Melonie Fullick

Melonie Fullick is originally from New Zealand and currently writes from Hamilton, Ontario in Canada.

Melonie is a Ph.D. student working on research in post-secondary education, policy and governance. She previously earned a BA in Communication Studies (2006) and an MA in Linguistics (2007). She has many interests including communication, knowledge, history, politics, science and technology, public relations, and teaching. She enjoys “building bridges” between theory and practice, research and policy.

Melonie can be found in virtual space via email (melonie.a.fullick@gmail.com) on Twitter (@qui_oui), at LinkedIn and on Academia.edu. She also writes about universities, policy, and pedagogy at Speculative Diction, and maintains a photo blog, Panoptikal.

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Most Recent Articles

September 13, 2012
Competition and the culture of academe
In my academic research, I look at the governance of universities and implementation of new policies that are described as “neoliberal”. This involves trends such as privatization of funding (including increased tuition), treatment of students as consumers or customers and of education as a “private good”, and the marketization of education.
June 28, 2012
Trouble With Transparency
What’s happening at U.Va. is hardly an isolated phenomenon, though this example is more public than most. In fact, the focus of my dissertation research is this process of “strategic change” at universities, how it’s imagined and implemented, and how it’s perceived and experienced by organizational participants.
May 20, 2012
Love the Teaching, Hate the Grading, and Other Institutional Paradoxes
April is the cruellest month in (Anglo-North American) universities, given that the yearly academic cycle reaches its peak with final exams, which are in turn preceded by the crushing weight of major end-of-term assignments. Some students, worn out by the demands of the season, lapse into a state of caffeine-fuelled zombie-like vacancy. For those of us on the receiving end of their work, there is the prospect of a mountain of marking that forms the final obstacle to a brief breather before the summer term begins.
March 11, 2012
Living in Liminal Space
In teaching and in research I’ve been taught to pay close attention to the assumptions I bring to the contexts in which we create and re-create knowledge, and one aspect of my own perspective that I often take for granted is the fact that I’m more often present and comfortable in spaces that lie between one particular “position” and another.
January 17, 2012
Essay on the flawed commentary on higher education during 2011
Melonie Fullick reviews the clichés and half-truths that dominated too much discussion of academe in 2011.
November 15, 2011
Word Watching
Often when writing blog posts or papers, I end up dissecting not just a policy or educational issue but also the specific terms in which it is being described and discussed. I start to pick apart the terms and limits of the discussion alongside my engagement with the argument. Far from being a quirky habit, this kind of attention to language is a key element of much of the work I do.
September 13, 2011
First Year Focus-Understanding Student Choices
September is upon us and with the beginning of another academic year comes a fresh crop of undergraduate students jostling their way into universities’ hallways and classrooms. As a researcher in postsecondary education who also teaches undergrads, I take a direct interest in the first-year experience. Whenever I have a teaching assignment with first-year students, I try to have a conversation with them about the decision they made to come to university, the factors that influenced their choice, and how their experiences in university compare to those in high school.
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