Should I Stay or Should I Go?
If you are in Brisbane, feel free to come along to the final MACS meeting for 2008. If you can’t make it, I would urge you join in the discussion anyway: you are welcome to comment here, or on the MACS Facebook page.
Friday, October 10, 2008
3:00pm – 4:30pm
Seminar Room, level 4,
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
The University of Queensland
Mobility is a big issue for many early career researchers. If you stay at one institution for too long you risk being labelled as intellectually unadventurous; if you move too often then people wonder what you’ve done wrong. Moving institutions can expose people to new modes of thought, new experiences, but can also be seen as disloyalty to the institution that nurtured you. Many universities use rhetoric that speaks about attracting and keeping the best people, but also actively discourage (if not structurally prevent) their own graduates from applying for local postdocs.
Moving away from your home institution can bring a refreshing new perspective on life and work, but there are the costs of moving away from support networks of friends and family, and starting anew in a different city or country. As many of us are workers on short (or shortish) term contracts, these are questions we must face with some regularity.
This month we will hear the views of three people with different experiences, and try to answer the question “should I stay, or should I go” (with apologies to The Clash):
Peta Mitchell has been based in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History (formerly the Department of English) at UQ since her undergraduate degree, and now lectures there in writing and publishing.
Mel Gregg grew up on Bruny Island, Tasmania and first moved to the big city of Hobart to complete high school. After finishing her Honours degree at the University of Tasmania she completed her doctoral work at the University of Sydney, before moving to the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at UQ.
Zala Volčič completed her undergraduate studies at Ljubljana University, Slovenia, and her PhD in Media Studies at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. She has worked as an assistant professor of International Communication at Franklin College/University in Lugano, Switzerland; at Maribor University in Slovenia; the University of Skopje in Macedonia; and had a Research position at the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia, Bulgaria. Zala is now a University of Queensland Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies.
Your Comments
Tseen writes:
Written in October 2002 – “Some colleagues have offered me the well-intentioned encouragement that I will be able to find something because I’ve done well thus far in spite of the fact that I have studied for all of my degrees at the same institution. I would argue, usually politely and sometimes stridently, that I believe I have my current profile and set of opportunities because of my continued association with the same institution. Being at UQ all this time means that at every step – whether it be MA, PhD, or postdoc – I have been au fait with its processes and aware of its hierarchies and personalities. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t have gained the same information about other places but I do believe that, in saving myself this learning curve, the time was otherwise spent completing extra-curricular collaborative projects and gaining new academic networks through other channels. Given my non-academic trajectory post-PhD, having the same institutional affiliation also meant being able to maintain an academic persona while in a full-time policy and projects position.
In this day and age, with the communication tools we have at our disposal, the notion that one has to have a cosmopolitan pedigree to be a ‘good’ academic is an outdated one. And so is the idea that staying put should equal academic retardation. I would like to think that the quality and breadth of my professional work has not been compromised by the fact that I chose to remain in the same place.”
The addendum I included in 2006 reads thusly:
“UPDATE: This paper was written in October 2002 and, since then, circumstances changed and opportunities arose. I did end up moving from Brisbane. I am currently based in Melbourne as a Monash University Research Fellow (in the National Centre for Australian Studies; 2004-2009). It is a dream job: research only, generous funding and with a very supportive Centre behind me. The question remains: did I manage to work up the CV to get this position in SPITE of, or BECAUSE of, my time at the one institution?”
My 2008 perspective (so much older but probably not much wiser)?
I still stand by what I wrote in 2002. I don’t think the exhortations to go forth and prosper from some (more senior) academics have changed at all, yet the environment we work in as academics has altered hugely. I will admit that being at other institutions means tapping into broader networks and having yourself known by a slightly broader range of people, but – I’d argue – choosing to stay put and ensuring you present at key conferences and consciously build strategic networks could have about the same result.
Read the full post here
Posted: 6 10 2008 - 09:48 | Permanent link to this comment