summer school report / zomerschoolrapport

Some impressions from the first edition of the CHARM-EU Doctoral Summer School I participated in last week held at the University of Montpellier, France. It was a great opportunity to work together with 25 other doctoral researchers, and a wide range of international transdisciplinary practitioners, on developing transdisciplinary research practices to tackle complex challenges.

Personal highlights:

To learn from others about the wide variety of disciplinary practices that seem to share a common goal of curiosity, ambition, and rigour, in an attempt to improve the lives and livelihood of others.

To better understand the limitations of certain disciplinary ways of thinking, and theoretical frameworks (including my own discipline of the humanities), when working in a versatile, and real-world challenge driven, intellectual environment.

Personal challenges (and the ‘big challenge’ our smaller team worked on during the week titled UNIVERS – (UNcovering the Intrinsic Value of Early career researchers in Research Systems):

How to uncover, communicate, and manifest, the intrinsic value of early career researchers (curiosity, autonomy, creativity, personal growth) with increasing pressures of extrinsic factors in research systems (prestige, competition, productivity), and possibly how to realign these for the benefit of both early career researchers and the research systems they work in and with.