These structural questions were driven by the three questions which, in a series of breakout sessions, we were tasked to consider (other groups faced other questions). First, we were asked to assess what research was only possible in Malaysia (or the region), what kinds of work might define UNMC, what research could really only be achieved here. Second, how we might focus our bidding for funds to maximize external research income. Third, what non-traditional sources of research support might be available and how we might access them. In what were very open and frank and thoughtful debates, of course we also began to scrutinize some of the underlying assumptions behind these questions.

We wondered, for instance, whether at this stage and phase of UNMC’s development it was actually worthwhile pursuing external research funding at all. Such funding currently makes up 5% of total income for the campus. Nonetheless there is clearly a significant volume of high-quality research taking place even with such small baseline figures. We are well-regarded in the Malaysian Research Quality exercises. Given colleagues’ concerns about the amount of time, in already an already overcrowded schedule, they felt they needed to commit to the pursuit of research grants, we felt ,there is a discussion to be had about the cost-effectiveness of the culture of grant-chasing in research-intensive universities. One response to this issue might be for the institution to target significant investment in research support services at UNMC. More boldly, during this developmental phase of UNMC, the University and its partners might directly commission and develop research ‘in house’ for a period in order to establish technical capacity and mass. There was certainly agreement that, in any strategy discussion, there needs to be careful acknowledgement of the relative ‘youth’ of UNMC, of the need to nurture and develop the campus over time.

As the discussions developed during the workshop, colleagues were also increasingly conscious of the very fact that, at UNMC, we’re even able to hold such a forum. This led us to reflect upon issues around the size and scale of UNMC. In larger institutions, or even on our own UK campus, such a diverse group – in terms of disciplines, interests, stage of career, etc., – would never come together with such an open agenda. One of UNMC’s particular advantages, we came to feel, is therefore precisely its scale. Rather than worrying about our relatively small size, shouldn’t we be developing strategies the better to exploit that characteristic? We might usefully seek to compare ourselves with similar size institutions, looking at how they have utilized this feature, rather than feeling pressure to be a mini-Nottingham UK, or – as often happens – to be, primarily, a tributary to the wider tricampus ethos, drawing on and contributing to critical masses of research ‘power’ which are really located elsewhere. That is not to deny the value of such activities, but to question whether they should so predominate. We might, in this regard, also look at other models for research inquiry – one such being the interdisciplinary Smith Institute now School) of Enterprize and Environment at Oxford, a remarkable initiative established by Professor Sir David King, formerly UK Government Chief Science Officer, which was structured around particular, contemporary  research questions, rather than disciplinary or faculty interests. Such initiatives demonstrate how research in a 21st century university ought not necessarily to be defined by the categories and structures of 19th century institutions. Given the wealth of further determinants associated with South East Asia, there is a strong sense that the structures which are good for the University of Nottingham might not always be best for UNMC…

It was this final point that marks, for me, the key ‘take-away’ from the workshop. Even as the important, valuable work of agreeing the broad priorities went on, this fundamental, this overwhelming question still resonated. Are we properly attentive to the possibility that a key priority at UNMC is to ensure that we are fully responsive to, fully profiting from, our altogether unique context and environment? Sir David King is fond of closing his lectures with a quotation from Albert Einstein which seems relevant here: ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’.

Dr Sean Matthews is currently seconded from The University of Nottingham, UK as Head of School (UNMC) in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. With Professor Christine Ennew and Dr Christopher Hill, he convenes the Knowledge Without Borders Network.

Both Duncan [Dr Shaw on the UK perspective] and Mohan [Professor Mohan Avvari on the Malaysia perspective] highlight the difficulties in getting firms to host MBA projects. However, as they also highlight, and based on my own experience supervising a number of these company-based projects, when they are done well, they are a real ‘value-add’ for our students for experience and for the companies involved in terms of generating useful business insights. Having been involved in the first cross-campus project it is clear that international cross-campus projects extend these benefits even further.

Keys to Success
Some of these have been highlighted in the other posts from those involved, but from my perspective there were a number of critical factors to the successful delivery of this international cross-campus company-based project.

Candidates and Supervisors
Candidates need to be committed to undertaking a company-based project, be interested in the topic, engage with the firm and its capabilities/vision, and have the capabilities to collect data and generate meaningful insights for the company. The supervisors need to be prepared to work as a team and to engage with the firm as part of the project. This is vital to ensure shared understanding is developed but also offers benefits in the form of company contacts and knowledge and increased interaction with other campus colleagues.

Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities
A key issue with a collaborative project like this is for the supervisors to delineate and clarify the roles of the students involved. Company-based projects, like all MBA projects, require students to undertake independent research and the output need to be the work of a single student. Therefore, some thought was required to ensure that the project brief, which was written as a single market entry strategy project, was divided in such a way as to create two distinct projects that, combined, would then deliver on the company’s brief. It was important to get this right, as the students needed to be clear about which parts of the overall brief fell within their project remit.

As the UK supervisor, I felt that it was important to personally visit the company. This meeting reinforced Nottingham University Business School’s commitment to the firm and the project and allowed a clear combined vision to be developed, fleshing out the outline brief, clarifying exactly what was feasible within the timescales and managing expectations on the process and outcomes, such as, time scales, company support, student visits to the company, and financial arrangements.

Meeting minutes were then circulated to ensure that the discussion and agreements made were disseminated to the whole team. The supervisors discussed the meeting and finalised our decisions regarding the scope of the two separate projects. The students gave views on which project they would prefer to complete and final agreements were reached on which student would complete which project.

Collaborative Relationships
Supervisors
I actually think it helped that Anita and I knew each other before the project, because it made it easier to get going. However, I wouldn’t say that this was necessary, particularly with the ease of which we can now communicate through such packages as Skype.

Once the separate projects were defined, the role of the supervisors was then to ensure that their student was clear on their individual project and to support them through the process – the same as other projects. However, because of the importance of the combined outcome of the projects, we needed to keep in contact with each other regularly regarding the direction that our student was going in and their progress. Furthermore, we also agreed to cover for each other’s holiday periods; to ensure that the students were never without guidance. While we both saw this interaction and cover as somewhat over-and-above usual procedures, we both agreed that it was important to ensure the smooth running of such a project and delivery of the company outputs.

Students
Professor Avvari highlights the importance of complementary resources between campuses. These complementary resources are also important at a project level. The students have to work together as a team, recognising the different positions, roles and access to information. This knowledge sharing is vital to the success of the project.

The UK student had a very important role in visiting the company to generate a deeper understanding of their offerings, operations, and company objectives and then sharing this company knowledge with the student who is based at the overseas campus.

The overseas student then had more local knowledge about the countries being examined, which they needed to share with the UK student to support their understanding and familiarity with the market environment prior to and during the visit.

During the project, it is absolutely vital that the students work together. Early in the projects much of this interaction is focused on sharing material and knowledge. When designing the research methods, the students need to ensure that their separate sections will capture the necessary data to deliver on the company project brief. Later in the project it can be necessary to collect data jointly, to ensure that companies are not overtaxed with multiple visits.

Clearly, while I am stressing the need for the students to work together, it is also important to balance the requirements for independent student study (highlighted earlier) with the needs for delivering overall recommendations that the company. In the final stages of the dissertation, the students therefore focus on analysing the data related to their topic and presenting their own findings and recommendations.

Post Project Work
Collaboration and additional commitment from the students is required again after their projects are handed in, in order to combine the work from the individual projects to produce a coherent report to the client that draws the two strands together in such a way as to be able to offer actionable insights. Supervisors are also necessary at this stage to support the students in developing the report and presentation. Ultimately the company-based projects will only be successful if the information that is presented back to the client is in a format that they can digest.

While the additional efforts in generating the separate company report and presentation are not assessed, these activities are vital to the success of the project and offer a valuable skill development opportunity for the students in terms of producing a client report and presenting the findings, explaining and defending the conclusions drawn.

Support from the University and the Company
The interaction and data collection opportunities that are vital to succeeding in developing good project outcomes are made possible by the excellent financial support from NUBS and the company with regards to travel.

Furthermore, these projects require a reasonable commitment from the company to give time over to explaining the business to the student and in pointing the student to important reports, events, data collection opportunities. This firm commitment is essential to ensuring that the findings are focused on providing actionable recommendations that fit the companies objectives/focus. The more the company gives to the project, the more likely the students are to generate meaningful insights.
This is the one of a series of blogs about setting up and supervising international and inter-campus projects based on the experiences of staff at the Nottingham University Business School. Other blog posts in this series examined:

• Supervising up an international Masters project – a Malaysia perspective
• Setting up an international Masters project – a Malaysia perspective
• Setting an international Masters project – a UK perspective

This post is shared with the ‘Talking of teaching’ blog, the University’s blog looking at teaching culture and practice.

But never mind that for now: Choe is first and foremost a graffiti artist (and a very talented one) with a love for travel. Choe talks quite a bit about how he is particularly drawn to developing countries for their lack of order and the new perspectives they afford. Given his lifestyle, however, he frequently got into trouble with the law when he was younger, and in 2003, spent time in Japanese prison for punching a plain-clothes security guard. Trangression, for Choe, is not just about painting buildings he’s not supposed to, but living in a way that rejects social power structures.

