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In this article, I connect globalization and qualitative methodological practice, describing a semester-long intensive interview project about the anti-apartheid movement. I provide a detailed overview of the project as well as considerations for those who might want to adapt it for their own courses. Using students' reflections on the projects and their final papers, I demonstrate that this project successfully introduces students to a transnational social movement and provides valuable methodological practice.

Research papers take a long time to write and in an academic environment where the "publish or perish" clause applies, writing retreats are a way of creating time and space to write academic articles in a concentrated period of time. This article examines ways in which academics can write more articles for publication. In particular it focuses on the writing retreat as a possible model that institutions can follow in order to increase publication output without over-burdening academic staff. The aim is to examine how the writing retreat model can be used to suit the needs of individual academics. It is often argued that academics' heavy workloads are not conducive to productivity in research. In higher education institutions (HEI) were there is an established culture of research and where there is adequate funding for research, publication output is relatively high. However, in historically black universities (HBUs), this is not the case. The problem is that research output is low and shows no trend of increasing. Therefore, this article argues for use of the "writing retreat" model to promote writing for research. The literature reviewed suggests that this type of model is commonly used at HEIs with positive impact on research output. The research conducted on writing retreats was based on the experiences of academics who attended writing retreats for various purposes. Data was collected from three sources. The first was from postgraduate students who went on a writing retreat with their supervisor; the second source was a group of 15 academic staff who attended a Ph.D. writing retreat; the third source was the personal experiences of the researcher who attended a few writing retreats aimed at women academics and postgraduate students. Data was qualitatively gathered using interviews, evaluation forms and accounts of personal experiences. The findings from the research indicated that academics and postgraduate students welcomed this model of writing for research. It was found that the respondents wrote more in a concentrated period of time; they could concentrate better without distractions; they were motivated within the group and their research progressed at a faster pace. Based on the findings, a writing retreat model is proposed. The purpose of this model is to encourage academic writing for various purposes. It is also intended to motivate writing for publication in a research environment for different groups of academics so that HEIs, and in particular HBUs, can begin to increase research activity. Finally, a writing retreat model can be used for wider purposes like encouraging excellence in writing, reading and researching. (Contains 1 figure.)

PhDs by publications are a relatively new model for doctoral research, especially in the context of the Humanities or Education. This paper describes two writers' experiences of conducting doctoral studies in this genre and in these faculties. Each discover alternative ways of employing a body of published research papers in development of an overarching thesis. The writers argue that whilst it can be a pragmatic choice for some, PhDs by publications are more likely to be highly complex meta-narratives and that an overview of past research is fraught with theoretical, conceptual and epistemological challenges in the quest for coherence. They claim that the nomenclature "PhDs "by" publications" or ""through" publications" is misleading: in the epistemological space of Humanities or Education studies, this mode of doctoral research is more accurately represented as a "PhD "with" or "alongside" publications". They conclude that the particular affordance of the model is that it privileges accounts of the process of knowledge building and of descriptions of the gradual emergence of "doctoralness" in the person of the researcher. (Contains 3 notes.)

The aim of the one-day symposium was to bring together scholars in applied linguistics with an interest in the African languages for the launch of the new AILA Africa regional network. Contributions were in the form of invited research papers from several African countries. This report focuses on the South African contribution, which highlighted current research into the use and development of the African languages for academic purposes in response to the South African National Language Education Policy (South Africa, DoE 2002) with its focus on the development of multilingualism in the country.

This paper explores the use of situated cognition theory to investigate how new academics learn to judge complex student performance in an academic department at a South African university. The analysis revealed the existence of two largely separate communities of practice within the department, one centred on the provision of undergraduate teaching and the other on the production of research. Newcomers follow a range of trajectories in the course of their identity construction as academics and their learning is strongly shaped by their histories and individual experiences of negotiating their way into and across these key communities of practice. Learning to assess student performance in an Honours research paper was found to be integrally linked to the process of gaining entry into the research community of practice with limited opportunity for legitimate peripheral participation given the high stakes context within which assessment decisions are made.

The past two decades has witnessed the mushrooming of Islamic schools in Europe, the United States and South Africa. Initially, these schools were concerned essentially with providing an Islamic ethos for learners. More recently, however, they have begun to focus on the process of Islamization. The Islamization project was initiated in the United States by Muslim academics including Isma'il al-Faruqi, Syed Husain Nasr and Fazlur Rahman as a response to the secularisation of Muslim society, including its educational insitutions. In essence Islamization means including Islamic disciplines in the curriculum, providing an Islamic perspective on issues in the syllabi and locating, where possible, secularized disciplines within the Islamic "weltanschauung." Six international conferences have been held to date at different locations in the Muslim World. The first five generated conceptual papers on the Islamic approach to knowledge and education and inspired academics to write research papers on their disciplines from an Islamic perspective. Most of these have been published in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences. The three universities which were established to drive the process have had varying degrees of success. The sixth conference which was held in South Africa took the form of workshops where South African teachers and international academics were brought together to generate Islamised syllabi for the major school disciplines. This article attempts to explain the rationale for Islamic schools and their attempts at Islamization of disciplines. In my view, this is an important development in the context of demands for the revival of indigenous knowledge systems.