By coincidence, my current to-do list is finding itself replicated in other people’s blog posts today.
First, Bonnie Swoger, writing for Scientific American, sings the praises of the peer review system.
This is why peer review has become the standard in scientific publications – by allowing work to be criticized thoroughly at least once before publication, we are more likely to get sound scientific results that will hold up.
Of course, it isn’t all butterflies and daisies. Peer review isn’t always helpful. Sometimes it can be downright obstructionist. And as a result, many folks are working very hard to find new methods that allow for the same kind of critical review of scientific work at some point in the process.
Second, Anastasia Salter, writing for ProfHacker at The Chronicle, talks about the highs and lows of academic conference participation:
Step away from the familiar. When we give conference presentations, the “sage on the stage” cliché is often in full force. Unconferences are a chance to propose a discussion on something we don’t know, and count on a room of people with differing backgrounds to run with it. Posing an unsolved problem as a focus for a traditional conference presentation doesn’t work so well in many fields, but in an unconference it’s perfect.
Embrace everything as collaborative. Some great session proposals arise out of pre-planned collaboration and Twitter conversations while others are more emergent, mashed together from apparently similar topics during the voting and scheduling process or as conversations on Twitter overlap and people—or entire sessions—relocate and converge. A session is always much bigger than the original proposal as this evolution occurs.
Don’t take anything too seriously—especially rejection. While the public process of session proposal and voting that is experimented with in various forms in unconference models can make suggesting an unremarked topic like being picked last for teams in gym class, “normal” peer review both shelters ego s and potentially encourages nastiness. But in an unconference even if a session proposal doesn’t make the schedule, there’ll still be opportunities to share those ideas.
Finally, Katy Meyers, writing for GradHacker at Inside Higher Ed, checks in on advice for working abroad, as she experiences her first field work in Rome:
Doing research abroad presents more problems than just dealing with friends and family rolling their eyes every time you say something negative about a trip to a location that they would love to vacation at. In addition to having to collect data, network and maintain all of your grad student obligations, you have to deal with all the foreign problems.
This final link is a topic that has been much on my mind the past two weeks. I am in Tbilisi 11 years after first coming here as a first-year graduate student, having basically been here every year since. In addition to stops here, I have done field work and museum work in something like a dozen other countries in the meantime. As an anthropologist, that means I am no longer a rookie, but I would say I am still not quite a veteran. But there are a lot of points that could be added to Katy’s list.
Working abroad, or at least out of your comfort zone, is something just about every anthropologist does throughout their career, and is an essential part of anthropological practice. It is also one of the least intuitive and difficult parts of the job. Doing work abroad has the basic challenges Katy outlines, but particularly if the work is collaborative, the challenges (and rewards) are much more nuanced and complicated. I’ve often come to view my own attitude about fieldwork as similar to how one might approach a relationship…there are good times, less good times, and the constant need to calibrate your own goals, plans and attitudes to those people around you and the overall trajectory of your project. In paleoanthropology, researchers often find themselves in places where they are in many ways fundamentally privileged with respect to the academic resources available to them. Paradoxically, we are also often times strikingly ignorant with respect to local knowledge, both academic and general. The tact I have always tried to strike in my own approach is a combination of openness–particularly with respect to my own work–and humility. Some of the smartest people I have met in the field do not have the credentials of a Ph.D. or a business card from an elite institution, but they do have a wealth of experience that I could never replicate in my own work.
