RESILIENT Project’s PhD students attend seminar at Oslo Met

About the Seminar

Many researchers, especially in professional disciplines, have a professional or personal experience from their field of study. This poses a number of challenges for the researcher. How should one relate to one’s own experiences from the field one is researching? How can one make use of these experiences in research and at the same time avoid biases? The seminar will help the resilient students reflect on how they situate themselves in their respective projects. These are some of the topics covered in this seminar for PhD-students where we have invited Cecilie Basberg Neumann to give an introduction about situatedness in research.

The students came away with many valuable insights to help them implement their tasks in the social work field. Here is what one student had to say:

It was a very important seminar for me, I had learnt a lot on how to situate myself in the project and reflect my position as a researcher. It made me reflect on my research topic and think of anticipated challenges that I may encounter and how to manage them.

Catherine Manda, PhD Student, Institute of Social Work, Tanzania

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I learned a lot during this session, like:

1. Before going to the field, the researcher has to make a work structure in a logical way emphasizing on that which is connected to own experience.

2. Personal experiences may be relevant to research. However, a researcher has to privilege objectivity taking into account vulnerability and academic experience to avoid bias.

Genereuse Mukayisenga, PhD Student, University of Rwanda

About the Facilitator – Professor Cecilie Neumann