Tag Archives: research

Outsiders and insiders

Belonging to a group is very important to people. Even people who claim to be loners and deliberately live in the most isolated locations would still belong to a family unit, a community and/or a nation. We all seek belonging be it with other people or on a more abstract level, with a school of thought or belief.

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Mapping the field ai??i?? What makes a professor in linguistics?

Analysing academic worlds is very straight forward ai??i?? thatai??i??s at least what one might think!

There are these researchers doing their research in a particular way depending on their discipline and their research field, working in strong international networks and publishing in journals of global renown. However, once our team started to dig into this we werenai??i??t sure, any longer, if there is only one academic world or rather multiple worlds, depending on the administrative culture and the institutional structure of academia in a particular country. Continue reading Mapping the field ai??i?? What makes a professor in linguistics?

On the limits of academic freedom

Researchers often struggle with how they are categorized by others

Researchers should be free from constraints that prevent them from the pursuit of scientific truth ai??i?? this is an idea that universities all over the world like to pride themselves on. However, even the purest, most basic research is subject to pressures which are never exclusively scientific. Researchers are subject to a number of social constraints as they compete for resources, pursue careers, and network with others. In a nutshell, research is a social practice ai??i?? a practice which does not only turn around ideas.
In my own career, I am often reminded of the social aspects of research when I interact with other researchers:I find it painful to be defined by a limited set of academic career parameters!

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