Early career researchers are of increasing interest, regardless of national boundaries, given both policies to enhance international competitiveness, and concerns about individuals turning away from academic careers. As a result, there is a growing literature documenting how early career researchers navigate their journeys and decide to stay or…

Navigating academic work as well as career possibilities during and post-Ph.D. is challenging. To better understand these challenges, since 2010, we have investigated the experiences of early career scientists longitudinally using a range of qualitative data collection formats. For this study, we examined the experiences of four students and four…

Increasingly PhD graduates who wish to take up traditional academic positions (full-time teaching and research leading to permanence) are unable to find such jobs. They end up in fixed-term appointments as post-doctoral fellows or researchers on others' grants. Few studies document their experiences and most that do draw on data from the late…

Increasingly, research staff positions rather than lectureships are the reality for social sciences PhD graduates wishing academic work. Within this context, our longitudinal study examined how social science doctoral students and research staff in two UK universities imagined their futures in and out of academia. The variation over time in how…

While there are increasing numbers of fixed-term researchers internationally, their experiences are relatively under-examined. As a result, I argue their developmental needs are not well understood and rarely addressed. This study--a cross-case analysis of social science researchers in two universities in the UK--builds on the few existing…

Presents a continuum of the development and growth toward a scholarship of teaching. Explores whether a scholar of teaching studies teaching as a discipline in itself or whether teaching is studied through another discipline. Suggests how the isolation of the scholarship of teaching from the primary work of the disciplines and of departments might…