HuSS Graduate Research Conference

Doing a Masters or PhD is often imagined as mostly solitary. On one side is the drive towards gaining invaluable experiences through developing your skills as an independent researcher. On the other side, however, is the isolation and loneliness often accepted as a given element in the life of Masters and PhD students. Positively and negatively, images of ‘the solitary postgrad” abound. This panel discussion explores another perspective: how collaboration is also embedded in research life.

Academic collaboration takes various forms and experiences, depending on one’s current needs. Seasoned researchers with substantial publication records collaborate with fellow experts in other areas. Early-career researchers can build their professional reputations by connecting with others to form teams for working together. As graduate researchers learning the ropes, opportunities to engage with others in similar ways are also available, offering many advantages that can enrich your life as a researcher now and in the future.

Going beyond the baseline of the supervisory relationship, this panel opens conversations toward activities that may include:

• co-authorship in research outputs
• joining and/or forming reading clubs, research teams, or support groups
• organising activities to support one’s own development by contributing to research culture: connecting to wider contexts through seminars, talks and symposia, public events involving non-academic participants, creative and artistic engagements and projects, social activism and community outreach.

Bridging these discussions is meticulous attention to the specific contexts of graduate researchers in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Test a thesis! Pitch a pipe dream paper! It’s like an academic shark tank without the sharks. We are hosting a ‘three minute thesis-type competition’ - only it is not a competition! - for all of your fledgling ideas for papers, theses and books (academic or otherwise!). If there’s a discipline or journal you’ve been tempted to dip your toe into, or an argument you need to ruminate on, then join us for a creative environment to find a place for it!

We strongly support submissions daring to create collaboration and cross disciplinary boundaries  - like visual arts/microbiology or humanities/media like in past submissions. To assist in this, We have designed a template to make this connection: “I’m doing a project rooted in my perspective in Discipline A. I’m hoping to connect it with those of you in disciplines B, C, D, etc. Would you be interested in something like this?”

But it could also be something along the lines of, “Hi, my dream is to finally get started working on Project X, because I know Y and can frame these issues from these angles. However, to get Project X off the drawing board, I’d need someone who knows Z, because I have no background in that, and it’s necessary to round out the project. Any takers? Let me know what you can contribute and how much time you have.”

All we need is:

• Your name
• Your discipline and department
• Your supervisors’ names
• Your thesis topic/title
• Your bio (50 words or less)

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