Doing research needs reading and writing, but often academics struggle to find time for that. I suggest a few pieces my colleagues and I have enjoyed reading lately to re-claim time for pure research in the academic workspace.
One thing early career researchers learn from later stage ones is that “research time” is precious and needs to be protected. One can imagine that being an academic – which of course means different things at different stages, levels, or ages – must mean looking for a phenomenon interesting enough to study and being dedicated to understanding it as best as one can: which includes reading and thinking about it.
However, chaos and researchers’ attempts to deal with this chaos play a big part in academic life. Days are filled up with meetings, teaching – which comes with reading, preparing lectures or tutorials, helping or mentoring students, grading exams – bureaucratic work, and the rest of everyone’s life (care work, social and alone time, or rest). I’ve heard many older academics saying that eventually finding time to do research felt great, as a relief.
Anecdotes sometimes give insights – or can at least start the conversation – on complex phenomena. For some academics, taking time to read and write must feel like taking care of themselves, by allowing them to reconnect with what they wanted to do when they first decided to do research. Making space in our schedule for reading and writing can be seen as a way to reclaim the very core of what it means to be genuinely interested in something out there in the world.
Finding time to read and write isn’t a straightforward solution to the high workload of academic positions. However, appreciating its care function as a constant reminder of why we love research might re-frame the way we approach our everyday commitments. That is why I thought it would be nice to start this academic year by sharing a few pieces of writing worthy of being read. I asked colleagues from the COBRA network, fellow students at my institution and friends working in academia to share what they enjoyed reading in the last few months.
This short list includes pieces related to language, interaction or academia in general, written for experts or general audiences. I hope they can inspire our audience to make “unproductive” choices and try to make space in their schedule to dedicate to reading. You’ll find titles, author(s) and links to have a look at each one of those if you feel inspired.
1. Are We on the Verge of Chatting with Whales? by Christoph Droesser. A research group is using artificial intelligence to decode the language of whales. Along with teaching us something about those mammals, this work is a great example of what interdisciplinarity can aspire to mean.
2. Heartwarming: How Our Inner Thermostat Made Us Human by Hans Rocha Ijzerman. Regulating body temperature is a fundamental skill we share with other animals. Upright walking, loss of fur and the size of our brain were determined by the temperature of our bodies, but it might be the case that thermoregulation also shapes our relationship with the environment, with others and with our emotions.
3. A review of theories and methods in the science of face-to-face social interaction by Lauren V. Hadley, Graham Naylor, and Antonia F. de C. Hamilton. We constantly take part in face-to-face interactions, yet scientists have hard times studying them – because of their intrinsic unpredictability and variability. This review helps the reader navigate and approach the current literature and the possible development of the field.
4. Train PhD students to be thinkers not just specialists by Gundula Bosch. Is there still space for Philosophy in PhD? Not only is there some space, but also, we do need it. A new program at John Hopkins University is specifically dedicated to training PhD students to be critical thinkers rather than just productive lab members.
5. ‘My students never knew’: the lecturer who lived in a tent by Anna Fazackerley is a striking piece about the casualisation of academic work in the UK. This is for anyone who feels the need for a reality check.
6. Experimental evidence for scale-induced category convergence across populations by Douglas Guilbeault, Andrea Baronchelli, and Damon Centola explains how it is possible that people in different cultural communities come to see and conceptualise the world in the same way.
I hope you enjoy them!
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Author: Greta Gandolfi, ESR6, @greta_gandolfi
Editors: Joanna Kruyt, ESR11, @_JoannaK_, Dorina de Jong, ESR2, @dorinadejong and Tom Offrede, ESR5, @TomOffrede
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