Also – a very happy women’s day to everybody from both Ritu and I.

Priyali: I know you’ve been travelling internationally to complete work contracts. How do you go about finding openings? Do you use an agency or is it down to your own research, and how do you decide who is a good employer?

Ritu: I maintain an extensive professional network through writing, reading and research. I make prospective employers aware of my work and establish a continuing dialogue to contribute significantly towards health, social research and policy. This also helps me to find and select the kinds of projects I am keen to work on.

Priyali: You are someone who grew up in India but now lives in the UK, and has spent some of her most formative years within it. Do you feel you have access to more than one culture, and does this make you attractive to prospective employers?

Ritu: When people ask I often say I was brought up in England. I have certainly established “belongingness” here in Britain. I feel very much part of its society and environment. I think the experience of working in two different nations and understanding how things get done, certainly benefits in maintaining contacts and sustaining networks. I have access to wide networks here and in India. We live in a globalized world and also an extremely competitive one. With people now having access to specific geographical locations they didn’t have before, they are presented with new challenges and dynamics. These present difficulties but can be dealt with successfully.

Priyali: This is your free space – go ahead and send a message out to other researchers, practitioners and readers of this blog as to what most engages you at this point in your life and career.

Ritu: I feel that universities should prepare PhD students, who often live an isolated life, for the outside world. They should encourage them to publish and provide continued support even after they graduate. Most PhD students feel misplaced and choose different career paths, due to little or no guidance or support from their universities. It’s even more difficult for migrants who would like to establish their careers outside their home country.

Also, I would like to add that Britain needs to rethink its position on international development. I feel that Britain’s capacity to make a difference in the developing world is huge. This needs to be planned carefully by considering intersections of race, gender and social inclusion.

People belonging to diverse backgrounds should be given opportunities to contribute to the international development sector through an equitable manner and process. This will help deal with issues of social exclusion within the UK that give rise to inequalities in the work environment.

She is an academic, researcher and activist with substantial experience in gender and human rights issues. She has country knowledge and experience of working in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Serbia, Denmark, Mexico and the United Kingdom. Ritu is a founder and moderator of the South Asian Sexual Health (SASH) Forum and an Editor of the AIDS-ASIA eForum.

She is also the Director of Spatial and Social Development Perspectives – UK.

http://ritumahendru.wordpress.com/about/

http://mishtimli.blogspot.com/

Priyali: Hi Ritu, welcome to the “Let’s Talk” blog which is a platform for people within higher education and those simply interested in it, to talk about the things that concern us.

First off, many congratulations on completing your doctorate in Sociology. Would you like to comment on your early career experiences now that you’ve got it under your belt? What are your career plans, and what do you think of the present job market in the UK and outside it?

Ritu: Thanks Priyali. As you are aware, opportunities for PhD graduates are sporadic. I have not had much success in securing a full time academic position in the UK, something that I was looking forward to after finishing my PhD. However, I have specific engagements with various UK universities. Elsewhere, I am in negotiation with universities to establish international programmes – this is a lengthy and time consuming process.

Preferably, I would like to teach Gender and Public Health from sociological perspectives, and engage myself in social research simultaneously. I do have a company and would like to keep that as a tool to continue my engagement with countries like India, Afghanistan, South Africa etc. It may appear that I am adhering to the doctrine of utilitarianism. However, the job market in the UK is bleak so I have created a job for myself and carved my own path. I am hoping that one day the situation within UK universities will change, and I will have a full-time position at a University here.

Priyali: What or whom do you hope to influence with your work as a social science researcher?

Ritu: I wouldn’t necessarily like to influence anyone. Instead, I would like to facilitate and/or provide space for discussions on the issues of migration, gender and health. This would create knowledge of social marginalization through theoretical and methodological understanding. I am interested in the conceptualisation of diasporas and health and how the two are deeply interlinked. I made initiatives to enable this dialogue and founded SASH – an online forum that attempts to address the sexual health needs of migrants  and diasporic communities in the UK.

Next post: 7 March. Dr. Mahendru comments on being able to work across cultures, and on career planning for doctoral researchers.

I think he meant by this that there is a craft and a science to producing that finished piece of work, whatever the discipline.  When the moment comes that you submit, defend and are finally awarded a doctorate by your examiners, you are being recognized as a worthy peer by the academy.

What is it then in your hands to do with the piece of work you have invested several years of your life in?

Publication – yes, but in what form and with whom? I was approached shortly after being awarded my doctorate by a company that wanted to publish my thesis. However, they did not have a peer review process. A friend of mine was similarly approached, and accepted. But she is a communications professional. The value of having her work out in book form supercedes the necessity of peer review. For someone like me who is building a career in scholarship, peer review makes the difference between work that will stand me in good stead when being considered for a lectureship, and work that may not carry so much weight.

How do you find the right publisher and the right audience for your work? Who will hold the copyright and for how long? How long will it take to appear in print?

To all researchers – please consider this an open call to write in with publication questions and answers. The greater our knowledge, the better our decisions.