Anyway, over the last week, I was watching a TV show that Choe did for the TV channel Vice, called ‘Thumbs Up‘, in which he hitch-hikes around the US and China. Of course, what would a reality TV show about one of the world’s most famous graffiti artists be without some graffiti. One scene in particular was fascinating to watch:

Choe is somewhere south of Beijing and starts to do graffiti on a wall in broad daylight on a moderately busy street. As he is painting, a crowd gathers and an older man comes up to him, saying in Chinese, ‘You can’t do that! You can’t do that!’ Choe doesn’t speak Chinese or appear to care what the man is saying, but instead continues to paint (the crowd growing and the man continuing to tell him to stop). An amazing mural emerges and Choe finishes and walks away — the crowd of locals gaping at the mural and the scene they just witnessed.

I ended up telling my older brother (who’s spent time in India) about the show, and we went back and forth about both the medium of graffiti as an art form — it is, by nature, transgressive — and Choe’s general attitude while travelling around China. After I told my brother about this particular scene, he said, ‘I’m incredibly uncomfortable with the notion of a westerner using “Asia” as a playground for their fantasies.’ Indeed, part of the show’s draw is Choe’s lack of respect and concern for the consequences of his actions. ‘Transgression’ is the whole point, but transgression is often profoundly selfish. Choe’s art is about him expressing himself in his own terms, regardless of whom it affects.

Still, I was left thinking two things:

First, for as ‘transgressive’ as Choe’s actions are, they are also still sanctioned and supported by certain power structures, notably the TV channel paying him to do the show and the rich, famous, and powerful people —including the White House — that serve as his patrons. In interviews, Choe laments now being asked to ‘tag’ buildings: it’s not, of course, transgressive art if you’ve been invited to do it. In this way, the popular culture swallowed up Choe’s transgressive voice, and now idolises and celebrates it. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s article ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular‘ is worth reading on this point.

Second, and perhaps more relevant, I thought about my brother’s comment, rejecting Choe’s actions as treating Asia as a ‘playground for [Western] fantasies’. I wondered what Western action in Asia would not be playing out a fantasy in some way, a suitable verb at the end of the sentence ‘I came to the East to…’ As I try to fill in that sentence —’teach’, ‘work’, ‘live’ — I can’t think of anything that doesn’t entail, in some way, an orientation to my own desire, my own ‘fantasy’. I’m not tagging the Great Wall of China, certainly, but am I doing anything more positive?

There’s no easy answer to this, I don’t think, but I do think we need people like Choe (in China and the States and everywhere) to transgress publicly and draw our attention to what we prohibit and why we say you can do some things, but not others. Choe points to a wall in a subway and says, ‘Why can’t I paint on that?’ The answer, it turns out, is more complicated than you think.

Dr Stephen Pihlaja is Assistant Professor of Language and Literature in the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He blogs more regularly at Take, Take, Take.

Image used under Creative Commons License from fresh888

I would say this though: any endeavour, be it international or not, carries with it the potential to do both good and bad, and I imagine the presence of Nottingham in this part of the world is the same. Hopefully we are doing more good than bad, but I’m not so trusting of my instincts about this, as a former Evangelical Christian who originally came east with the gospel and a plan to convert everyone in my path. I did this with the purest and best intentions, though: imperialists always think they are doing good.

How do we know if our good intentions will bring about good… My Evangelical good intentions ultimately fell to the empirical reality around me, so I am optimistic that when we are wrong, we can succumb to the truth and learn and grow. I’d like to believe that this is true not only of individuals, but also institutions. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I have hope.

Dr Stephen Pihlaja is Assistant Professor of Language and Literature in the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He blogs more regularly at Take, Take, Take.

Photo by Tyson Call, originally posted here. Licensed under Creative Commons.

The success of an international project hinges on many things, amongst them of course is excellent support from the teams that set up the entire collaborative effort in both campuses. Apart from students, I believe that such projects are equally sought after by faculty, for two reasons. First it expands our own knowledge base with some additional insight into the workings of certain industries; second, it expands our own networks with industry and provides an excellent opportunity to develop better relations with our counterparts in the different campuses.

While many opportunities are available for expansion of networks, this type of effort involves our most important stakeholders – the students. The students gained the most from this collaboration. First, it provides them an opportunity to travel and experience another campus environment, and second it provided an insight into an industry; develop knowledge and experience in a field that they may not have had the chance to explore otherwise. The expertise of providing inputs or resolving a real problem of a firm in the course of their study is indeed a valuable addition to their CV. In fact, the lack of such an opportunity will not augur well with future MBA students even though at this time such an opportunity is limited.

