when we say that they are “good” or “bad”.

Being a (female) academic

This week I was invited to talk to the female postdocs at my university about my experience with creating an academic career path for myself, as a woman. This is what I told them.