As an Indian citizen who spends significant time living and working in the UK, I have been able to witness at first hand the changes taking place in the education sectors of both countries.

The Indian economy like the Chinese economy is expanding. India, like China, is investing heavily in education. New schools and universities are being founded at a steady rate.

British universities are looking to these two countries for expansion. The universities of Liverpool and Nottingham have already set up joint programmes and campuses in Xi’an Jiatong and Ningbo respectively.

I recently attended a meeting at which a reputed British university presented plans for a joint doctoral programme, to a group of senior faculty representing a number of established Indian universities. If the plan goes ahead, students will be able to show joint accreditation for their doctorates. Since a large part of the programme would be based in India, where both living expenses and tuition fees are significantly lower than in Britain, the overall cost of the doctorate would be reduced. A senior figure at the meeting remarked on the possibility that this could work not only in favour of Indian students seeking a UK degree – but also in favour of UK students wanting to cut down on university expenses.

I should mention of course that faculty at wellknown universities in India as with their counterparts in Britain, are highly distinguished. Students from both countries who are able to enroll  on such a programme should it go ahead, would also have that advantage on their side.

Are we going to see British students no longer simply taking a gap year in India but living and studying there in significant numbers? What will this mean for teaching methods, curricula and  – that impossible-to-define, mythical beast – global consciousness?

Is your department or university considering a move East?  If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts and expectations with reference to that?

It may seem strange to link the two things but I hope it will become clear why I am.

As reported in The Guardian last Saturday Mr. Schmidt said, “Over the past century the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together.”

My deepest sense of where we are – as a scholar and a human being – is that we need to renew our ability to make connections.

I write this blog to make connections with people I would never have the chance to communicate with otherwise.

Maybe the riots would not have happened if we had been better at talking to each other.

Maybe this is our chance to stop them from happening again.

Art and science. The working and the not working. The very educated and the less educated.

I don’t know when the idea that life and the world can best be described in binaries took such strong hold of us.

Can we soften and expand and shape our categories – instead of allowing them to control us?

How else can we make our work – and play – relevant and enduring?

What are the binary ideas you would like to change? Are you going to let your inner polymath out?

In this post I want to talk about the relationship between your research and your teaching.

Researchers may feel that they walk a lonely path – and they do. Research by its nature is an individual and personal activity. It is probably one of few professional career paths in which you are positively encouraged to act on the world around you according to highly personal ideas.

And yet – speaking anecdotally even and only from my own experience of the research world as I know it through departments I have taught at, conferences and impromptu debates around coffee machines (!) – most researchers aren’t by nature disengaged from other people. On the contrary, we seem to be insatiably curious about and interested in other people, or we would not spend large chunks of our lives seeking to add a tiny, original drop to the vast ocean of knowledges man and woman have created together over the centuries.

The good news is that our chosen line of work offers its own way out of the loneliness I think many of us have felt, in our hours and years spent following a research trail.

As teachers, we automatically find a social dimension to our work.

In our classrooms we come up against fresh faces and minds to whom we seek to make our ideas both clear and relevant.

We also find a whole new social dynamic in bringing our research selves into the light of day and into the classroom.

I am presently working on a university language and study skill teaching assignment where it is the meta-skills – to use a word any self respecting dictionary would probably reject on sight – of being a learner (and a teacher) which count. Life in the classroom isn’t about ideas right now – its about ideas about ideas. How to frame, present and deal with an argument. What to do when the Harvard style guide won’t tell you how to cite a completely new kind of source which wasn’t around when it was last revised.

I hope I’ll also have a chance to teach the literary periods I specialized in – but stretching to teach language and study skills is gifting me an important kind of knowledge. The knowledge of social contact – where the work I produced over years spent largely in the company of my own mind is being translated into something immediately and socially valuable.

Be flexible and be open to the opportunities around you – don’t shy away because you think it’s not what you trained to do. Let your research self breathe and your teaching self too – they need to not be frozen into one place and one time in an infinite universe.

To coin a metaphor, it’s rather like preparing a one course meal from the grand banquet you prepared for a once-in-a-lifetime festival. What to put in? More importantly – what to leave out? Most ironically, it is becoming clear to me that this whole process is in a sense the opposite of what it took to produce the thesis itself.

Let me explain with reference to the actual context. As a scholarly writer my great struggle has always been – to find the right design and the right connecting axes for my argument. Structure, structure, structure. Words and ideas rushed in on me  – but the simple and absolute necessity of putting each one in the right place occupied my days and nights.

However that story doesn’t concern us for the purposes of this post – somehow, like other survivors of this marathon, I found a way through this terrain and at an unsuspecting moment reached my destination. Aspects of this journey have been discussed elsewhere on this site by Heather http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/phd-student/2011/06/15/what-makes-a-phd/ and Kat http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/language-and-literature/2011/05/30/world-building-with-mind-mapping/. My own work now is to scale down – to sift through the first chapter of the thesis and produce a unified miniature – something which will tell the reader what I feel it is important for them to know about the forty two year poetic career of my subject:  D.L. Richardson. A British-born poet and teacher who, like many of that generation of Anglo-Indians, lived between nineteenth-century Calcutta and London. The first time around it took me 20,000 words.

