Stitching together an intellectual life

20 August 2019 by 4 Comments

Photo by Quinn Bidmead | unsplash.com

This post is by a colleague we know through our Research Whisperer community.

She has chosen to remain anonymous to share her experiences of being part of the academic precariat in Australia.

I am looking at a flyer for an amazing opportunity to hear one of my intellectual heroes speaking. Registration for the symposium costs $100. In my head, I do the calculations: $100 for registration, an hour to get there and back and probably two hours if I just stay for one talk, so that’s four times $55 (the per hour rate I would be getting for doing what I am paid to do), which makes it $320 to hear a keynote. I sigh and push away the enticement.

Someone asks me to read their paper, or their ethics application, and the calculation fires up – can I afford to be a good colleague this week?

These are the daily decisions you make when you move from a salaried role to a casual one. They are also the decisions that cost the most, not just in monetary terms but also in professional development, networking, the chance to hear about opportunities and to stay current with reading and thinking.

I read articles about following your passion and chasing your dreams and I am angry and tired. Honestly, I’m pretty much always tired and have a low level thread of anger running through my system. I am a very interesting person.

I think what strikes me hardest about my precarious academic life is that this is not where I imagined I would be at this point in my life. We all have mental pictures of our futures and while mine was necessarily vague, it included worthwhile work, financial security, and intellectual challenge…making a contribution in some way to learning about our world. I believed, perhaps naively, that publishing, getting research money, having industry experience, and teaching would lead to job security. It did not. Read more of this post

Filed under Research culture, Research life Tagged with , , , , ,

A tale of two interviews

2 May 2017 by 3 Comments

Our anonymous author approached the Research Whisperers with this post about disrupted research interview expectations and the importance of approaching these encounters with an open mind. This is a lesson at the heart of all research, but it can be easy to build up presumptions around our skills and expertise. 

Having our intellectual expectations upended can be confronting and frustrating, but it can also be enlightening about the topic and ourselves.

Speech bubbles at Erg by Marc Walthieu | flickr.com | Shared via CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Speech bubbles at Erg by Marc Walthieu | flickr.com | Shared via CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I’m conducting interview-based research on a complex social problem in Australia, and I had the opportunity to interview a woman I’d been looking forward to meeting for some time.

She was the CEO of an organisation that delivers services to a marginalised group, which was an important perspective for one of my case studies. I knew she held some views on my research topic that were very similar to my own, which can help with rapport.

I expected it to be a positive experience.  It ended up being the most uncomfortable interview I’ve ever conducted, for this or any other project.

The awkwardness started before we even sat down, when I held out my hand in greeting and she (let’s call her P01) went in for a kiss on the cheek. Not the way research interviews in office settings are usually kicked off! Once we were seated, one of her first comments was that she doesn’t normally participate in research interviews, so I should feel lucky, and that she had agreed to do it this time because she could tell that I supported the organisation’s work. Also, could we keep it to 40 minutes? I assured her that very much appreciated her time, and quietly panicked at how unwelcoming this little exchange felt.

I started asking my questions, which she answered quite briefly and directly, occasionally chuckling or waiting for me to reframe my words into an actual question before responding. In my experience, participants usually respond at length at the mere mention of a topic (without necessarily waiting for me to ask a question), so muted alarm bells continued to ring.  Read more of this post

Filed under research methods Tagged with , , , , ,

The unwritten code of conduct

15 December 2015 by 24 Comments

The author of this post has chosen to remain anonymous for good reasons. The Whisperers know the author, and consider this to be a very important issue in contemporary academe.

Impact and public scholarship have become ever more popular elements in institutions, and more attention and pressure on researchers around questions of what academics are ‘allowed’ to say comes very much to the fore.

Photo by Ondrej Supitar | unsplash.com

Photo by Ondrej Supitar | unsplash.com

Each day this week, my supervisor has walked into my office and made verbal demands that I remove content from my beloved blog.

Each day, the boundaries of appropriate social media usage shift a little, and my requests for some clear written guidance are rebuffed.

I’m a postdoc at a research-intensive organisation.

I work in a typical physical science department. That is, it’s a highly male dominated environment with an age profile skewed towards the era of peak Bob Dylan fandom. This isn’t necessarily a problem. But, in my case, it is.

My department has chronic cultural problems. Bullying, gender and race-based discrimination are commonplace, and things are particularly toxic for early career researchers and female academics. I am both, and have experienced first-hand sexist, homophobic and racist comments, and inappropriate physical contact from senior academics in my workplace. Read more of this post

Filed under Research communication, Research culture Tagged with , , , , , ,