By Dan Perry, PGR Intern for Pathfinder Career Destinations, and PGR in Education
This post reflects on how academic research (in this case, a PhD in Education) can intersect with experiential learning (gained via a PGR internship) and how each informs the other.
When I began as PGR Intern, working on the University of Glasgow’s Pathfinder programmes with the Research Culture and Researcher Development Team, I was not expecting this role to intersect with my PhD research in Education. Although I am purposefully resisting categorisation of my research, it concerns itself with abolition, anticolonialism, post-disciplinarity and post-qualitive inquiry. [To find out more about me and my research, see my blog post on the PGR Intern Blog.] My research involves (re)focusing on care, community, anticolonialism, and ethical foundations, restructuring how research is conducted, working beyond disciplinary borders and being reflexive and accountable about the work I produce. In short, it seeks to enact different ways of doing and thinking about research.
Being an intern in the Research Culture and Researcher Development Team has shown me that this team also seeks to enact different ways of doing and thinking about research. This culture change is possible and already happening, if the culture and community is constructed from the outset. In this post, I demonstrate this intersection through three interrelated aspects – embodiment of (self)care, working across disciplinary boundaries and communities, and finally, questioning binaries and single narratives.
The Embodiment of (self)care in Research Culture and Researcher Development
I have been able to participate in the Walk, Talk, Connect initiative (a monthly opportunity to walk and meet with other Researchers and Research Professional Staff) as both a (co)leader and a walker. For me, this is a practical enactment of the values of care and community that also surface in my research. For example, in my thesis, I write about self-care, drawing on theorizations such as “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (Audre Lorde, 1988). Activities like Walk Talk Connect can be viewed as a practical (and literal) embodiment of these visions of research and the academy. Engaging in such activities allows individuals to show up at their best in their research and contributions to the university, and to the world at large.
Welcoming across disciplinary boundaries and communities
My research tries to envision what post-disciplinarity could look like in the academy: an intellectual approach that moves beyond traditional academic disciplines, favouring fluid, boundary-crossing methods of inquiry. It challenges rigid disciplinary structures by integrating diverse perspectives to address complex social, cultural, and political issues more holistically.
In my internship, I’ve seen the RCRD team take a flexible approach to disciplinarity that values and recognises all researchers. Firstly, the team members come from varied academic disciplines and utilise the strengths of their respective backgrounds when working together. For example, the Research Culture and Researcher Development interns study law, engineering, creative writing and art history.
Moreover, the chosen priorities interplaying within Glasgow’s research culture work reflect the need for equitable ‘Recognition’ – how individuals from all disciplines have something to offer to one another, by virtue of being Researchers and Research Professional Staff, and have a shared responsibility to contribute to the institutional culture in which they operate. RC&RD has a flexible approach that welcomes extended team members (Community Co-leads, Staff Representatives, and Mentors for example) across the community, valuing and recognising all. While I had considered these notions in the context of abolition it has been enlightening to see them play out in the context of collaboration and community building.
Questioning binaries and single stories in the career narrative
Another of Glasgow’s Culture priorities is Career Development. Under this heading my work supporting the Pathfinder suite of programmes has also reflexively deepened my thinking about my research topic. Pathfinder supports UofG Researchers with career awareness, options, planning, and transition. Pathfinder is specifically structured to avoid the false divide of academic – or – non-academic careers, or plan A – vs – plan B, and instead recognise the complexity of career trajectories and expectations. It also purposefully challenges notions of failure and the tendency to obscure the role of care and community when individuals make career decisions.
In challenging the utility of these binaries and divides, Pathfinder enacts some of the very notions I have encountered and engaged in my academic research. For example, in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TedGlobal talk she explains that “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” I think that some of the work currently happening in Pathfinder, and within Research Culture at UofG more broadly, is gradually broadening some of the ‘single stories’ that may persist around careers and career outcomes for researchers.
When I began my internship 6 months ago, I was eager to learn more about different types of roles available in university settings. I had decided soon after I started the PhD in Education that I did not want to become a Lecturer. Because my work supporting the Pathfinder programme has focused on career development for researchers and research professional staff, I’ve had the opportunity to expand my own thinking about my personal career development.
Having spent a lot of time and becoming familiar with the Career Narratives series for developing this blog post summarising the learning form the first 50 career stories in the series, my outlook on work has changed. Taking the advice of many Pathfinder LinkedIn posts, which give career guidance and insights, I decided to be proactive and reach out to one of our narrative writers to ask more about their career. They were more than helpful, and this experience reflected another aspect of my research principles of care, community, and the collective. In this case, these principles came to inform the way I approached my own network building and career development. The Pathfinder Career Narratives have empowered me to have agency over my own career direction and narrative.
“What is not yet, what is becoming.”
Finally, as I continue with my internship, I am increasingly reflecting on the relationship between the work of affecting change in research culture and post-qualitative inquiry (a mode of inquiry that animates my PhD research). Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre describes post-qualitative inquiry as “a philosophy of immanence concerned not with what is but what is not yet, to come. Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and others refused pre-existing, formalized, systematized, procedural methods and methodology because they over-determine thought and practice, closing off what might be thought and done in favour of doing, thinking, finding, and representing what is, what exists” (St. Pierre, 2019; pp163-164). In working to change culture, we are all concerned, every day, with “what is not yet, to come.” The radical possibility and optimism that drew me to work with post-qualitative inquiry in my thesis research has also, surprisingly, found me again in my internship and I’m increasingly drawn to imagining my own career path through the lens of what might be and what is to come.
The Auditorium: a research culture and researcher development blog 