An observation and a question.
While sitting in a symposium dreaming of my next cup of coffee I have noted a couple of sentences that really bothered me in Early Career speakers and it hit me then that I was hearing this more and more, it was along the lines of:
“We were asked to give this talk”
“We were tasked to XYZ”
To put it simply, in Academia is it to some extent expected that a supervisor would ask students or an Early Career in general to do or look into something. However if one were to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, we would notice that the specificity of research and academic training more broadly is that supervision ought to be more guidance than drafting a task list.
Why did “We were asked to” bother me so much ? This specific and probably not accidental construction of these sentences radiates a total lack of agency; according to a quick Google search:
Agency is the sense of control that you feel in your life, your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior, and have faith in your ability to handle a wide range of tasks and situations. Your sense of agency helps you to be psychologically stable, yet flexible in the face of conflict or change.
“We were asked to” is the anti-thesis of Agency and the reason why it matters is that Agency is an excellent probe or gauge of an independent mind and if we loop back, an independent mind is the first building block of a researcher.
It’s impossible not to draw the conclusion that went terribly wrong somewhere down the line.
Here are my questions is where does this come from and how do we create an environment where Early Career people can aspire to have agency ?
Comments