Career – Academic Housekeeping and its Effect on Interdisciplinary Early-Career Development - Seminar in the series Interdisciplinary possibilities, practices and challenges

This seminar deals with the theme of academic housekeeping, that is, important but ‘menial’ tasks that keep a research environment strong but that are not necessarily credited as formal academic merits. Examples include reading manuscripts for  colleagues, organising social events, emotional mentoring of peers, and taking part in committees on equality and work environment issues. Taking the time to perform academic housework can have negative effects on a person’s career advancement in academic cultures of ‘publish or perish’ where only certain valuable contributions are counted. If you work in an interdisciplinary research setting the issue of uncounted valuable contributions might be further alleviated given the time and effort required to negotiate and administer cross-cutting collaborations. In this seminar, we discuss who performs academic housekeeping in our research environments with a focus on its effect on early-career development and in particular if or how interdisciplinary oriented scholars are particularly affected. We will look at current research on the allocation of academic housekeeping and discuss ways to increase solidarity between staff and how to turn academic housekeeping into visible labour. 

We are happy to welcome Sara Kalm, Associate professor at the Department of Political Science at Lund University who will present her research on academic housekeeping. After Sara's presentation, we will have ample time for discussion. 

Registration: Only zoom participation is available. Participation IRL is closed.

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About the seminar series

Interdisciplinary possibilities, practices and challenges is an exploratory seminar series. The aim of the seminar series is to expand our collaborative understanding of different aspects of performing interdisciplinary research. The series is meant to be a collectively maintained venue for discussing the practices, challenges, and opportunities with cross-disciplinary research endeavours.

The seminars are open to anyone curios about doing research across disciplinary boundaries. The series have a few recurrent themes,  where you can choose to follow all of the seminars or focus on seminars on a specific theme.

- Practices and skills: seminars designed to discuss various skill-sets and practices specific to working in interdisciplinary contexts. Topics include collaborative writing, seminar cultures, publishing strategies, developing research ideas and grant applications etc.