James Craske is a final year doctoral candidate working across the Schools of Education and Politics. He also works as a Research Associate at the Centre for Competition Policy and started his placement with the Courage Project in May. This placement is about building a research community culture across SSF, though its design allows for students in other Schools and Faculties.

Over the summer months, I will be running a series of activities for postgraduate researchers as part of my Courage placement. The idea is to create collaborative and supportive sessions that contribute to developing the research culture across faculties, bringing together PhD students as they develop essential and necessary skills for an academic career such as publishing and teaching.

Traditionally, training and personal development are often discussed in terms of competition, “finding-the-edge”, catering to individual needs, and the importance of good strategy. The sessions in this programme will be guided by a different set of ethics, including honesty, the role that luck can play, contingency, group-focused, collaborative, and conducted with a flatter knowledge hierarchy (with PhDs and academics sharing their experiences).

Within the current training and supervision practice, students can take on these activities with often little/no support, which can lead to lack of motivation, uncertainty or a sense of isolation. In some cases, there is a tendency for students to navigate the publication process or teaching without a broader network or the support they need.

This programme is intended to provide some space and support for PGRs as they go about completing activities within their doctoral programme.  

The Programme and Why it Matters

The Courage Project can only do so much, of course. Whatever thinking is done about the subject of “research culture,” we shouldn’t lose sight of the more significant institutional issues: things like precarity and overwork. This will be effectively dealt with by more substantive collective action and thinking. There is a benefit, however, in having honest conversations, problematising conditions and building up support networks that can help to mobilise alternative ways of working and thinking about research culture.

It is vital to have dedicated conversations about how difficult the research journey can be and to have some insight into the unpredictable nature of activities such as publishing given the expectation that postgraduate researchers should be able to just “pick these things up”. Developing a good research culture means high quality and competitive training, but it also requires being open and honest about how these things work. Sometimes a good strategy can lead to a publication failure, for instance. When is the last time your supervisor told you they had a paper rejected, or told you about moments when teaching went wrong? As such, the pilot I am running will provide an insight into postgraduate researcher’s views, and contribute to an evidence base for developing better provision in the future.

The Programme

These activities will run deep into the summer months – this is partly down to the circumstances of my placement – but I hope to catch people whilst they are working on “other things” besides their thesis. It’s also a reminder that PhD students are often still about, even if they are not visible. Embedded into the programme of workshops for the publication development and reading group will be a voluntary focus group session, where postgraduate researchers can feed into the evidence-base of a final report about how their current experiences and future expectations about postgraduate research culture.

Publication Development

The publication development sessions will aim to provide two things: a view of the underbelly of publishing and set time devoted to writing. On the first, I will ask academics and PGRs who have already published to talk honestly about the process of things such as peer-reviewing, the difficulties of selecting journals, the length of the process, and pressures to publish. The second part is to provide the structured time that PGRs can use to write their articles (whatever stage they are at) in a collaborative environment over a few months.

Reading Group

A PGR reading group will look at some of the “common” elements that come with the territory of a thesis. There will be a series of short writing prompts about these topics from different disciplines, on the topic of “writing and the PhD” and another session considering “researcher identity and the role of the intellectual/researcher” in today’s world and institution. We will decide on a third session will after feedback during the first two sessions. A series of blog posts will be created for the Lakeside blog to let others know what we have been discussing.

Teaching and Associate Tutors

I will use my placement to contribute to current conversations that are taking place to improve the support and provision of associate tutors. I will do this by speaking to staff members who lead associate tutor work, contracts and provision in their Schools, in order to find where there is good practice that can be shared.

Secondly, if there is a demand, I will look to feed into any existing associate tutor network in order to improve the communication of ATs across several schools and faculties. This could involve facilitating monthly meet up for associate tutors, who rarely get to share experiences across schools or faculties. I am particularly interested in talking to associate tutors in the Social Science faculty because so far, we have had fewer conversations with this group.

Sign up!

I’m still working on some of the final details of this programme of activities, which will be rolled out from late July. If you are interested in taking part in any of these sessions or want to find out more, then please use this expression of interest form to be added to the mailing list: https://bit.ly/2I7cHqa