J Burford
Biographic Data
| ID | 30756 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Burford |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Burford |
| SIGNATURE | BURFORD J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Thammasat University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0707-7401 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Expectations of independence from the outset? The discourse of researcher independence in the pre-application stage of doctoral admissions
This paper explores how the discourse of ‘researcher independence’ operates in the pre-application stage of doctoral recruitment. Drawing on semi-structured interview data from an institutional case study of pre-admissions practice at a UK Russell Group university, we examine how doctoral programme officers and academic directors of doctoral programmes interact with enquiries from pre-applicants. Our Foucauldian-inspired analysis demonstrates tha…
Picturing sexuality education in Thailand
Visual research methods are increasingly utilised in educational research and scholars have used them to develop accounts of sexuality in schooling contexts. This article advances this work with an analysis of secondary students’ drawings of their experiences with sexuality education. We performed a thematic analysis on 150 drawings created during participatory focus group discussions (FGDs) among students in 30 Thai general secondary and vocatio…
Picturing education agent-student relationships in China
Education agents are key players in the global higher education (HE) market. Yet thus far the accounts of agents and the students who engage their services have received relatively limited scholarly attention. Previous studies have largely been written from the host country perspective, and current accounts emphasise agents’ role as recruiters, how universities manage their agent relationships, and how governments regulate agents’ role in the HE …
Filmic figurations of the ‘non-traditional’ student
Films offer useful entry points into how the university and the university student may be understood within the social imagination. In this article, we explore the 1980s film Educating Rita (1983), which many commentators argue offers a ground-breaking portrayal of the ‘non-traditional’ higher education (HE) student. Educating Rita’s success, in part, arose from its novel depiction of an older working-class woman who transitions to study at an el…
Institutional Heteronormativity, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Soft Resistance
Drawing on semi-structured interview data, this article examines how gay academics in China negotiate academic workplaces suffused with institutional heteronormativity and restrictive gender norms. It highlights gay academics’ accounts of leadership and institutional practices, revealing how heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity are institutionalised within higher education institutions. This study finds that Chinese higher education instit…
Campus climate, queerphobia, and heteronormativity
Seeking supervisability
In doctoral admissions research, a neglected stage is the informal phase which precedes the submission of a formal application, and which involves the circulation of various communications about admissions; we term this stage 'pre-application doctoral communications' (PADC). Due to the informality of PADC, there are inclusivity concerns about the potential for prospective applicants to be screened out of even applying for doctoral education. Supe…
Pre-application doctoral communications
This paper makes a novel contribution to international doctoral education scholarship by offering a detailed examination of preapplication doctoral communications (PADC) between prospective applicants and various university staff members. While PADC is currently an under-considered phenomenon within extant research literature, the paper argues that it ought to be conceived of as an important subset of doctoral admissions practices. Given the poss…
Narratives of ‘stuckness’ among North–South academic migrants in Thailand
Not Getting Over It
This forum-style paper presents contributions by scholars from the area of Critical University Studies (CUS). It articulates the ways that particular concepts from Sara Ahmed’s scholarship have influenced or been useful in CUS. Across her scholarship, Ahmed offers intersectional perspectives on exclusionary practices and structures that many within CUS have drawn upon. The contributors to this paper hail from and research across a diverse range o…
Being, adjusting and developing satisfaction
Academic mobility is an ancient phenomenon that has particular characteristics in an era of increasing internationalisation. However, surprisingly little has been published about academic mobility to Thailand, and available accounts in both Thai and English languages are dispersed and disconnected. This article addresses these challenges by accumulating Thai and English-language accounts and making them accessible for a wider international audien…
Producing un/professional academics
This article explores the process of constituting ‘professionalism’ as a discursive category amongst migrant academics working in Thailand. We animate the conceptual resource of ‘category boundary work’ to examine the inclusionary and exclusionary practices by which ‘un/professionalism’ is produced in the talk of 25 aa-jaan dtàang châat or migrant academics working in Thailand. Throughout our data, the discourse of professionalism was constructed…
Homeliness meant having the fucking vacuum cleaner out’
This article extends examinations of the gendered nature of care and service in academia, with a particular focus on the labour of maintaining conference communities. Utilising empirical data from a cultural history of the International Academic Identities Conference, we draw on interviews with 32 conference organisers, keynote speakers and participants to explore the gendered dynamics of reproducing conference communities. While some participant…
Thoughtful gatherings
