Feeling Vulnerable as an Independent Scholar - Let's Change That!
Part 1
The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network has prioritized strengthening the career goals of postdoctoral scholars and early career researchers. While the blog below is a US resource, we are reposting this because all independent scholars will benefit from reading the helpful information here.
What are the unique challenges faced by independent scholars? What type of human and material resources do you need - and how can you obtain them? What type of policies impede the success of independent scholars?
Is working as an independent scholar worthwhile?
Your might feel vulnerable if you have been unable to secure that post as a lecturer or professor. Perhaps you've spent hours of work, laboring over several dossiers only to receive word that "there were many qualified applicants." That is not an indictment on your skills! Academia often fails to prepare you for the opportunities available to independent scholars.
Who might benefit from this?
Maybe you are working within a paid fellowship but it is soon coming to a close and you're panicked. Should you write your essays and articles or apply for more funding? Do you have interlocutors working with you or do you feel that you are running up against gate keepers? We are here to help! From gaining access to JSTOR and other online systems, to creating a team of collaborators who will work with you, to learning more about the grant proposal writing cycle and how to prepare your best possible application, we can help.
Our ever evolving list of partners allows us to assist you with your research, publications and access to jobs including fellowships. Please be in contact with any additional information you believe would help you achieve your goals. We have shared numerous resources here on the website which you can easily access using the "search" tool at the top of the page. During 2023, we will begin hosting seminars with additional information to provide you with support.
Below, we are sharing a helpful blog from the UCLA College of Social Sciences Center for the Study of Women (CSW). While thinking of what you most want and how we can work together, we leave you with this simple reminder: Unbow your heads, Sistahs. You have power on the margins!
The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network (c) 2023
https://csw.ucla.edu/2019/03/05/my-journey-through-the-research-access-crisis/
My Journey Through the Research Access Crisis
My Journey Through the Research Access Crisis
March 5, 2019/Awardee Research, Research Affiliates
By Becky Nicolaides
Back in 2006 when I made the tough decision to walk away from a tenured faculty position at UC San Diego, I knew in the back of my mind that I would always remain a scholar even if I disengaged from the security of an academic career. I still had book and article ideas swirling in my head. I had to hit pause because of family obligations and my need for a calmer, more healthy life routine. I’d been commuting between LA and La Jolla for nine years, all while growing our family and trying to juggle the demands of an academic job and parenting. It got to be too much.
But the idea of shutting down my intellectual growth and scrapping new research projects was never an option. I had spent the previous 20 years getting deeply trained in my field through rigorous study and teaching. I’d published two books, was germinating ideas for a third, and plotting out new modes of financing that work. And I knew that the UCLA Center for the Study of Women stood at the ready for me. It would provide me a new intellectual home base, a crucial conduit to the resources I needed as I refashioned myself into an “independent scholar.” Same mind, same track record, new working universe.
CSW proved to be an outstanding place for my soft landing. I was grateful to be accepted into their Research Scholars Program, a model regional program that provided research resources to local independent scholars. The program gave us a UCLA email address, a community of like-minded scholars, opportunities for small grants, and perhaps most importantly a Bruin ID and password that would get us into the library system. We could check out books like a faculty member and access databases remotely from home. Scholastically, it felt like I had slipped sideways from UCSD to UCLA, into the same kind of access I had as a member of the UCSD faculty. The continuity was reassuring and crucial to keeping my mental momentum moving forward.
But as so-called “visiting scholars” – the designation given us by CSW – my fellow independent scholars and I seemed to occupy a gray zone outside that standard university trifecta – students, faculty, staff. In 2015, much to the distress of CSW itself, the Research Scholars program had to be reconfigured due to a new set of policies and restrictions on visiting scholar positions imposed by UCLA administrators. This move also reflected concerns coming from the library, because library contracts with commercial database companies only allowed off-campus use by that critical trifecta – faculty, students, staff1.
With this change came a loss of full access to library resources, plunging me into a distressing crisis that sent me scrambling. In the middle of a big (and funded) book project, I needed my full access to ProQuest historic newspapers, America History and Life, PhD dissertations, and history journals. I reached out to academic friends and former colleagues. Try your alumni library card, they told me. That only gave me a truncated suite of databases that excluded many sources I needed. Try your local public library. The LA Public Library offered a surprising number of databases, but again didn’t cover the full range of my needs. Try the Huntington Library. Same story. Why don’t you just buy subscriptions to those databases, some asked? That would cost upwards of $500/year for just a portion of the material I needed, and some databases I couldn’t buy into at all because they weren’t available to individuals, only to university libraries. When I relayed my situation to some, they were outraged that a public university, supported by taxpayer dollars, was shutting out the public from full library use. It was possible to purchase a community user card for $100 which allowed a person to check out 5 books at a time (one renewal allowed), no recall privileges, and in big bold type no off-site access to online subscription databases. This fell far short, again. Have you ever seen a history professor’s office? Books line the walls like wallpaper, with some shelves occupied solely by library books, renewed over and over again (I know this, because I used to do it). And the lack of remote database access was a nonstarter for me.
Desperate conversations continued, and one thing led to another, including a new affiliation with USC (hello, library access), and an elected position on the governing council of the American Historical Association, the nation’s oldest, largest association of professional historians. This was a dynamic and powerful group. As the lone independent scholar on that 19-member board, I was committed to bringing the issue of unequal research access onto the radar of the AHA, an organization I knew was highly cognizant of the growing trend toward “career diversity” among history PhDs. In light of a relentlessly tight job market, they were doing plenty to help realign the profession itself to support alternate career paths – read: non-academic – starting with how history departments train their graduate students. I envisioned the issue of research access as another facet of career diversity. I was pursuing an alternative career path at the mid-career stage, while also trying to sustain the scholarly life. Research access had become an agonizing, unexpected barrier to me, for a mercifully brief period. While I’d solved the problem for myself at least temporarily, I wanted to explore this issue on a larger scale, to see what – if any – solutions an entity like the AHA might help bring about.