Welcome to the 3rd annual Social Sciences and Law Faculty PGR Research Conference!
The PGR Research Conference arose out of the desire of post-graduate research (PGR) students in the Faculty, many pursuing PhDs, to meet and engage intellectually with peers from other schools and to create a Faculty[1]wide intellectual community. For several years, school reps, the Faculty Rep, and I, as Faculty PGR Director, had discussed that PGRs too frequently felt corralled, institutionally and intellectually, in disciplinary, school and/or departmental ‘siloes’. While disciplines, schools and departments are crucial, we wanted to encourage, and create a space for, more cross[1]disciplinary and cross-school engagement, fostering vibrant intellectual dialogue about the substantive topics, theoretical approaches, and methodologies that we know our PGRs share across what are, after all, largely artificial academic boundaries. A Faculty-wide research conference, organized by our students themselves, seemed a good mechanism to explore how we might accomplish this. Additionally, it would provide career and professional development opportunities in various dimensions of conference organizing.
The pandemic hit while we were planning the inaugural 2021-22 conference. Raffaello Rossi, then the Faculty Rep (now a lecturer in the Business School), led the first conference organizing team. They swiftly moved the conference online, creating a wonderful digital event held during Welcome Week. It served successfully to inaugurate cross-Faculty intellectual conversations amongst PGRs across all our schools. It also allowed us to meet and to welcome new PGRs who, given the pandemic, began their PGR journeys without any in-person teaching, supervision, or peer support. We think it was a success on both counts. The team organizing the 2nd conference in 2022-23 was led by Uygar Baspehlivan, then a second-year PhD student in SPAIS. As we slowly emerged from the pandemic, and while many students remained overseas or outside of Bristol, Uygar and his team successfully hybridized the 2nd conference, which was held partly on campus but with 5 | many participants joining online. Again held during Welcome Week, two successful days of conferencing and socializing helped to sustain the growing sense of Faculty-wide intellectual PGR community.
Antonia Voigt, the incoming Faculty Rep for 2023-24 and a third-year PhD student from Education, has been leading this year’s superb conference organizing team. The team have successfully applied for funding for a series of pre-conference training workshops – on such topics as delivering presentations and networking at conferences – which you may have attended. This year’s conference features, for the first time, skills training and workshops on abstract writing and ethics as a lifelong approach to research. In addition, supported through funding from Bristol Doctoral College, we are proud to have put together a cross-disciplinary panel to discuss and showcase how research happening across the University of Bristol contributes to improving our common future and to our understanding of sustainability.
We are proud of and very pleased by the development of and expansion across these annual Faculty PGR Research Conferences. We anticipate that the third iteration will be even more intellectually stimulating and exciting and we welcome all PGRs across the Faculty to attend!
By Professor Jutta Weldes, FSSL PGR Director (until August 2023)