TheCultureLab
Postdoctoral life is notoriously precarious, with long lab hours, demands for international mobility, and high pressure to perform and produce. TheCultureLab focuses on working with the PDN postdocs to help foster soft skills and strengthen the sense of the community.
TheCultureLab takes the form of participatory drop-in workshops. In line with the cutting-edge educational approaches, each workshop combines exercises from theatre and creative writing practices to engage with the experiences of being a postdoctoral researcher. Practical exercises help to form a space for co-creating collective knowledge and awareness, which naturally emerge through shared perspectives. The exercises also organically help participants foster their public speaking-, presentation-, and negotiation skills and learn to manage stage fright and writer's block.
The project is hosted by Prof Bénédicte Sanson and run by Dr Helene-Scott Fordsmand, a philosopher at the HPS, writer and curator and by Dr Anatolii Kozlov, who is a former scientist and currently a philosopher at the UCL STS and a theatre practitioner.
This project was awarded with the Cambridge University “Enhancing Research Culture” grant, promoted by the ARRC (https://www.arrc.group.cam.ac.uk). It will run from Lent 2024 to Michaelmas 2025.
Some thematic materials related to the content of the workshops can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/helene-scottfordsmand/culturelab
Professional web pages
Helene Scott-Fordsmand, philosopher, writer and curator https://sites.google.com/view/helene-scottfordsmand
Anatolii Kozlov, scientist, philosopher and theatre practitioner https://sites.google.com/view/anatoliikozlov
Feedback from the Lent 2024 participants:
“For me, it's a treat to come here. It's not like another thing on my agenda. I know I'm going to have cool conversations with nice people and it's fun”
“I really look forward to the [workshops], and I think it's a nice space to have because post-doc can be quite isolating”
“[These exercises] move different parts of your brain”
“[The exercises] created a feeling of confidence in the room”
“It's made me think about teaching styles and enthusing people”
“The depth of the conversations: I never spoke with anyone from the department on that level”
“It made me think how to improve communication and how to be part of the community rather than just focus on yourself”
“It's a space where you can reflect”
