Creating Alternative Communities: The Survey!

by Mary Kate Hurley

It always seems that whenever I want to blog, someone beats me to it.  The result, of course, is just more bloggy goodness for everybody!  Make sure you don’t miss Materiality at #Kzoo2015 from Jonathan.  And for more previews of #NCS14 Iceland, check out Jeffrey's post on Ice.

I write as I'm about to depart for about a month out of the US, beginning with manuscript work in the UK and a trip to the Leeds IMC, and culminating in #NCS14.  I’d imagine some blogging will happen while I’m abroad, but in the meantime, I have a request for ITM readers: 

 

My paper for NCS this year is called “Creating Alternative Communities: The BABEL Working Group as a Response to the Adjunctification of the University,” and is part of a panel on institutional histories that looks to be really fascinating: 

2H Paper Panel: Institutional Histories of Medieval English Literary Studies (L 201)

Thread: In Search of Things Past
Organizer: Lynn Arner, Brock University
Chair: Lynn Arner, Brock University

1. Sylvia Tomasch, Hunter College, CUNY, “The Two Chaucer Societies”
2. Mary Kate Hurley, Ohio University, “Creating Alternative Communities: The Babel Working Group as a Response to the Adjunctification of the University”
3. Justin Sevenker, University of Pittsburgh, “The Society of Antiquaries and the Origin of Old English Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain”

 

My admittedly rather long title is a way of bringing together several things I’m deeply interested in and committed to: shedding light on the conditions under which adjunct professors labor (the good and the bad), thinking about the future of the university, and the BABEL working group, which has given so much to me and so many other young medievalists. 

This paper, however, can’t succeed without YOU.  Yes, YOU.  I’m looking for responses to a few short survey questions to help me as I form my thoughts and compose a paper that I hope will help to explore the work BABEL has done over the past ten years, the work it’s doing, and the work still to do. 

So, click right here to fill out the survey.  I’ll be accepting responses until July 10^th. Your answers can be as long or as short as you want. You do not need to be formally affiliated with BABEL to participate: you just need to have ideas about it, or things you'd like to say! As regards privacy, your name is a required entry, but I’ve included an option on the survey that allows you to decide if and how your thoughts can be cited in my paper.  I’ve never done a survey of this type before, but will follow proper protocol: all data will be seen only by me, I will comply with your wishes regarding citations, and will delete the data when the project is concluded.  If you need a character reference, the most indicative level of my trustworthiness that I know is this: I knew who the "Chaucer Blogger" was in 2007, and didn’t reveal it, not even to my little sister.*

Please see below for the email that will be circulated with a link to the survey once I'm settled in England.  Thanks so much for all your help, and I look forward to sharing my findings with you at NCS!

Dear Colleagues, 

You’re receiving this survey as part of a project I am conducting for NCS Reykjavík, where I will be presenting a paper titled “Creating Alternative Communities: The BABEL Working Group as a Response to the Adjunctification of the University.”

I am hoping that you might be able to take a moment to answer a few short questions for my research.  Please follow the link below to a Google Documents Survey:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1CbCSiBcusxck0yWSxs1TRutOdindIxZWjTKsMQ6vSuA/viewform?usp=send_form

A note on matters of privacy: The survey DOES require you to enter your name; however, it also allows you to indicate your preference as to whether your responses may be cited by name, anonymously, or only as part of an aggregate.  Responses to the survey will be kept confidential--unless you choose to allow your thoughts to be cited--and I will delete them all after the project is completed.  I will post the full text of my paper from the NCS conference on "In the Middle" (www.inthemedievalmiddle.com) after the conference.

I would like to gather my final data by July 10th, so if you would like to participate, I would be very grateful to have your responses by then.

Thank you so much for your help and support.

All the best,
Mary Kate Hurley
Ohio University

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* it was Geoffrey Chaucer.  Who else would it be?