ISE PDS: Doing a PhD while the house is on fire? (Online)
Doctoral School of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University
Doing a PhD while the house is on fire? How to navigate academic development at a time of unprecedented crisis
This seminar offers a platform for PhD researchers to discuss issues of professional development, research ethics and personal positioning in a time of unprecedented climate, ecological and social uncertainty and crisis. PhD researchers are subject to multilayered pressures with regard to employment/livelihood, research and publication requirements, teaching, public discourses and exogenous factors such as corona. Behind all this looms the climate and ecological emergency, which will in the years to come mean a fundamental transformation of socio-economic systems, including the welfare state that funds higher education and research institutions. How to navigate this can be enormously challenging. And yet PhD researchers are expected to do just that, on their own, in an institutional system that is slow to respond to these enormous changes.
In this seminar, we will discuss these challenges and share resources and strategies how to negotiate and face them. Line Kvartborg Vestergaard, a PhD researcher and academic activist, will share her experiences and reflections.
Some of the questions to discuss are for instance
• What are your assumptions about academia and the university as an institution of employment, research and learning?
• How might the climate and ecological emergency affect these in the years/decades to come?
• How will (or does) this process affect you, at a personal and professional level?
• What are the roles that researchers might take in this process? Which agency and strategies can researchers have?
Preliminary seminar programme
13.00 – 13.20 Welcome, outline and introduction of participants
13.20 – 13.50 Talk: Mapping challenges of doing a PhD when the house is on fire
13.50 – 14.15 Work in pairs: Reflecting/discussion your own position
Break
14.30 – 15.30 Group work: Strategies, responses, agency at different levels
15.30 – 16.00 Wrapping up, ways forward