Many accounts of conferences research begin with a lamentation that conferences are a neglected phenomenon. The lamentation goes that conferences are under-researched, despite their ubiquity, frequ
Hovering on the periphery? ‘Decolonising’ writing for academic journals
In this Forum, we are creating a space to challenge not only the dominance of English in academic journals, but also ‘metropolitan’ genres of scholarly writing and discourse, and, indeed, the ways in which particular knowledges continue to retain their dominance and to be privileged. We are inviting readers to reflect on how academic writing continues to be ‘colonised’, by problematising it and seeking to ‘decolonise’ it in,order to ‘decentre kno…
Analysing the national and institutional policy landscape for foreign academics in Thailand
While academic expatriation is a longstanding global phenomenon, Thailand has emerged in recent years as an increasingly popular destination for internationally mobile academics. The objective of this article is to identify current policy dispositions towards foreign academics at the national and institutional levels in Thailand. The article finds that within Thai higher education policy discourse, foreign academics are framed in three primary wa…
Intersections of LGBTI Exclusion and Discrimination in Thailand
The trouble with doctoral aspiration now
This article attends to the affective-political dimensions of doctoral aspiration. It considers why doctoral students continue to hope for an ‘academic good life’ in spite of the depressed and precarious features of the academic present. The article emerges from 2013 research with ten doctoral students in the Arts and Social Sciences, at a research-intensive university in Aotearoa New Zealand, and accomplishes two primary objectives. Firstly, it …
Enlarging conference learning
This article stages an encounter between the field of fat studies and conference pedagogy scholarship. After laying the foundations for a reading of academic conferences as learning spaces, the authors present two examples—International Fat Studies Conferences held in Aotearoa, New Zealand, in 2012 and 2016—to unpack these ideas. The framing of fat studies conferences as pedagogical spaces sparks questions that travel in multiple directions. It c…
Through a glass darkly
This book arrived in the mail as I was finishing my PhD. I told several friends that I was undertaking this review, and one asked, his voice inflected with concern, if a doctoral student on the ver
Evaluating a gender diversity workshop to promote positive learning environments
Drawing on data from an Aotearoa/New Zealand study of more than 230 secondary students, this article evaluates the potential of a 60-min gender diversity workshop to address bullying and promote positive environments for learning. Students completed pre- and postworkshop questionnaires. The authors used descriptive statistics to summarize results and conducted t-tests to assess the statistical significance of changes from before the workshop to i…
Not writing, and giving 'zero-f**ks' about it
This article proposes that a queer reading of failure might offer opportunities to re-think the affective-political practice of doctoral writing. It examines data from one case in Aotearoa New Zealand to illustrate how a doctoral student negotiates ‘failure’ in relation to their writing practice and identity. While higher education researchers have tended to interpret failure as something to avoid, or learn from in the pursuit of normative succes…
Queering accounts of "MSM" practitioner agency
This article demonstrates how donor resources can enable MSM/TG practitioners to exercise agency in diverse ways, which produce collateral benefits for sexuality/gender-diverse communities. By focusing on what Thai MSM/TG practitioners actually do, we illustrate how their practices respond to their own aspirations, not only the demands of donor funding regimes. We position our project as queer in the sense that it interrupts the normative absence…
Hovering on the periphery? ‘Decolonising’ writing for academic journals
In this Forum, we are creating a space to challenge not only the dominance of English in academic journals, but also ‘metropolitan’ genres of scholarly writing and discourse, and, indeed, the ways in which particular knowledges continue to retain their dominance and to be privileged. We are inviting readers to reflect on how academic writing continues to be ‘colonised’, by problematising it and seeking to ‘decolonise’ it in,order to ‘decentre kno…
The trouble with doctoral aspiration now
This article attends to the affective-political dimensions of doctoral aspiration. It considers why doctoral students continue to hope for an ‘academic good life’ in spite of the depressed and precarious features of the academic present. The article emerges from 2013 research with ten doctoral students in the Arts and Social Sciences, at a research-intensive university in Aotearoa New Zealand, and accomplishes two primary objectives. Firstly, it …
Thoughtful gatherings
Many accounts of conferences research begin with a lamentation that conferences are a neglected phenomenon. The lamentation goes that conferences are under-researched, despite their ubiquity, frequ
Intersections of LGBTI Exclusion and Discrimination in Thailand
Homeliness meant having the fucking vacuum cleaner out’
This article extends examinations of the gendered nature of care and service in academia, with a particular focus on the labour of maintaining conference communities. Utilising empirical data from a cultural history of the International Academic Identities Conference, we draw on interviews with 32 conference organisers, keynote speakers and participants to explore the gendered dynamics of reproducing conference communities. While some participant…
Not writing, and giving 'zero-f**ks' about it
This article proposes that a queer reading of failure might offer opportunities to re-think the affective-political practice of doctoral writing. It examines data from one case in Aotearoa New Zealand to illustrate how a doctoral student negotiates ‘failure’ in relation to their writing practice and identity. While higher education researchers have tended to interpret failure as something to avoid, or learn from in the pursuit of normative succes…
