Inger Mewburn

Last updated
Inger Mewburn
Inger mewburn.png
Born1970 (age 5253)
Alma mater University of Melbourne (PhD)
RMIT University (Bachelor of Architecture (Hons.); Master of Architecture)
Known forResearch on doctoral education, research student experiences, post-PhD employment pathways, and digital scholarship.
Notable workThe Thesis Whisperer blog; How to be an academic; How to fix your academic writing trouble
Website thesiswhisperer.com

Inger Mewburn (born 1970) is a Professor and Director of Research Training at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. [1] She has published on academic identity, writing, and digital scholarship. [2] [3] She is known as "The Thesis Whisperer" on social media, [4] and has been named as an "Australian social media influencer in higher education." [5] Mewburn uses social media to provide commentary on researching student experiences (particularly with thesis writing), researching student supervision, and post-doctoral employment pathways.

Contents

Education

Born in Hobart, Tasmania, and raised in Melbourne, Victoria, Mewburn completed her schooling at Croydon High School in 1988.

Mewburn's undergraduate degree was from RMIT University and she was awarded her doctorate from the University of Melbourne in 2009 for her thesis, "Constructing Bodies: gesture speech and representation at work in Architecture classrooms." [6] Her dissertation was awarded the John Grice Award for Best Thesis in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. [7]

Career

Mewburn was a Research Fellow at RMIT University from 2006–2012, and worked with research higher degree students and their supervisors as a research education and development scholar. Since 2013, Mewburn has been Director of Research Training at the Australian National University.

She undertakes research on post-graduate research within higher education, and is an influential voice on social media on this topic. [8] In 2010, Mewburn started The Thesis Whisperer blog. Her work on this blog, grounded in her academic research, has earned her global recognition as an expert on topics in doctoral education and academic cultures. She is frequently invited to work with cohorts of research students around the world. Mewburn is committed to sharing her knowledge to help others during their thesis process. [9]

Mewburn regularly writes for and provides expert opinion on doctoral issues to peak publications and higher education forums such as Nature, [10] [11] [12] The Conversation , [13] The Guardian , [14] Times Higher Education , [15] Campus Review, [16] and the London School of Economics Impact Blog. [17] [18] [19] She has mentored and supported the establishment of other scholarly development blogs, which are influenced by her successful model; these include the DoctoralWritingSIG [20] blog, Mademoiselle Scientist [9] and The Research Whisperer. [21]

In 2015, Mewburn ran a massive open online course, How to Survive Your PhD. The bulk of the content was organized around the emotions experienced by most PhD students: Confidence; Frustration; Loneliness; Fear; Curiosity; Confusion; Boredom and Love. [22] The course was designed to cater for students' families and supervisors, as well as the students themselves. Mewburn said that it was "... really heartening to see mums, dads, partners and even children of Ph.D. students are so interested in learning about the emotional parts of the journey." [23]

Research

Academic identity and workload

Mewburn's research has focused on the process of becoming an academic. In 2010, Robyn Barnacle and Mewburn published an influential paper [3] showing that scholarly identity is distributed and is performed through both traditional and non‐traditional sites of learning. [24] In 2011, she built on this work, and on material published on her Thesis Whisperer blog, to argue that PhD student ‘troubles talk’ in everyday interactions form an important aspect of identity formation. [25] [26]

In 2013, Mewburn and Pat Thomson published an influential paper [3] on why academics blog. They positioned this activity as a community of practice primarily written for other academics. [27] In 2017, Deborah Lupton, Mewburn and Pat Thomson edited a book on the digital academic, which bought together accounts of using digital media and technologies as part of academic practice across teaching, research administration and scholarship. [28]

In 2019, Adrian Barnett, Mewburn, and Sven Schroter published a paper analyzing the submission of manuscripts and peer reviews, to understand the amount of work undertaken outside of standard working hours. [29]

Academic employment

Over time, Mewburn's research has come to focus on the challenge of employability of PhD students in Australia. [30] In 2016, Rachael E Pitt and Mewburn published an analysis of advertisements for academic positions that sought to understand what graduate attributes universities were seeking from PhD candidates. [31] In 2019, Mewburn published Becoming an academic: How to get through grad school and beyond. One reviewer commented that Mewburn's approach allowed her to engage with "...topics that are only discussed in conversations hidden in the office kitchenette." [32]

In 2018, Mewburn, Will J. Grant, Hanna Suominen and Stephanie Kizimchuk used machine learning and natural language processing to analyze the content of non-academic Australian job advertisements to understand what proportion of positions would be suitable for PhD graduates. In 2020, Mewburn, Chenchen Xu, Hanna Suominen and Will J. Grant launched the PostAc tool, a real-world instantiation of her research that aims to help research degree graduates find employment. It aims to make the market for advanced research skills more visible to job seekers. [33] [34] [35]

Selected publications

Awards and recognition

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postgraduate education</span> Phase of higher education

Postgraduate education, graduate education, or graduate school consists of academic or professional degrees, certificates, diplomas, or other qualifications usually pursued by post-secondary students who have earned an undergraduate (bachelor's) degree.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doctorate</span> Academic or professional degree

A doctorate or doctoral degree is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities and some other educational institutions, derived from the ancient formalism licentia docendi.

