Reflections two years after thesis defence (II/II)

In a previous post, I described some career reflections a couple of years after my thesis defence. Overall, I am very grateful for my PhD education, since I think that both the seminars and the activities within the two research schools I belonged to (the National Graduate School in History and Learning in Multicultural Contexts) prepared me quite well for what came afterward — and for what you can do in advance to increase your room for manoeuvre.

If I were to give advice to a PhD student, it would be to teach as much as possible and to learn as much as possible from more senior teachers. This is because you often have to teach at least part-time to make a living after your thesis defence, and previous experience counts for quite a lot.

A more informal piece of advice I would give is to think carefully about a) what you want to publish after your defence, and b) where and why you want to publish. After I finished my thesis, I knew that I wanted to continue doing research, which I was fortunately able to do for a full year after my viva thanks to scholarships from various foundations. What I had not, however, thought through properly was where I wanted to publish — something that turned out to have consequences further down the line.

In graduate and post-graduate education, you often learn that publishing is good and that publishing in peer-reviewed international journals is even better. However, very little attention is paid to how this is actually done — which is rather curious, since it is essentially a whole industry. This means that every scientific journal has its own style, impact, and target audience. Therefore, you often need to have an idea of where you intend to publish before you start writing, since not all journals accept all writing styles. For instance, most Swedish peer-reviewed journals want explicit discussions of theory and method, whereas many international journals are not interested in that at all and instead focus primarily on empirical work. There are also purely theoretical journals where you should never submit empirically driven papers.

If I had known this a couple of years ago, my publication record would probably look much better. I currently have one paper accepted in a journal and another in an anthology. However, I also have two articles under re-review — mostly because I did not understand how the journal market worked. And this becomes a problem, since the phrase “publish or perish” unfortunately still matters. So if you are considering a postdoc, make sure to read up on which publication channels to target before you start writing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Contemporary Sexual Politics: Efforts to Silence Sexuality in Politics

Image
Following up on last week’s post, we can ask ourselves where questions of sexuality are being challenged in politics. From a contemporary perspective, I would argue that we are currently witnessing global attempts—particularly from conservative actors—to banish issues of sexuality from public discourse. In Foucauldian theory, we can speak of several forms of the exercise of power. Foucault uses the concept of biopower to analyze social views on sex, capitalism, and power. One of the central aspects of biopower is that it often operates through the individual, who is expected to internalize social norms rather than be externally forced to accept them. Yet, in the case of sexuality, we have over the past decades witnessed rather forceful attempts to silence it, thereby making people unaware of important aspects of their own sexuality. In such cases, the effort seems to lie in banishing "unwanted" expressions from public discourse, thereby limiting the individual’s scope for a...
Read more

The old bucket and me - Hinke Bergegrens philosophical works

Image
(the title of this entry is a play with words, since the name "Hinke" carries resemblance to the word hink in swedish which means bucket).  For the past months I have been working on a project on Swedish politician Henrik "Hinke" Bergegren, who is often forgotten in contemporary history writing. Bergegren was born in an upperclass family in Stockholm in the year of 1861 and early in his life came into contact with rising workers movement. Within the movement he soon gained prominence and was a key person in forming the social democratic party, which would shape Sweden upuntil this day. In the scholarship on Bergegren a key concern have been the framing of him as a political terrorist, where he on the party's congress spoke openly about using violence as a mean to achieve the workers goals. In 1908 he was excluded permantly from the social-democratic party, which often have been described as a result of his agitation for violence. However, historian Åsa Linderbor...
Read more

Book review of sorts: A history of childhood by Colin Heywood

Image
One of the many perks with being a university teacher is that you get to read alot of various scientific literature. This semester I have been assigned to teach course about the history of childhood, which actually aligns rather well with my research interests on the history of families and migrant children. However, teaching also requires to read through the course literature and in this case a key-book was Colin Heywood's "a history of childhood".  As a standalone book it works rather well as an introduction to both the history of childhood and, in a wider sense, social constructionism. What I however have struggled with when incoorporating it to teaching is these three aspects: a) The structure which is divided thematically rather than chronologically  b) The books overestimation of the social; whilst also underestimating human evolution c) The approach where the past is presented as a one-way route to an enlighted, contemporary Europe or western world  Starting with m...
Read more