– Created by members during the Gotland Retreat January 2019 –

What CEFO adds to the experience of being a young researcher

  • Meet and connect with PhD students from other departments and disciplines
  • Broaden your perspectives and research
  • To have an insight into how postgraduates operate in different fields other than my own
  • Opportunity for reflexive learning about your own research communication to a wider audience
  • Experience of running PhD courses, workshops and events
  • Chances to learn about how to be constructive to other people’s research
  • Peer-based support on research ideas, writing, skills, courses, and career
  • To learn how to produce a journal and what it means to be on an editorial team
  • Support for the research process – e.g. technical details, how to apply to grants, how research ideas originate, the process of publication
  • Fun! During the ‘urgh’ times in our areas, this environment could play a supportive role

What is our role within the university? What is the university not doing that we are doing?

  • Create meeting places across disciplines and departments
  • To challenge the narrow specialization of disciplines and stress the need for many different perspectives
  • Initiate conversations across boundaries with a focus on environmental/climate change issues
  • Peer-supported feedback on your work in progress from wide perspectives
  • PhD student-led education. Courses developed from needs and perspectives of PhD students. Create and run courses that aren’t limited by a specific discipline.
  • A bottom-up / grassroots network
  • Bring together answers to questions that aren’t raised yet
  • Challenge subject hierarchy and recognize we have different approaches to the same issue

Why does the world need transdisciplinarity / interdisciplinarity? 

  • Because research fields are getting more and more specialized
  • Global, long-lasting decisions need a common ground, i.e. need to be accepted by people from different disciplines
  • Everything on Earth is connected. The world is getting more complex
  • Inter-disciplinary approaches breeds creativity and new innovation – e.g. RADAR
  • To challenge public misconception on highly relevant topics (such as what climate change actually is) through using data expertise from a wide range of disciplines
  • Because not considering other perspectives is how we cause more problems with proposed solutions
  • The thinking that ‘caused’ global challenges might not solve it
  • The thesis is bigger than your department. “Limited by the problem not by the discipline”
  • Translate concerns into shared aims