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Academic departments at universities often have a specialty within their subject. They may take a unique approach to their studies, or have a niche area of expertise. The study of philosophy is segmented by factors including time period and epistemology. Those studying postmodern philosophers and critical theorists like Jacques Derrida tend to be concentrated at specific universities.
Trudi Connolly—a critical theory scholar—always planned on attending college and conducting research. When it came to selecting an undergraduate institution, Connolly focused more on location than academic department. She attended New York University (NYU) to live in the city and be near family. Connolly originally studied politics and sociology, but she changed fields after finding comparative literature and philosophy more interesting. NYU maintains one of the leading critical theory departments in the world, and Connolly became particularly engaged with it.
Following graduation, Connolly taught in China for six months before enrolling in a PhD program at the University of California at Irvine (UCI)—another major hub for critical theory and home of the UCI Critical Theory institute. At UCI, she applied critical theory to her interests at the intersection of violence and ethics. She also came in close contact with UCI’s strong creative writing department. “In a sense, it was my first real encounter with an English curriculum,” Connolly said.
Attending UCI made perfect sense for studying critical theory, but the environment was very different from New York. “I had never lived on a university campus [or] in the suburbs before,” Connolly shared, “[s]o for some extrinsic reasons I became unhappy with the situation, although I was never particularly unhappy with the work.” Deciding the PhD program was not suitable for her, Connolly left the program. She eventually settled back down in Tucson, Arizona.
Connolly was encouraged to study critical theory at UCI based on the resources, but the campus and location were not fitting. Research platform Jinso solves this problem: your academic focus doesn’t have to be dictated by your university. Jinso connects researchers globally so that affiliation does not impact engagement with other scholars. Students are seamlessly connected with research mentors to produce and publish papers.
After leaving UCI, Connolly was “surprised and disappointed by how few people had the kind of [critical theory] language [she] thought was more ubiquitous,” and her present work changes that narrative. She accepted a job teaching high-level English at a charter school with a flexible curriculum and “converted [her] class into [...] philosophy, film and iconography.” She teaches her course “from a highly critical theory inflected position,” allowing her to increase knowledge and accessibility to a philosophical interest often reserved for university study. The charter school’s curricular flexibility allows scholars to easily design courses where they can share their higher-level expertise. As Connolly observed, “There are quite a number of academic refugees [at the charter school].”
Connolly now spends a significant proportion of time as an artist, so she no longer focuses on academic research. However, many scholars choosing career paths outside of academia still conduct research. Jinso allows everyone to stay engaged in research through online collaboration, regardless of professional occupation. The platform ensures that one’s links to academia are not broken by walking away from campus.
GitHub is a popular platform used by computer scientists to manage their collaborative projects, but a similar program does not exist for academic work. There is no standard platform to create work, connect with others, and share work in one place. Most platforms only fall into one or two of these categories.The Jinso collaboration tool is a better way for groups to work on projects. By bringing the entire academic collaboration process onto one tool, it simplifies workflows and communication.The first steps for using the Jinso platform are:
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects. Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time.
Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects.
Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time. Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
When a new Project is created, an initial revision must be shared. This can either be plain text or a PDF.
The Project will be immediately visible to all Group members with the first revision shown. Group members can comment on the revision with questions or feedback, and others can reply to comments.When another revision of the paper has been completed, the Group admin can add a new revision to the same Project.
The revision will become visible above the prior revision, and it will have a new comment box associated with it. Projects make it simple to keep track of a paper’s entire revision history and discussions at each stage.
For each revision, Group admins can also create subtasks. Arrows allow Group members to view all of the different subtasks and comment on them individually. Subtasks allow a paper to be analyzed in unique components. For example, a research paper can have a unique subtask for each of its sections, and collaborators can discuss them all separately in the comment boxes. Jinso is a quicker way to collaborate on long-term projects. It makes it easier to connect, share, and manage the development of ideas and papers. You can create a Jinso account and start using the platform today for your research and academic needs at jinso.io.
Academic departments at universities often have a specialty within their subject. They may take a unique approach to their studies, or have a niche area of expertise. The study of philosophy is segmented by factors including time period and epistemology. Those studying postmodern philosophers and critical theorists like Jacques Derrida tend to be concentrated at specific universities.
Trudi Connolly—a critical theory scholar—always planned on attending college and conducting research. When it came to selecting an undergraduate institution, Connolly focused more on location than academic department. She attended New York University (NYU) to live in the city and be near family. Connolly originally studied politics and sociology, but she changed fields after finding comparative literature and philosophy more interesting. NYU maintains one of the leading critical theory departments in the world, and Connolly became particularly engaged with it.
Following graduation, Connolly taught in China for six months before enrolling in a PhD program at the University of California at Irvine (UCI)—another major hub for critical theory and home of the UCI Critical Theory institute. At UCI, she applied critical theory to her interests at the intersection of violence and ethics. She also came in close contact with UCI’s strong creative writing department. “In a sense, it was my first real encounter with an English curriculum,” Connolly said.
Attending UCI made perfect sense for studying critical theory, but the environment was very different from New York. “I had never lived on a university campus [or] in the suburbs before,” Connolly shared, “[s]o for some extrinsic reasons I became unhappy with the situation, although I was never particularly unhappy with the work.” Deciding the PhD program was not suitable for her, Connolly left the program. She eventually settled back down in Tucson, Arizona.
Connolly was encouraged to study critical theory at UCI based on the resources, but the campus and location were not fitting. Research platform Jinso solves this problem: your academic focus doesn’t have to be dictated by your university. Jinso connects researchers globally so that affiliation does not impact engagement with other scholars. Students are seamlessly connected with research mentors to produce and publish papers.
After leaving UCI, Connolly was “surprised and disappointed by how few people had the kind of [critical theory] language [she] thought was more ubiquitous,” and her present work changes that narrative. She accepted a job teaching high-level English at a charter school with a flexible curriculum and “converted [her] class into [...] philosophy, film and iconography.” She teaches her course “from a highly critical theory inflected position,” allowing her to increase knowledge and accessibility to a philosophical interest often reserved for university study. The charter school’s curricular flexibility allows scholars to easily design courses where they can share their higher-level expertise. As Connolly observed, “There are quite a number of academic refugees [at the charter school].”
Connolly now spends a significant proportion of time as an artist, so she no longer focuses on academic research. However, many scholars choosing career paths outside of academia still conduct research. Jinso allows everyone to stay engaged in research through online collaboration, regardless of professional occupation. The platform ensures that one’s links to academia are not broken by walking away from campus.