Evaluating a gender diversity workshop to promote positive learning environments
Drawing on data from an Aotearoa/New Zealand study of more than 230 secondary students, this article evaluates the potential of a 60-min gender diversity workshop to address bullying and promote positive environments for learning. Students completed pre- and postworkshop questionnaires. The authors used descriptive statistics to summarize results and conducted t-tests to assess the statistical significance of changes from before the workshop to i…
Analysing the national and institutional policy landscape for foreign academics in Thailand
While academic expatriation is a longstanding global phenomenon, Thailand has emerged in recent years as an increasingly popular destination for internationally mobile academics. The objective of this article is to identify current policy dispositions towards foreign academics at the national and institutional levels in Thailand. The article finds that within Thai higher education policy discourse, foreign academics are framed in three primary wa…
Institutional Heteronormativity, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Soft Resistance
Drawing on semi-structured interview data, this article examines how gay academics in China negotiate academic workplaces suffused with institutional heteronormativity and restrictive gender norms. It highlights gay academics’ accounts of leadership and institutional practices, revealing how heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity are institutionalised within higher education institutions. This study finds that Chinese higher education instit…
Pre-application doctoral communications
This paper makes a novel contribution to international doctoral education scholarship by offering a detailed examination of preapplication doctoral communications (PADC) between prospective applicants and various university staff members. While PADC is currently an under-considered phenomenon within extant research literature, the paper argues that it ought to be conceived of as an important subset of doctoral admissions practices. Given the poss…
Queering accounts of "MSM" practitioner agency
This article demonstrates how donor resources can enable MSM/TG practitioners to exercise agency in diverse ways, which produce collateral benefits for sexuality/gender-diverse communities. By focusing on what Thai MSM/TG practitioners actually do, we illustrate how their practices respond to their own aspirations, not only the demands of donor funding regimes. We position our project as queer in the sense that it interrupts the normative absence…
Through a glass darkly
This book arrived in the mail as I was finishing my PhD. I told several friends that I was undertaking this review, and one asked, his voice inflected with concern, if a doctoral student on the ver
Evaluating a gender diversity workshop to promote positive learning environments
Drawing on data from an Aotearoa/New Zealand study of more than 230 secondary students, this article evaluates the potential of a 60-min gender diversity workshop to address bullying and promote positive environments for learning. Students completed pre- and postworkshop questionnaires. The authors used descriptive statistics to summarize results and conducted t-tests to assess the statistical significance of changes from before the workshop to i…
Not writing, and giving 'zero-f**ks' about it
This article proposes that a queer reading of failure might offer opportunities to re-think the affective-political practice of doctoral writing. It examines data from one case in Aotearoa New Zealand to illustrate how a doctoral student negotiates ‘failure’ in relation to their writing practice and identity. While higher education researchers have tended to interpret failure as something to avoid, or learn from in the pursuit of normative succes…
Intersections of LGBTI Exclusion and Discrimination in Thailand
The trouble with doctoral aspiration now
This article attends to the affective-political dimensions of doctoral aspiration. It considers why doctoral students continue to hope for an ‘academic good life’ in spite of the depressed and precarious features of the academic present. The article emerges from 2013 research with ten doctoral students in the Arts and Social Sciences, at a research-intensive university in Aotearoa New Zealand, and accomplishes two primary objectives. Firstly, it …
Enlarging conference learning
This article stages an encounter between the field of fat studies and conference pedagogy scholarship. After laying the foundations for a reading of academic conferences as learning spaces, the authors present two examples—International Fat Studies Conferences held in Aotearoa, New Zealand, in 2012 and 2016—to unpack these ideas. The framing of fat studies conferences as pedagogical spaces sparks questions that travel in multiple directions. It c…
Homeliness meant having the fucking vacuum cleaner out’
This article extends examinations of the gendered nature of care and service in academia, with a particular focus on the labour of maintaining conference communities. Utilising empirical data from a cultural history of the International Academic Identities Conference, we draw on interviews with 32 conference organisers, keynote speakers and participants to explore the gendered dynamics of reproducing conference communities. While some participant…
Thoughtful gatherings
Many accounts of conferences research begin with a lamentation that conferences are a neglected phenomenon. The lamentation goes that conferences are under-researched, despite their ubiquity, frequ
Hovering on the periphery? ‘Decolonising’ writing for academic journals
In this Forum, we are creating a space to challenge not only the dominance of English in academic journals, but also ‘metropolitan’ genres of scholarly writing and discourse, and, indeed, the ways in which particular knowledges continue to retain their dominance and to be privileged. We are inviting readers to reflect on how academic writing continues to be ‘colonised’, by problematising it and seeking to ‘decolonise’ it in,order to ‘decentre kno…