Hm.

Well…the FIRST thing I’m doing is to follow my supervisor’s advice to “write what you need to write.” I mean that I’m following the mysterious, rational and more than rational shaping instinct which allowed me to form a view of Richardson’s life in the first place – I’m combing through the chapter and cutting and pasting the sentences and passages which form an outline of his poetic life into a new document. It’s amazing how your focus changes with your word count –like packing a smaller suitcase.

The SECOND thing – is that I’m making space for change. Putting in the final full stop was definitely not the end of my thinking about Richardson, the nineteenth century or the Romantic movement. It was a stage in the development of that thinking, and I would like the finished chapter to reflect that ongoing growth.  Nothing complicated about this – I’m simply adding in new thoughts and ideas as I go along in brackets containing both short, haiku-like questions and long, rambling ones (nothing like the bracket for relieving the military precision of linear sentences, eh?).

The THIRD thing is– carving out and creating time to deal with the copyright permissions I’m going to need to get and the formatting of the chapter in accordance with a new (to me) set of style rules.  

And – finally – given the hours, energy and patience this takes, I make time to remember why I’m doing this. The joy of work can seem very far away after hours at a stretch on my laptop – so I need to remember that ,in fact, I’m recovering – or rather helping to recover – the life and hopes  of a real person. And presenting him to an audience that probably would never otherwise come across his work or feel any relationship to it.

A wider view of Adrian’s teaching, research and publication profile can be found on his homepage:

https://sites.google.com/site/adrianholliday42/

Could you very briefly comment on what the humanities bring to public life in your opinion?

They bring a complexity of perception which helps us all to put aside our prejudices – a  complexity which cannot easily be put into ‘straight’ words or images. I would like to expand this concept to creative aspects of the media, particularly to satire and comedy. It is not an accident that many of our intellectuals are comedians. The problem is that we may not be aware that we are putting aside our prejudices when we encounter this complexity; so that when we come back to ‘thinking logically’ about things, the prejudices come running back and it is as if we have learnt nothing.

What kinds of research do you hope to see early career scholars in the humanities undertake?

This is hard for me because I don’t consider my own discipline to be in the humanities, but in social science, which is a very different matter. There are however hard decisions, especially in Britain, where academic institutions want one to publish in the journals and to get funding which will tick the right boxes in government research assessment exercises. Here one must ‘give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar’, distinguish one’s job from one’s work, and try also to work on areas which will make one’s academic community rock and inspire one’s students. I suppose it is important to remember that we are getting paid to do our jobs, but that this enables us to have the immensely privileged life of being free academics. 

Career planning and decision making hold many challenges. Would you like to share a very positive decision you made and its outcome?

I began my academic career in very different times; but I remember I worked hard to get research students from the very beginning – to go to conferences, to write and publish, and to get myself known for being critical and adventurous in my thinking, mainly outside my university I must say. This attracted students I think.  In publishing I never ever gave up, and bore all the criticisms sent back by reviewers, and felt that my teaching would never be sound unless it was based on my own published research. I had the conviction that I would not be able to change things until I submitted to the academic community first.

Are there decisions and career moves you would like to advise early career academics  to be cautious of?

There is never a better time to do things than the present. Life will never get less busy. One must carry one’s writing project with one absolutely everywhere and squeeze it into the smallest spaces between meetings and administrative duties. Being an academic is not a 9-5 job.

What has helped you the most in defining and achieving your career goals?

Never being bitter or defensive, at least not for long, and never publicly. At the same time, never submitting to established thought. Having a trajectory of investigation which can be traced back to my undergraduate days – a personal project – but which has never ceased to develop into new thinking.

I have taken advantage of the unique nature of the internet to look for a collegial space we can all come to in our own time. My memory of the final stage of my doctoral research is a blur of classes, supervisions, library visits and – yes : ) – grocery shopping. From what I could see of more senior academics around me, life only gets busier after this. But yet to listen, to find a voice with which to contribute: these surely are the quiet staples of the path we have chosen to follow. Without them our work risks becoming a round of task completion alone, I think?

In practical terms the need to publish seems to me the most pressing issue for scholars who, like me, have recently completed their doctoral work. In both the United Kingdom where I lived and worked for more than a decade and in India where I presently live, an academic gains in credibility through getting their work published. Putting together at least a basic publishing plan and considering relevant points such as: identifying scholarly journals and possible monograph publishers, ways of approaching them and factoring in the time it will take from the acceptance of a proposal to the final publication (fingers crossed : )) is practical research activity that is just as important as the work it takes to develop and write your doctoral thesis.  

Of course it’s not just how to publish that’s a practical issue. The “why” is just as important.  My own answer to this is a simple one: to be engaged and to engage.  Dialogue and human contact are what make being a learner and a teacher worthwhile. How else can we make sure that the humanities remain fresh, alive and …well, human?