In my previous post I used the metaphor of the dinner table to suggest a way of thinking about literature reviews and the meaning of engagement with disciplinary debates. I have received a few comments on Twitter and Facebook, and my friend Alice Mpofu-Coles left the following:
This is a good point, and I felt bad for not thinking about it in my post. I do come from Sardinia, not exactly the centre of the academe, and I am a first-generation Dr. and then Prof. (which means that I am the first in my family to get a Ph.D. degree and pursue an academic career). But I am also aware of my privilege as a white male in academia, even more so considering that I was lucky enough to have a family that unreservedly supported me in my studies, both financially and emotionally. I also had a very fast career, and while I did work a lot for this, I cannot help thinking that things could have gone quite differently without the award of a generous Marie Curie post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Manchester less than a year after the award of my PhD (2014) at the University of Cagliari. I know many people who also worked really hard and did not make it in this sector. As I tweeted a few months ago:
In February 2017, less than 3 years after getting my PhD, the University of Reading offered me my first permanent lectureship, and I guess this is when I stopped worrying about getting a job at a university. I did start worrying about many other things, but that’s not something that I will cover today. My point here is that I felt – and even if differently, I still feel – as an outsider in academia for most of my life, and that is why Alice’s comment made me feel uneasy. Nobody invited me to that dinner table, and getting a seat there was not easy. And yet, I did not think about this when I was writing that post. Have I already forgotten how difficult it was for me to feel part of a research community during my doctoral studies?
I remember my first academic conferences as a PhD student. I received little guidance on how to select which one I should attend or on how to make the best of those expensive and time-consuming trips. I used to feel the urge to attend as many panels as I could, feeling guilty for skipping a session to socialise with other PhD students. Big conferences were the worst. I would spend three or four days trying to absorb as much as I could from panels and presentations, taking as many notes as I could and feeling so insecure about my own research. I am introverted, but I would still make an effort to approach people at the end of panels as “you have to network”. At the end of the event, on my way home, I would feel drained emotionally and financially from this exceptional amount of social interaction, and I did not feel part of (or wanted to join) any dinner table. I sometimes had to take two planes and a train, pay a taxing registration fee, sleep in the cheapest hotel I could find and all this to attend a conference (my friend Julian Kircherr wrote about this a few years ago) where I was just one of the many ‘unknown faces’. Moreover, as someone for whom English is at best a second, if not a third, language, I also felt extremely disadvantaged: presenting my work in this language, particularly at the beginning of my career, was not easy. Of course, English is the lingua franca in international academia, we all know that, but researchers should not forget that not everyone feels at ease expressing their ideas in that language. And yet, I feel that often – and this is something that I particularly noticed in my interactions with other PhD students – there is a divide between native anglophone speakers (or those who attended international schools) and ‘all the rest’. Anyways, this is not about linguistic privilege, I will talk about this in another post.
Luckily for me, things got different with small workshops and events. These events are generally advertised through mailing lists and social networks, and are more centred on a specific research topic (as in “the politics of hydraulic infrastructure in Central Asia”). There, you have more time to get to know people and talk about research, methods, challenges, and so on. I started to have more realistic expectations about what I wanted to achieve with these events, and I eventually settled with the following: try to make a decent job in presenting my research and make ONE good contact. With one good contact I mean someone that is likely to remember me and my research, and that I could approach in the future with a request to collaborate, a reference letter, an advice etc. Anything else was a bonus. This minimalistic approach made me feel less stressed and anxious, and helped me preserve my mental health. Each time I attended a workshop or a conference, I managed to make that one contact, and I regularly exceeded this expectation (and if I did not exceed it, that was OK).
Are you attending two conferences a year? Then in the three years of your PhD, you might have made six good contacts, which I think is not so bad. Each of these people might be able to introduce you to someone else, and so your network grows, the people sitting at your dinner table become less intimidating, and that dinner might even become enjoyable.
Then there is another aspect that shapes and (re)produces the politics of academia: citation politics, but that will be for another post.
Filippo Menga 