The project in this case, covered a common challenge to all industries – market opportunity and market scanning for entry. This on its own provides students with an experience of examining a market region for international market entry that may repeat itself soon in their future careers as market expansion is required for brand survival.

In chronological order, we began with an advertisement by email of the opportunity to the MBA students when they were beginning to consider supervisors and project topics. We provided the brief and also asked students to provide a proposal that would be assessed. The better proposal would be selected for this collaborative effort. Two students submitted a proposal and the better proposal was chosen.

Professor Vicky Story and I then considered how the brief could be expanded into research tasks that could be divided for the two supervised students across campuses. Due to the nature of the origin of the project which was in the UK, Vicky in the UK and myself spoke over Skype. We initially laid down the separation of duties so that the students involved in Malaysia and in the UK could each do separate components to produce individual project reports that contributed to the completion of their respective MBA’s. Importantly, the two components produced by the students would contribute to an overall research presentation and report to the industry counterpart in the UK.

This was followed by subsequent communications and meetings with the Malaysian student. The first meeting was mainly to discuss the key areas the student should focus on in relation to the brief, this was followed by supervision of the general content, primary data gathering efforts and secondary data required , followed by meetings to discuss the organization and presentation of findings. In this effort however it is important to highlight that an important dimension was communication and exchange of ideas between students. We encouraged their communication and provided our inputs into their individual sections when required. This was further augmented by the student from UK flying over to Kuala Lumpur for the collection of primary data on consumers for his part of the research effort. The student from Malaysia also flew over to the UK towards the end of the project. However, due to my own schedule and changes in the final presentation date, I could not go over to the UK to supervise the presentation to the industry partners. The students however were both in the UK, and with guidance from the UK supervisor Vicky – they presented to the firm with very good feedback.

Overall, a number of factors were important in its success:

1. The communication and collaboration between supervisors in the campuses.
   For such a collaborative effort, supervisors must devote some time to discuss and exchange ideas at any stage of the project. These discussions may involve Skype meetings which may be more lengthy, email exchanges or even a quick telephone call. Without these discussions and exchange of ideas, the effort would not progress. Prof Vicky and I did our best to communicate with each other as often as possible to catch up on student progress in the first instance, and discuss any matters as they arise.
2. Students have to be equally committed to the effort – to exchange ideas and have discussions not only with the local supervisors but also the other campus supervisors and students if needed in order to coordinate efforts to produce a more coherent project report. This is important as it involves a significant amount of funding, students themselves should not view this as an opportunity to enjoy a break at another country or campus. It has to be clear to students that work and results are expected for this type of collaborative efforts.
3. An equally committed contact person in the firm. – the firm should also be happy to exchange information with the students and the supervisors. Only then would the research effort provide inputs which are useful for charting the company strategy or resolving a company challenge. On numerous occasions, students had queries and contacted the contact person in the firm for information and help with information resources. It is important, that such a dedicated person exists and is informed about the collaborative efforts and all that is involved.
4. Lastly but not least, the support of the management of both campuses and the management team of the collaborative efforts. In this case, due to the nature of the project, sometimes there were matters that needed to be resolved immediately and I am sure that the students involved and myself were very pleased that the management teams of the collaborative efforts as well as any administrative support that was made available was quick to act and respond to queries, resolving matters as they arose. This effort would not have been possible without such a level of responsiveness. While it may not always fit in with our office hours – the academic support was only one part of the equation.

As pointed out by Dr Duncan Shaw and Professor Mohan Avvari in previous posts (Setting up an international Masters project – a UK perspective and Setting up an international Masters project – a Malaysia perspective respectively), the potential for projects through cross campus collaborative efforts is immense. While it normally encompasses the various postgraduate programmes , it may also be expanded to executive education programmes . With the lower cost of communications in current times, we have to take the opportunity of the complementary and additive resources we have in the three campuses to open more doors for collaborative efforts.

The final blog posts in this series will examine:

• Supervising  an international project – a UK perspective

This post is shared with the ‘Talking of teaching’ blog, the University’s blog looking at teaching culture and practice.

Cross-posted to devastatinglyabstract.com

Foreign Dissident

Western Troublemaker

Meddling Mat Salleh

Scion of Soros

Enemy of the State

Until I moved to Malaysia I never knew I was so dangerous. Serius, lah! You probably think I’m joking, but I’m not. I wish I was.

Sure, these kinds of accusations are somewhat amusing, and it’s tempting to respond to them with that most beloved of quotes from The Ever-Abiding Dude: “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

But when you’re a Mat Salleh; an Orang Putih; a blonde, blue-eyed, European-looking and mostly-genetically-European New Zealand woman with a tendency to be rather outspoken, and you’re researching the kind of things I research, while living and working in academia within Malaysia? Tidak boleh, cannot. These kinds of opinions count.

