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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Negotiating In Silence: Experiences With Parental Leave In Academia, Johanna Weststar Jul 2012

Negotiating In Silence: Experiences With Parental Leave In Academia, Johanna Weststar

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This paper presents a case study of pregnancy/parental leave arrangements among faculty members at a mid-sized Canadian University from 2000-2010. The data show that leave arrangements were very inconsistent across faculties, across and within departments, and even for individual faculty members who had taken more than one leave. The majority of problematic cases were instances where a faculty member began or ended a leave in the middle of an academic term. Without specific language in their collective agreement, these faculty members often negotiated circumstances that carried individual penalties for duties that were unassigned in light of the leave. This research …


A Polyphonic Approach To The 'Dark Side' Of Making Video Games, Johanna Weststar, Amanda Pettica-Harris, Steve Mckenna Jan 2012

A Polyphonic Approach To The 'Dark Side' Of Making Video Games, Johanna Weststar, Amanda Pettica-Harris, Steve Mckenna

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This paper considers the video game industry and how it is represented through social media blogs and tweets. It aims to disentangle the polyphony of voices communicating through different stories about what it means to work in the gaming industry. The multiple voices found within the blogs and tweets weave a complex and contested narrative about the carnivalesque way in which video games are made, poignantly illustrating the good, the bad, and the ugly. Using the work of the Russian literary theorist and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, 1993), and particularly his notions of monologic and dialogic stories and narratives (McKenna, …