Many thanks to the European Association for International Education (EAIE) which has featured this blog in its Comprehensive list of online resources for international educators.

How exciting!

They tweeted this to me on a Twitter account I haven’t used for a year so I have now got my account back up and running. I can sense myself already falling down the slippery slope of time spent on yet another social media tool. Ah well. If you’re on Twitter you can find me @EmmaSabzalieva. 

Another exciting piece of news for today was the news that I’ve been awarded a Joan Balchin Memorial Travel Fund grant from the Association of University Administrators. The grant will fund exploratory research on university administration and management in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, which I will undertake this summer. I will be interviewing administrators/managers in a range of universities (public/private, old/new etc) to start investigations on the following topics:

• Is there a concept of ‘university administration’ or ‘university management’ in Central Asian universities?
• What are working conditions like for university administrators?
• What is the relationship between administrators and academics? Does the same concept of a divide between the two groups exist as in the UK?
• Does the notion of the ‘third space worker’/’blended professional’ exist?
• Can you have a career as a university administrator?
• If you can, what routes are there for the career?
• What is the most senior position that administrators can attain?  

If you work in a Bishkek-based university or know someone who does, please get in touch! I can do the interviews in English or Russian and it should take no more than an hour of your time.

I’m hoping to have enough material from the interviews to write the research up into an article, but at the very least will be writing a report for the AUA newsletter, Newslink, in the autumn.