Polite invitation turns out to be fraudulent

For the second time I received a nice email from “Dr. Kateryna Bielka, M.D”. She says complementary things about one of my published papers and, in a highly personalised manner, asks if I would consider publishing in an esteemed journal that she is working for. Like many academics my email in box is peppered with highly standardised invitations to publish in open access journals. Most are clever enough to parse one of my article titles into the email text they send out but this invitation appears much more human. And the journal in question is called Medical Research Archives

However, human it isn’t. In fact it is the second one I have received from this ‘person’. When you search for the name of the journal and couple it with ‘predatory open access’ you get a very informative account from the Scholarly Open Access blog at. https://scholarlyoa.com/2016/08/04/about-those-manipulative-spam-emails-from-internal-medicine-review/

You learn that the journal in question will charge between $1250 and $3000 to place your work, that it is closed access, and that the journal appears to have no subscribers at all. Not a very attractive proposition.

The prohibition is prohibited: new managerialism

I found this on the Zizek Studies Facebook page: (It probably makes most sense to those familiar with his way of thinking – and who can imagine him saying this at some public lecture)

In our permissive times, a new form of the unsayable is more and more acquiring a ­central role: it is not only that certain things are prohibited to say – the prohibition itself is prohibited: we are not allowed to say openly what is prohibited.ZIZEK

Already in Stalinism, it was not only prohibited to criticise Stalin and the party publicly, it was even more prohibited to announce this prohibition publicly. If someone were to shout back at a critic of Stalin, “Are you crazy? Don’t you know that we are not allowed to do this?” he would have disappeared into the Gulag even faster than the open critic of Stalin. Unexpectedly, the same holds for the relations of domination in our permissive post-patriarchal societies: a modern boss is tolerant, he behaves like a colleague of ours, sharing dirty jokes, inviting us for a drink, openly displaying his weaknesses, admitting that he is “merely human like us”. He is deeply offended if we remind him that he is our boss – however, it is this very rejection of explicit authority that guarantees his de facto power.

This is why the first gesture of liberation is to force the master to act as one: our only defence is to reject his “warm human” approach and to insist that he should treat us with cold distance. We live in weird times in which we are compelled to behave as if we are free, so that the unsayable is not our freedom but the very fact of our servitude.

Slavoj Žižek

RCN Research Society Facebook page

The RCN Research Society leaps fearlessly into the world of social media with a Facebook page. We have 179 members of the page so it is clearly a good way to reach a lot of researchers in nursing in one fell swoop. Maybe to advertise research jobs or publicise a recent paper or book or to informally canvas opinions of nurse researchers.  Its to be found here.

RCN research society page

Professor Helen Allan to give seminar on infertility, at the Royal College of GPs

Professor Helen Allan has been invited to give a seminar at the Royal College of
General Practitioners on the topic of ‘Infertility’ at an RCGP Learning, One
Day Essential CPD for Primary Care Event on Men’s Health.

This is an important step forward for Professor Allan who hopes to recruit
GPs to work with her on a funded research project about early parenting in
infertile couples and the role of primary care professionals in identifying
the needs of parents following IVF.

For further information please contact Professor Allan: h.allan@mdx.ac.uk 

Professor Helen Allan of CCRNM and colleagues win grant to investigate fertility treatments

Congratulations to Professor Helen Allan of the Centre for Critical Research in Nursing and Midwifery Education and colleagues who will investigate early parenthood experiences of infertile couples after successful fertility treatment as part of winning a development grant award.

The research group, which includes Professor of Health Psychology Olga van den Akker and Professor of Nursing Helen Allan, won the Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology (SRIP) grant award to run a workshop to develop a collaborative team for investigating the implications on IVF/ICSI conception and delivery of a baby for couples’ lives in early parenthood.

Full story here:

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/news/2016/05/researchers-win-grant-to-investigate-fertility-treatments

 

Doctors and Nurses do not need more stress – protect our NHS!

In a recent letter to the Guardian newspaper, signed by prominent nursing academics including Professor Helen Allan from CCRNM,  nurses at all levels are urged to participate in Action Nursing – a movement which encourages nurses and their health colleagues to engage in action to protect health care.

Read the letter in the Guardian

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Professor Helen Allan

Our Sociology book launched at RCN Research Conference

After a year of meeting at secret locations in London we finished our book Understanding Sociology in Nursing with Danny Kelly and Pam Smith, 2016 ISBN: 9781473913592 Available from Wordery or from the publisher Sage. The idea of the book is to do something different to the sociological-theory-for-nurses format. To me (MT) those kinds of books seem to be aimed at other academics rather than student nurses or practitioners. Our book starts with issues that this kind of reader will have to face e.g. becoming a nurse, or when things go wrong and looks at how basic sociological concepts can help make sense of these things. The book was launched by sociologist Julia Lawton.

book cover

Sage launched the book at this year’s RCN International Research Conference in Edinburgh. Here are the authors, attempting symmetry.
author