Analysing the national and institutional policy landscape for foreign academics in Thailand
While academic expatriation is a longstanding global phenomenon, Thailand has emerged in recent years as an increasingly popular destination for internationally mobile academics. The objective of this article is to identify current policy dispositions towards foreign academics at the national and institutional levels in Thailand. The article finds that within Thai higher education policy discourse, foreign academics are framed in three primary wa…
Being, adjusting and developing satisfaction
Academic mobility is an ancient phenomenon that has particular characteristics in an era of increasing internationalisation. However, surprisingly little has been published about academic mobility to Thailand, and available accounts in both Thai and English languages are dispersed and disconnected. This article addresses these challenges by accumulating Thai and English-language accounts and making them accessible for a wider international audien…
Producing un/professional academics
This article explores the process of constituting ‘professionalism’ as a discursive category amongst migrant academics working in Thailand. We animate the conceptual resource of ‘category boundary work’ to examine the inclusionary and exclusionary practices by which ‘un/professionalism’ is produced in the talk of 25 aa-jaan dtàang châat or migrant academics working in Thailand. Throughout our data, the discourse of professionalism was constructed…
Narratives of ‘stuckness’ among North–South academic migrants in Thailand
Not Getting Over It
This forum-style paper presents contributions by scholars from the area of Critical University Studies (CUS). It articulates the ways that particular concepts from Sara Ahmed’s scholarship have influenced or been useful in CUS. Across her scholarship, Ahmed offers intersectional perspectives on exclusionary practices and structures that many within CUS have drawn upon. The contributors to this paper hail from and research across a diverse range o…
Filmic figurations of the ‘non-traditional’ student
Films offer useful entry points into how the university and the university student may be understood within the social imagination. In this article, we explore the 1980s film Educating Rita (1983), which many commentators argue offers a ground-breaking portrayal of the ‘non-traditional’ higher education (HE) student. Educating Rita’s success, in part, arose from its novel depiction of an older working-class woman who transitions to study at an el…
Institutional Heteronormativity, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Soft Resistance
Drawing on semi-structured interview data, this article examines how gay academics in China negotiate academic workplaces suffused with institutional heteronormativity and restrictive gender norms. It highlights gay academics’ accounts of leadership and institutional practices, revealing how heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity are institutionalised within higher education institutions. This study finds that Chinese higher education instit…
Campus climate, queerphobia, and heteronormativity
Seeking supervisability
In doctoral admissions research, a neglected stage is the informal phase which precedes the submission of a formal application, and which involves the circulation of various communications about admissions; we term this stage 'pre-application doctoral communications' (PADC). Due to the informality of PADC, there are inclusivity concerns about the potential for prospective applicants to be screened out of even applying for doctoral education. Supe…
Pre-application doctoral communications
This paper makes a novel contribution to international doctoral education scholarship by offering a detailed examination of preapplication doctoral communications (PADC) between prospective applicants and various university staff members. While PADC is currently an under-considered phenomenon within extant research literature, the paper argues that it ought to be conceived of as an important subset of doctoral admissions practices. Given the poss…
Expectations of independence from the outset? The discourse of researcher independence in the pre-application stage of doctoral admissions
This paper explores how the discourse of ‘researcher independence’ operates in the pre-application stage of doctoral recruitment. Drawing on semi-structured interview data from an institutional case study of pre-admissions practice at a UK Russell Group university, we examine how doctoral programme officers and academic directors of doctoral programmes interact with enquiries from pre-applicants. Our Foucauldian-inspired analysis demonstrates tha…
Picturing sexuality education in Thailand
Visual research methods are increasingly utilised in educational research and scholars have used them to develop accounts of sexuality in schooling contexts. This article advances this work with an analysis of secondary students’ drawings of their experiences with sexuality education. We performed a thematic analysis on 150 drawings created during participatory focus group discussions (FGDs) among students in 30 Thai general secondary and vocatio…
Picturing education agent-student relationships in China
Education agents are key players in the global higher education (HE) market. Yet thus far the accounts of agents and the students who engage their services have received relatively limited scholarly attention. Previous studies have largely been written from the host country perspective, and current accounts emphasise agents’ role as recruiters, how universities manage their agent relationships, and how governments regulate agents’ role in the HE …
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (15 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Higher education (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Pedagogy (7 works) · Higher Education Governance and Development (6 works) · Media studies (6 works)