The Doctor of Education is a research or professional doctoral degree that focuses on the field of education. It prepares the holder for academic, research, administrative, clinical, or professional positions in educational, civil, private organizations, or public institutions. Considerable differences exist in structure, content and aims between regions. In the US, for instance, the EdD usually is a professional doctorate for working or learning professionals and has a large taught component with a smaller thesis, comparable to for example a DSW or DPH, whereas in the UK and Canada, the Ed.D is a full research doctorate with research and profession related courses but ultimately awarded for the thesis resulting from original research, that way aligning more with a Ph.D.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Group of Eight (Australian universities)</span> Coalition of Australian tertiary institutions

The Group of Eight (Go8) comprises Australia's most research intensive universities - the University of Adelaide, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney and the University of Western Australia. It is often compared to the Russell Group of pioneering research universities in the United Kingdom.

Academic dishonesty, academic misconduct, academic fraud and academic integrity are related concepts that refer to various actions on the part of students that go against the expected norms of a school, university or other learning institution. Definitions of academic misconduct are usually outlined in institutional policies. Therefore, academic dishonesty consists of many different categories of behaviour, as opposed to being a singular concept.

Bachelor of Philosophy is the title of an academic degree that usually involves considerable research, either through a thesis or supervised research projects. Unlike many other bachelor's degrees, the BPhil is typically a postgraduate degree awarded to individuals who have already completed a traditional undergraduate degree.

Contract cheating is a form of academic dishonesty in which students pay others to complete their coursework. The term was coined in a 2006 study by Thomas Lancaster and the late Robert Clarke (UK), as a more inclusive way to talk about all forms of academic work, as opposed to more outdated terms such as "term paper mill" or "essay mill", which refer to text-based academic outsourcing. In contrast, Lancaster and Clarke are computer scientists who found evidence of students systematically outsourcing coding assignments. Hence, they coined the term "contract cheating" to include all outsourced academic work, regardless of whether it is from text-based or non-text-based disciplines.

Penny Diane Sackett is an American-born Australian astronomer and former director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) at the Australian National University (ANU). Professor Sackett was the Chief Scientist of Australia from November 2008 until March 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doctor of Philosophy</span> Postgraduate academic degree awarded by most universities worldwide

A Doctor of Philosophy is the most common degree at the highest academic level, awarded following a course of study and research. The degree is abbreviated PhD, from the Latin Philosophiae Doctor, pronounced as three separate letters. The abbreviation DPhil, from the English 'Doctor of Philosophy', is used by a small number of British and Commonwealth universities, including Oxford, formerly York, and Sussex, as the abbreviation for degrees from those institutions. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is an earned research degree, those studying for a PhD are required to produce original research that expands the boundaries of knowledge, normally in the form of a dissertation, and defend their work before a panel of other experts in the field. The completion of a PhD is typically required for employment as a university professor, researcher, or scientist in many fields.

Bullying in academia is a form of workplace bullying which takes place at institutions of higher education, such as colleges and universities in a wide range of actions. It is believed to be common, although has not received as much attention from researchers as bullying in some other contexts. Academia is highly competitive and has a well defined hierarchy, with junior staff being particularly vulnerable. Although most universities have policies on workplace bullying, individual campuses develop and implement their own protocols. This often leaves victims with no recourse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Stokoe</span>

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Athena SWAN is an equality charter mark framework and accreditation scheme established and managed by the UK Equality Challenge Unit in 2005 that recognises and celebrates good practices in higher education and research institutions towards the advancement of gender equality: representation, progression and success.

ANU Press is new university press (NUP) that publishes open-access books, textbooks and journals. It was established in 2004 to explore and enable new modes of scholarly publishing. In 2014, ANU E Press changed its name to ANU Press to reflect the changes the publication industry had seen since its foundation.

T.J. Thomson is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a chief investigator at its Digital Media Research Centre, where he leads its News, Media, and Journalism Research Group. He teaches and researches on visual communication topics, especially media representation, the production and reception of visual journalism, and visual culture. He has been an officer in several national and international societies and has served as the associate editor of Visual Communication Quarterly since 2017.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open thesis</span>

An open thesis, also known as an open dissertation, is a thesis that is freely available for members of the public to access upon publication, and often also during the planning and writing process. The decision to write an open thesis is made by the author, who will usually explain their rationale for creating an open thesis as part of the final published work or while developing it. Writing an open thesis is a process with many decision points regarding where and when to share information openly - from the planning stage, through research and writing, the defense/ voce viva and ultimate publication. Open theses are usually created and located in digital and multimodal formats.

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  28. The digital academic : critical perspectives on digital technologies in higher education. Lupton, Deborah, Mewburn, Inger, Thomson, Pat. Abingdon, Oxon. 2017. ISBN   978-1-138-20257-3. OCLC   975372928.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
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