EGOS Women's Network Meeting 2016

prior to the 32nd EGOS Colloquium in Naples, Italy

Wednesday, July 6, 2016, 15:00–17:00

Location: University of Naples Federico II, Monte S. Angelo campus, room B1

Coffee and tea will be available from 15:00 onwards.
At 15:30, four parallel Round Table sessions will start. Detailed descriptions of each Round Table can be found below.

Regine Bendl, Inge Bleijenbergh, Christine Teelken & Katharina Chudzikowski

While post-doctoral researchers (postdocs) are an increasingly important and productive group of employees in academia, they are lacking a further career perspective and embeddedness within their organization. Guidance and support are crucial but often weakly organized and not systematically sustained by their employing organization.
A comparative study amongst two Dutch universities (a survey with both closed and open questions amongst 225 respondents), reveals that nearly all post-docs (85%) want to stay in academics, but only less then 3% was offered a tenure track. Another survey amongst the medical faculties will be finished soon. We also conducted interviews amongst the postdocs and their supervisors.
Given these limited career perspectives, we would like to invite EGOS scholars to discuss the following questions in our interactive session:

• What options do you have for further career perspective, both inside and outside academics?
• How can you create and enhance such options?
• What kind of support do you receive from your institution and from the academic community, and what do you actually require?
• What kind of role does gender play in your own current and future career?

‘Originality’, ‘relevance’,’ rigor’, ‘clarity’, ‘logical progression of argument’, ‘readability’, ‘theoretical and practical implications’, ‘generalizibility’, ‘credibility’ – amongst many others, these are notions with which authors are confronted with when receiving feedback from journal editors. However:

• What makes a paper submission successful?
• When does it fail? What are positive/negative experiences of publishing?
• How to develop publishing skills?
• How to handle pressure from supervisors/faculty?

In this interactive Round Table session the participants will reflect on these and other questions based on their own experiences and knowledge about the publishing process. This session is an invitation for scholars to exchange their publishing experiences for succeeding in academic publishing.

 

Academic research increasingly depends on acquiring (international) research funds. However, writing successful grant applications is a particular skill that calls for both careful reading of calls and careful wording of application texts. Moreover, the international funding landscape changes continuously which makes it difficult to oversee your opportunities.
This Round Table focuses on exchanging knowledge and experiences about getting EU-funded projects. We will focus upon using your own research interests and academic networks for preparing a grant application rather than upon technical instructions to fit the bureaucratic criteria. You are actively encouraged to bring in examples from your own experiences.

 

This Round Table explores the motives, contradictions and practices of working for social change from within the context of an academic career. It builds on an understanding that working for social change is situated within a context of competing discourses and practices. Working for social change from within an academic career is often associated with the identity of a ‘tempered radical’ (Meyerson & Scully, 1995), as it creates particular opportunities in relations to powerful institutions, but is also fraught with tensions, contradictions and enduring paradoxes. The latter result from strong external pressures and also personal aspirations to legitimize work in terms of the dominant discourses of higher education and business schools. The Round Table will explore questions such as:

• How do I engage with legitimate opportunities and platforms for constructing my work as a contribution to social change – e.g., within the contexts of teaching, research, grants, public engagement?
• How do I experience and work with the contradictions of using these legitimate opportunities to work for social change?
• How do I approach work for social change that might be difficult to legitimise within the context of my academic career?
• How do I re-position myself and my work for social change in ways that are both meaningful and secure under the umbrella of an academic careers?

Round Table D invites participants to engage creatively with their everyday practice. Drawing on their personal experiences, participants will be invited to express and learn from each other’s practical and discursive approaches to positioning their work for social change within an academic career.