Let me tell you a story.

I attended the third Bersih rally as an observer at the end of April last year. Bersih, a coalition demanding free and fair elections in Malaysia, have contributed to the increasing normalisation of street protest and non-violent civil disobedience in Malaysia – a state of affairs that is, by all accounts, a radical departure from the previous state of citizen politics in Malaysia. The day I spent alongside, if not precisely ‘with’ the Bersih crowds was one of the most inspiring, yet simultaneously most frustrating experiences I’ve had in this country. After being told over and over about the racial and religious tensions and conflicts endemic to Malaysian society, I was surrounded by people of all races and religions and ages, talking to one another, laughing with one another, giving masks and salt and water and aid to one another when their government tear-gassed and water-cannoned them, asking simply for the right to elect who they want as their government via a fair and free electoral process.

Every time they sang a protest song or chanted ‘Hidup Rakyat‘, I desperately wanted to join in; every time they clapped their hands and pumped their fists in the air, I held my arms awkwardly by my sides, dressed in demure black and white in a sea of yellow and green. Not because I didn’t support their cause – I do, completely and utterly. Not because I was afraid, although having been informed that I was on my own if I got arrested, there was a little of that too. But primarily I played my observer role because I didn’t want to be that Orang Putih. The one who gave anyone an excuse to raise the spectre of the meddling Westerner who think they know what’s best for Malaysians and Malaysia, evidence of an invasion of whitey-knows-best neoimperialism intent on causing trouble and fracturing unity.

I’m wary of this because I see this discourse mobilised in the government-controlled media again and again. I’m wary, because just about every time I go to a public forum on Malaysian political issues and the media are there, somehow the cameras end up positioned right next to me (and my long-suffering partner, who is of a build more commonly associated with rugby players than electrical engineers, and who is almost as glaringly foreign as I am).

The first, time, I thought it was coincidence. Now I’m not so sure. I wonder how many times I’ve appeared on Malaysian television, a nameless blonde mat salleh laughing at jokes made at the expense of the current regime, iconographic fodder for a discourse that characterises people like me as dissidents and troublemakers, agents of Western imperialist powers, sent to disrupt and destabilise national harmony and contentment – or at least the ideological veneer of this harmony and contentment.

Let me tell you another story.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran a ‘training’ (a.k.a. a workshop) at one of the bigger state universities in Malaysia. It was for a research project I’m working on with the Malaysian Centre for Independent Journalism – we’re going to be monitoring the national media coverage of the ever-imminent, as-yet-unannounced 13^th Malaysian General Election, looking for statistical evidence of media bias. (Given the fact that we’re going to be doing a month’s-worth of sentence-level content analysis of 28 different media outlets, spanning print, TV & online media, and in 4 languages, I’ve been running quite a few of these workshop to train our 50-odd coders, and have been privileged to meet academics, students and civil society participants from across the country.) I got to the university a bit early, and just sort of wandered around, as is my wont, until the group I was meeting arrived. I should have known I would have been noticed. The next day, I found out that the academics I’d been working with at the university (who were already being asked to explain their involvement in the project) had been questioned several times along the lines of “Who was that mat salleh and what were you doing with her?”.

I have more of these stories than I like to count.

Maybe I am a dissident and a troublemaker – my research agenda doesn’t exactly suggest otherwise. I make no claim to being objective in my selection of who and what I research – I want, as much as possible, to engage in research that exists in solidarity with progressive issues and causes. I’m a scholar of activist counterpublics; staying dispassionately removed isn’t really an option for me – something I suspect many social scientists will be intimately familiar with. I study these things because I believe (truly, madly, deeply) in them. How I research them is a different matter – there are academic standards to be upheld, and that is as it should be – but that doesn’t mean I’m not trying to intervene on the side of what I see as ‘good’. In line with my favoured methodological tradition, I don’t see the roles of activist and academic as mutually exclusive.

But living and working here, I’ve had to become hyper-aware of the fact that my very presence can be counterproductive to those I’m trying to support. My solidarity can be toxic: to their cause, to them personally. I am a liability, a Schroedinger’s albatross hung round their necks – half dead, half alive, capable of wrecking us all on the rocks of creeping Western influence.

I have learnt to shut my mouth, still my hand, limit my public opinions – none of which comes naturally. I have developed Gramsci-esque abilities in the already-arcane art of writing funding applications. I have become skilled at self-discipline and self-censorship – I won’t sign this petition, because there aren’t enough other signees to hide my name; I won’t lend my voice to this Facebook page, because my hair is too blonde; I will limit my public role in this research project to a dispassionate discussion of the methodology.

I will not stand out, stand up, be counted, because here, I am a negative number.

