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Illustration: Ragni Svensson (image is cropped)
Essays Navigators in the Baltic Sea Region Professional strategies and identity constructions among early-career academics
Drawing on in-depth interviews, this essay investigates professional strategies and researcher identity constructions in the precarious postdoctoral phase. The analysis indicates that most of the informants in the present study seem to be somewhere in the middle of the process of establishing a postdoctoral/early-career identity. The essay underlines the need for better preparing PhD students for the postdoctoral phase; and suggests that to most of the informants, the emerging researcher identities are secondary to more pressing issues, relating to survival in academia alltogether.
Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2024:3, p 121-130
Published on balticworlds.com on September 18, 2024
abstract
Drawing on in-depth interviews, this essay investigates professional strategies and researcher identity constructions in the precarious postdoctoral phase. The analysis indicates that most of the informants in the present study seem to be somewhere in the middle of the process of establishing a postdoctoral/early-career identity. The essay underlines the need for better preparing PhD students for the postdoctoral phase; and suggests that to most of the informants, the emerging researcher identities are secondary to more pressing issues, relating to survival in academia alltogether.Keywords: Early-career researcher, postdoctoral identity construction, socialization.
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Including comments by Sari Autio-Sarasmo. Senior University lecturer, Supervisor for the Doctoral Programme in Political, Societal and Regional Change and Vice director at Aleksanteri Institute, the Finnish Centre for Russian and East European Studies and from Florence Fröhlig, Director of Studies at BEEGS, Baltic and East European Graduate School (BEEGS) at CBEES and Associate Professor in Ethnology at Södertörn University.