Progressive Geographies

Navigating the Academic World: A Professional Development Workshop in Urban Studies 

28-29 March 2019

Graduate School for Urban Research

Brussels Centre for Urban Studies, VUB

Brussels, Belgium

We are excited to announce that the Brussels Graduate School for Urban Research at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) is organizing a 2-day professional development workshop in urban studies, Navigating the Academic World. The workshop will take place 28-29 March 2019 at the VUB Etterbeek campus in Brussels.

This is an exciting and unique multidisciplinary workshop on academic publishing, grants and jobs, specifically tailored for doctoral students and early-career academics working on urban issues. The workshop is led by well-known academics who have been part of scholarly journal editorial boards and hiring committees at different European universities.

The program of the workshop consists of two days with lecture sessions in the morning (10:00-12:30) and short individual feedback sessions in the afternoon (2:00-4:00pm). The first day will be focused on academic publishing. We will have three editors, professors Pushpa Arabindoo (University of London, City), Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch (University of Grenoble Alpes, ACME), and Alex Loftus (King’s College London, IJURR) providing us with insights about choosing the right journal, editors’ expectations, review processes, rejections, and more, followed by Q&A. In the afternoon session, participants will get feedback on their papers from the editors.

The second day of the workshop is allocated to academic job market and hiring processes. We will have professors Miguel A. Martínez (Uppsala Universitet), Monika Grubbauer (HafenCity Universität Hamburg), Yuri Kazepov (Universität Wien) providing us with inside knowledge of academic job search, applying for grants, hiring politics and processes in Europe and at their respective universities, followed by Q&A. In the afternoon session, participants will get feedback on their CVs during one-to-one sessions.

The workshop is free for participants. For quality purposes we can accommodate up to 20 people. Those who are interested to participate need to send their application to Parastou Saberi (parastou.saberi@vub.be) by 20 February 2019. The application consists of: 1) a copy of your CV, 2) one-page motivation letter, briefly explaining your interest in the workshop, the stage of your academic career, 3) for those who would like to have one-to-one editorial feedback, a draft of their paper. Parastou Saberi and Bas van Heur will adjudicate the applications and will send out the results by 25 February 2019. A more detailed program of the workshop will be available closer to the event.

Lunch and beverages will be provided during the workshop.

David Beer, Georg Simmel’s Concluding Thoughts: Worlds, Lives, Fragments – Palgrave June 2019

This book draws upon the work of Georg Simmel to explore the limits, tensions and dynamism of social life through a close analysis of the works produced in the final years of his life and reveals what they might still offer some 100 years later. Focusing on the relationships between worlds, lives and fragments in these works, David Beer opens up a conceptual toolkit for understanding life as both an individual experience and as a deeply social phenomenon. Taking the reader through artistic and musical forms of inspiration, to the problems of culture and on to the conceptual understanding of lived experience, the book illuminates the richness of Simmel’s ideas and thinking. This sophisticated dialogue with Simmel’s lesser known later works will provide fresh insights for students and scholars of cultural and social theory and pave the way for a reinvigorated engagement with his ideas.