Organised by the Earth System Governance Early Career Committee.
Water Off a Duck’s Back – Building Personal and Emotional Resilience in Academia
As researchers, we are free to professionally pursue our greatest interests and engage in exciting collaborations across the globe, making the career trajectory a true privilege. At the same time, research is highly competitive, and the path to an academic career involves both structural hurdles, and personal struggles of learning to cope with failure and let downs. For example, retaining an interest in your topic and staying curious can become challenging when you have to balance the many demands that come with a professional academic career, such as increasing administrative requirements and the pressure to stay highly productive over time. Besides, with more and more articles being published every year, the competition is growing ever steeper.
Studies find that a large number of PHD candidates experience anxiety or depression during their doctoral years. Junior researchers enter a world where success easily becomes reduced to quantitative measurements that may not in fact reflect effort or creativity, nor account for the unequal opportunities that doctoral students have globally, for example in terms of access to publishers and journals. We are therefore interested in talking about how researchers can become more like water off a duck’s back when facing academic pressure; and, in effect, how junior academics can stay curious, grounded, and emotionally resilient, both individually and through the communities around them.
Speakers
- Thashmika Bandara, PhD candidate, City St George’s University of London, UK
- Anna Berg Grimstad, PhD candidate, Uppsala University, Sweden
- Prof. Karen O’Brien, Zennström Visiting Professor, Uppsala University, Oslo University and cChange
