5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Managing (and thriving!) as a research-focused academic: Devising individual, context-appropriate, and sustainable strategies to one’s professional life

Language: English

This professional development session brings attention to the array of professional skills necessary to manage – in a sustainable fashion – a research-focused academic career (from understanding how one goes about setting up personal and professional goals for oneself, and why devising personalized time-management strategies could be important to thinking about the database search strategies one relies on in order to establish efficient literature review routines that are sustainable in the long-run). Thus, although this session is not designed to offer one-size-fits-all set of professional skills, it does aim to facilitate the kind of reflexive thinking needed to understand that the everyday choices we make have implications for our abilities to manage the research-oriented- goals we set for ourselves. The session takes for granted that what constitutes ‘basic’ professional skills’ is bound to be different in different contexts, and that our individual preferences, every day strategies and career goals are bound to differ, this session is designed to encourage self-reflection. This session is not, in other words, designed to offer tips that are country-specific. Instead, this session aims to give emerging scholars some of the ‘epiphanies’ needed to craft more purposeful and sustainable everyday strategies (and routines) for themselves, which are, among others, informed by neuroscience hacks used to achieve ‘peak performance’ (in whatever way each and every one of us defines this), time management and priority setting hacks and by other skills of relevance to the craft of research. Worth mentioning is the fact that, in academia, ‘peak performance’ is often expected in three spheres (research, education, and service). Thus, understanding what the expectations look like for each of these spheres in different contexts, and what the ‘ideal’ trajectory for a research-focused academic career may look like are both important insights.