A crowd multiplied by me = a Western conspiracy.

Setting up an international project – a Malaysia perspective

As Dr Duncan Shaw rightly put it in his post on the UK perspective, many MBAs love doing projects with external organisations because it gives them access to the full commercial context of their work, they can see how it helps the firm and they have a much more compelling addition their CVs than a normal thesis. Students in the MBA programme, particularly full-timers, often ask about such options. As Duncan also pointed out, it is sometimes difficult to convince firms that the effort of hosting an MBA project and in cases where firms are willing to host a student for a project – timelines have not matched

At the Malaysia campus, we have always felt that there is a lot of potential to do all kinds of international projects – not just MBA student projects, but also along with colleagues and students from Nottingham’s campuses in UK and China. While such efforts are on amongst colleagues sporadically based on contacts developed individually – when the idea of an international project involving students from two campuses was mooted by Duncan, when he visited Malaysia last year, we were quite glad and got on it immediately and the first and very successful international project has now been completed and here are some of our viewpoints:

Planning Projects – Research, Student or Teaching & Training Projects are International Ones

• Whether it’s an MBA student project or MSc Dissertation, Research Projects or even Training (and finally Consultancy) – it’s good to develop projects – comparative studies or based on complementary resources (capabilities of colleagues in UK and China campuses). Planning based on complementary resources help also to overcome the fact that our individual objectives may be different.
• The three locations of campuses offer potential in developing research projects as comparative studies (Ningbo – China perspectives , Malaysia – South East Asian perspectives and UK – Western/EU perspectives) and Industry projects (with MBA or MSc students) for such topics as Market Entry studies, International Business Strategy studies etc.

As colleagues develop research proposals seeking funding or executive education programmes, it would be good to communicate to relevant colleagues across campuses. At Malaysia, we now have a person in charge of ‘external relations’ (myself) to whom colleagues can write to get connected to the correct person. We can identify such a person in Ningbo and in UK also.

Connecting with Colleagues Critical

• There are several colleagues who have travelled between campuses and it’s good to take their help as intermediaries to connect with relevant colleagues. Starting with email introductions is certainly a useful way to start off the process of getting to know colleagues across campuses –
• But meeting colleagues is critical – and helps a lot in developing a relationships. This of course requires travelling between campuses – while it would be great to have a fund and opportunity for one and all to visit each other – there is a need for inter-campus visit funds and other funds like the RKTB fund for research project.
• ICCSR has now held its annual conference in China campus and this year planning it in Malaysia – facilitating meeting of colleagues from all three campuses with CSR interests along with other international colleagues. It would be good if other UK based research centres hold their meetings in Malaysia and China (with Air Asia flights can be reasonable and organising costs in Malaysia can be reasonable). In Malaysia, in addition to working with NUBS colleagues – its quite easy to connect with colleagues in other school in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences as we are all in one building (inter-disciplinary project possibilities).

Role of Project Supervisors (for MBA Student Projects or MSc Dissertations)

• Such projects involve two colleagues – and so additional communication commitments between the two supervisors and then among all involved (in the case of an MBA project it would at least 4 people).
• Simple project management is needed to get any cross campus projects to go smoothly – supervising students across different time zones can be actually quite comfortable – UK communication is seen first thing in the morning by Malaysian colleagues and Malaysian communications are seen first thing in the morning by UK colleagues (just a matter of understanding a small time lag). Malaysia and China is small difference and so not such an issue. Also IP phone and Skype offer economical communication.

International Students Projects Selecting Candidates

• It is important to ensure we have a candidate who would commit better to the project – given that they would be working cross culturally and also have to present to the company. We put in place a simple procedure – asked students to submit proposals for the project and selected based on proposal quality and also with some background information of the candidate (class performance and opinions from colleagues).
• Role of the candidates – communications of progress and getting ready to present – in future we have ensure that students in such projects should be communicating updates/progress for the project. They should also practice presentation (using Skype or any other web tools).

Developing further on this pilot sort of project

• The first UK – Malaysia MBA student project should lead to more such collaborative projects – students related, comparative research studies and finally training and consultancy projects.
• Most topics or ideas related to business studies have the potential of being investigated in the three very different locations of the University – I am sure (supporting Duncan’s view), most of us would love to do projects that looks into the potential for a three country approach to research, teaching and business engagement.
• In Malaysia we are developing Executive Education programmes and if programmes are developed in collaboration with UK and China colleagues there is immense potential.
• Our China campus colleagues attempted a three campus e-teaching of a module (didn’t take off due to lack of funding at that time). We hope that such efforts will be revived – e.g. modules like methodology related module can be taught with the different expertise available in different location or other module which lend themselves for sessions to develop discussions involving cross cultural perspectives (Business Ethics, Marketing and many other such modules).

