My name is Aspen Omapang and I am an Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice & Technology at CU-Boulder. If you would like to know more about me, just click here. My website is a work-in-progress as I transition from WordPress to Hugo, so thank you for your patience as I slowly port over all of my blog posts. Speaking of, all of the blog posts are available on the archive, the newest of which are below!
Literature Reviews as Discourse
No, this is not a research blog post where I analyze literature reviews and try to reveal their discourses. This blog post is about making sense of difficulties I have had getting published when reviewers are quite critical of your background sections. Throughout my time as a PhD student, I have been told a great many things about literature reviews, such as: Literature reviews are summaries. Literature reviews are about finding gaps in the literature. Literature reviews are about appealing to certain publication venues. Literature reviews are about deciding where the field should go. Literature reviews are about saying which literature we should listen to. Perhaps the most harrowing, that literature reviews are something you should already know how to do when you arrive for a PhD program. ...
Beyond Positionality
If you are trying to chart your growth or changes, then it’s helpful to establish a baseline, where am I at on how I think about my position in this world, in this country, and in this academic role. Motivation When I began my PhD in Information Science in the Fall of 2020, I was in awe. Cornell University, an Ivy-League institution, felt so impossibly out of reach for someone like me, and now I would walk through the doors of Bill & Melinda Gates Hall in Ithaca, New York to forever change my life. To become a Doctor. ...
The Importance of Rejection in Academia
At this point, I have lost count of how many applications I have submitted since becoming an “academic.” Though, the labyrinth of folder trees remembers (it always remembers). For many of us, the reality of the brutality of academia happened during our applications. I remember thinking “How can they expect us to submit (semi) unique applications to 10+ universities all at the same time, and then expect us to wait months to figure out if we get in?” Essentially half a year of my life down to an email on a cold day in February. All of which could render that labor useless. Little did I know that this timeline would be all that awaited me on the other side. ...