[The last two weeks have been too hectic for me to keep up the pace of regular posting here. Yes, teaching is over but not marking, or BA and MA examining boards. Bureaucracy is, well, eating me alive. Every time friends or relatives ask me whether I’m already on holiday I go ballistic…]
Two very different matters lead me to consider today networking. One is a conference, the other a doctoral dissertation.
Recently, I attended in Barcelona the Spring conference of At Gender: The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation (http://www.atgender.eu/). I found out about this association through an email sent by the Institut Interuniversitari d’Estudis de Dones i de Gènere, to which I belong –and whose name has always puzzled me (aren’t women gendered??). Since I’m used to English Studies conferences it took me a while to get the idea behind At Gender: no Americans, hardly any Brit, plenty of Scandinavian scholars and many others from all over central and eastern Europe. Ah!, I thought, so Europe does exist after all –how nice.
I did enjoy the panels I attended and met two awesome ladies, one from Finland, one from Barcelona itself. Chances for networking? Well, frankly much higher with the local lady than with the other lady for, let’s be frank about it, it’s hard to keep in touch with people you are with for a couple of days, much easier to meet for coffee with someone nearby. Second observation about networking: attending a conference in one’s city is a very bad idea as the need to socialise (=network) with one’s peers is lower than if you’re thrown together with them in a distant location. Third observation: once an association has been running for years, the chances for new incomers to network diminish as the basic nets have been formed. When you see so many people greeting each other by first name, the chances to introduce yourself and start conversation dwindle (or that must be my shyness). Anyway, so that you know: At Gender exists, and so does the grandly named, EU-funded ‘European Institute for Gender Equality’ (http://eige.europa.edu). That its central office is in Vilnius, Lithuania says all I need to know about how peripheral gender is to the European Union. With apologies to gender scholars in Vilnius.
My doctoral student Auba Llompart, author of an impressive dissertation on children’s Gothic to be soon submitted, has applied for a ‘Mención Europea’. This is a certificate added to her doctoral degree stating that she has done research elsewhere in Europe for at least 3 months under another scholar’s supervision. Now, if you’re into English Studies, ‘elsewhere in Europe’ means Britain, where, by the way, hardly anyone knows what a ‘Mención Europea’ is. It turns out this is not a way of certifying all over Europe that you’re a doctor but just something that Spanish universities are promoting, with validity in two or three more countries.
Anyway, Auba must have on her board a foreign expert and we have invited someone from the British university where she did her research. Now, here’s the tricky situation: we need two other scholars to act as external examiners and write reports on her dissertation. It seems that one of these can also be based at a British university but the other must be based in some other European country. Uff. Not that easy… as my networking gravitates towards Britain.
Apart from the corresponding emails to anyone who might help, I spent a couple of hours surfing Academia.edu, trying to make a list of suitable specialists outside Britain. Start with my own contacts, check those of my followers and of people I follow, use research labels to locate other scholars and so on. I came up with a couple of names, one in Germany and one in Sweden but what Academia.edu revealed was what I already knew: networking is pyramidal, with the UK and the USA at the top. You get a smaller web of local connections (Spanish scholars following each other) and then a bigger web of international connections all pointing to ‘Anglo-America’. How many, say, Finnish and Italian scholars know of each other? If any? Something’s wrong here, I’m not sure what. Surely, my non-British equivalents in academic inclinations and aspirations must exist in all European countries, but how do we find each other?
Conferences? Well…
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