So be it in MBA/MSc student projects, in teaching, in training/executive education and finally research projects – look forward to more collaborative project among colleagues in the three campuses.

Future blog posts in this series will examine:

• Supervising  an international project – a Malaysia perspective
• Supervising  an international project – a UK perspective

This post is shared with the ‘Talking of teaching’ blog, the University’s blog looking at teaching culture and practice.

It didn’t begin that way: I had studied no Japanese before going and spent my first weeks in the country not even trying: I couldn’t remember a single phrase to save my life. After a month and a half of thumbing through a rather useless Japanese book (Japanese for Busy People, but I wasn’t all that busy and there wasn’t that much Japanese), I figured I either needed to get serious or give up.

So I got a proper textbook, one that I understood, and began to study hard, sitting under the trees of Ohori Park in central Fukuoka. Life changed dramatically. Suddenly, I could ask for things: I could function and understand and explore. And as I began to acquire bits and pieces, my interest in Japan, in Japanese, and the Japanese grew.

Now, ten years later, I am having the same experience in Malaysia, and in the same way as in Japan, my first attempts to study the language have added an intense amount of colour to the world here. My first sentence in Malay was, ‘Ini masalah kecil,’ It’s a small problem: a joke answer to any question. Malay, unlike Japanese, is not rigid and strict, but loose and playful. I’ve had fun with the administrative assistants here who call me ‘Doctor Bebek‘: ‘bebek’ (duck) being the affectionate term for the small motorbike I ride.

Standing behind of the house, talking across the alley with one of the many Aunties in our neighbourhood, I struggle through a series of phrases I learned at class: This is Mia. That’s a door. This is a key to the door. This is the door’s key. How are you? and she listens earnestly, nodding, but obviously not understanding me.

And another snapshot of learning: ordering my food the other day, I was attempting to ask for half as much rice, but had forgotten the word for ‘half’. I did, however, remember the structure for making fractions, so I asked for ‘one over two’, essentially. This confused the woman and another guy at the food stall, who kept insisting on responding to me in English, came up and took out two plates, ‘He wants the rice on two plates.’ No, I said, finally in English, dejected, Half.

These little failures, however, are cumulative and you remember the things you mess up much better than the ones you get right. You just have to push through the feelings of intense fear and weakness. There is this urban myth that people either are or are not good at languages. I think it’s less about language aptitude and more about being outgoing and willing to humiliate yourself, repeatedly and persistently, in pursuit of acquiring the language. You can fail, you will fail: fail now, or learn nothing.

And in the failure, you slowly gather cultural capital with those around you. I tell my students week after week, Form is function; function is form. What you say is embedded in how you say it. When you say, How are you? in Malay, rather than English, you do something different.

I am, of course, still a fat white man: our teacher says, ‘Don’t pronounce the final consonant or you’ll give away that you’re a foreigner.’ I look around the table of students and think, ‘The final consonant is the least of our problems.’ Still, a fat white man struggling in Malay is better than a fat white man demanding his way in English.

Language is not a Sausurrean LAN cable from one head to another: it is phatic. It is always phatic. And we can’t deconstruct our or any other culture until we can deconstruct the language. It is the first step. And if I can perform some submission in my broken Malay, this is not only a first step, but also a first step in the right direction.

(photo of Ohori Koen in Fukuoka, Japan courtesy of Chris Harber)

Dr Stephen Pihlaja is Assistant Professor of Language and Literature in the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus

My name is Stephen Pihlaja and I’ve been at UNMC now for almost two months. In brief, I have found the whole experience to be challenging in the best sense of the word. I knew embarrassingly little before packing up my three kids and wife and coming here from the UK. My lack of preconceptions has had its advantages: everyday has been another series of surprises, like last night when I nearly fell out of bed, shocked out of sleep by the sounds of my neighbours setting off firecrackers again.

As an academic, writer, and traveller, I am cautious of truth statements about how things are in one place or another, but I am always aware of the pressure from people back home to hear some report about what Malaysia is like. I feel the need to hedge everything in a story to emphasise that I only deal in and with reports of my own and others’ experiences. I am embedded, deeply embedded, in my own cultural understanding of the world; a kind of frame that I can never remove.

I can illustrate the effect of this frame best by showing you a painting by the American Abstractionist, Mark Rothko.

When I first moved to the UK in 2008, I had wanted badly to see the ‘Rothko Room’ in the Tate Modern Art Museum in London. The room features several of Rothko’s ‘Seagram Murals’, paintings which were commissioned to hang in the Four Seasons hotel in Manhattan. Rothko ultimately withdrew the paintings and donated them instead to the Tate. I have heard that they arrived at the museum on the day he committed suicide in New York.

The murals, when I was finally able to see them, made me think of cultural frames and how they impose themselves on our life. As you look at the murals, you want to look past the squares in the foreground, into what feels like the eternity behind them. But once you notice the squares in the foreground, you can never look past them completely. They frame and obscure the background; your eyes are continually drawn back when you try to look around them.

My cultural identity hangs in front of me constantly as I interact with people in Kajang where I’m staying. I am not Malaysian; I am not even British. I am an American, with all the baggage that carries. And when I look at Malaysia and Malaysia looks at me, when I go to the market with my wife and kids and people treat us differently, I can’t avoid the colour of my skin or my passport. My very presence here is constantly subject to a history I don’t even know, but positions me in a particular place, with particular affordances, both advantages and limitations.

My success as an outsider here will be, I suspect, dependent on learning and accepting what my position allows and disallows me.

Dr Stephen Pihlaja is Assistant Professor of Language and Literature in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus

Setting up an international project – a UK perspective

About seven years ago they gave me the admin job of finding projects for MBA dissertations. I used to work for Motorola and I did consultancy projects for lots of firms, so when I became an academic the Business School in the UK asked me to work with firms to get company-based projects for our MBAs.

Many MBAs love doing projects with external organisations because it gives them access to the full commercial context of their work, they can see how it helps the firm and they have a much more compelling addition their CVs than a normal thesis. In the best projects our MBAs tackle a hot topic that a whole industry might be wrestling with that summer – which makes a great subject to talk about in job interviews and the project can also generate a new network of job-finding contacts.

But it is sometimes difficult to convince firms that the effort of hosting an MBA project – even just answering questions from the student – is worth it. Also, MBAs are commonly attracted to high profile and international firms – they like the glitter.

A few years ago I was looking for a source of new projects that would be interesting and attention-grabbing enough for our MBAs. Then I got thinking about how we have three international University of Nottingham (UoN) locations plus partner agreements, like in Singapore, and I started the process of setting up an inter-campus project.  Here’s how I did it:

1. Plan the international project – I have done many MBA projects over the years so I knew I’d need a supervisor from the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC) plus the strong support of colleagues from the business school there.
2. Get some contacts – I didn’t know anyone at UNMC but one of my colleagues had worked there. She very kindly advised me on who I needed to talk to and then she make introductions by email.  I think the most valuable thing she did was to communicate, either implicitly or explicitly, that it was worth having a chat with me – i.e. I wasn’t some strange mad guy.
3. Visit your new colleagues – you need more than email to start new relationships. People need to see and hear each other to start building trust and getting to know each other. Fortunately there are several budgets available in the university – for teaching development or inter-campus development – that can be used to fund a trip. You will have to justify it well – I pointed out how inter-campus projects would help our forthcoming accreditations for some important business school associations – but make sure that you go over and meet people. There are always extra people to talk to and a teaching-related trip can easily start a new research-related relationship and vice versa.
4. Listen to your new colleagues – what even happens next has to work for everyone. Do not assume that your new colleagues will have the same objectives and ideas for activities that you do. Listen to their advice.
5. Do what you promise – meeting people on international trips is very exciting but it is easy to forget about what was agreed when you get home and are confronted with 500 emails from students and colleagues. But if you do not keep moving the project forward then the relationships will wither and die. When I came back from UNMC I found a firm that wanted to research new market entry opportunities in South East Asia. This was a great opportunity to hold a joint project with a student from UNMC and one from the UK campus.
6. Make sure that the project works – a first international project is the foundation for future projects of different types. But you can only build on success. In this project we were lucky because the two project supervisors were highly professional and very experienced at working with firms. Make sure that you pick great people to implement the project.
7. Build on the project – on the back of the project we ran last year I have got funding to travel to China to try and do the same thing again at University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNCC). More importantly, I have got to know a small network of people that are interested in projects that are above the level of a single campus. There is a vast untapped potential for The University of Nottingham in projects that are above the level of a single campus. Not just teaching-related, i.e. any projects that use the capabilities of one of our diverse locations to satisfy the needs of another – it’s a sort of ‘capabilities-needs arbitrage’ between continents and countries. The University of Nottingham has vast arbitrage opportunities in teaching, research and helping society because it is actually a platform for linking campuses in three very different countries. I would love to do a project that looks into the potential for a three country approach to research, teaching and business engagement.

Future blog posts in this series will examine:

• Setting up an international project – a Malaysia perspective
• Supervising  an international project – a Malaysia perspective
• Supervising  an international project – a UK perspective

This post is shared with the ‘Talking of teaching’ blog, the University’s blog looking at teaching culture and practice.