Visiting professorship fosters global connections

Professor Amanda Keddie, an internationally renowned researcher of social justice and education with REDI, recently spent two semesters at Swarthmore College in the US as the Julien and Virginia Cornell Visiting Professor.

Swarthmore College is one of the top liberal arts colleges in the US and the Visiting Professorship brings professors from around the world to the College to enhance the skills and knowledge of its academic staff and students. Professor Keddie’s selection reflects both her impressive contributions in areas of social justice and education and Swarthmore’s dedication to enriching its curriculum through international perspectives.

During her time at Swarthmore, Professor Keddie shared her expertise with students by teaching one course each semester (Gender and Education; Classroom Research for Social Change), leading online panel presentations with gender, masculinities and education scholars from around the world, and presenting a public lecture for the College community on marketisation, social justice and public schooling in Australia and the UK.

Here, Professor Keddie discusses her experience at Swarthmore and how research focussed scholars can develop their international reputation.

How did the invitation to apply for the Visiting Professorship come about?

My road to Swarthmore began in 2018, when I visited the US on a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to study educative approaches to addressing gender-based violence. While I was working at the School Participatory Action Research Collaborative, a race and gender equity institute at the University of Pennsylvania, I connected with Swarthmore Professor of Education Joseph Nelson. Swarthmore was not a research site in the Fulbright study, but I spent a bit of time there and was invited to give a lecture on “Social Justice, Education, and Supporting Young Muslim Girls”.

I was delighted when Professor Nelson and Professor of Education Lisa Smulyan nominated me for the Professorship. It was an absolute privilege to be invited to apply. The Visiting Professors require the support of the chair of the home department or program at Swarthmore.

What were you hoping to achieve during your visit?

You don’t necessarily see the tangible outputs from an experience like this immediately, but the international exposure does help to spread awareness of your work. My work in the masculinities space was particularly highlighted because it was the topic of the research seminars I presented during my visit. The second seminar was an overview of some of my key works over many years. It was an opportunity for me share my work with scholars and students at Swarthmore.

The undergraduate course that I taught on gender and education was comprehensive and politically timely, but I was able to bring a more global perspective by adding reading and material from research in England, Australia, and South Africa to the syllabus.

How has the Visiting Professorship impacted your research and teaching?

The visit was an opportunity to look at how another university works. Swarthmore is a small liberal arts college with about 1800 students that is primarily focussed on teaching rather than research so it’s very different to Deakin.

The content of the qualitative research methods course was so detailed and thorough that I’ve been able to use some of those resources with my PhD students in Australia. In a way it has broadened and deepened my thinking about the possibilities of this subject in preparing researchers. I will be able to take some of my learnings from Swarthmore into the research Masters course that I teach at Deakin. The Deakin course is excellent but it’s great be able to enrich it with this experience.

Every time you work in another context for an extended period it is extremely impactful on your research. Being somewhere different changes your perspective and broadens the way that you see some issues. It is a very special experience.

What were some highlights of your time in the US?

While I was in the US, I was invited to the University of Calgary by Dr Michael Kehler to speak at a masculinities seminar. The Professorship also came with an award of $10,000 for research purposes, which allowed me to attend a conference in Philadelphia.

Another highlight has been a collaboration that has been inspired by one of the seminars that I presented. Professor Nelson and I are working with a group of researchers from the US, Ireland, England and South Africa, to write a proposal to develop an edited collection of works. It’s another way to forge connections.

What are the challenges of this type of experience?

The Professorship involved living at Swarthmore for nine months. It can be difficult to leave your family and work for that length of time. It can also be quite stressful adjusting to a different culture and unknown expectations.

What advice would you give to anyone who wants to develop international connections?

I’ve had a research-intensive pathway in my career, so I’ve been very mindful of taking up opportunities to research overseas and develop collaborations with international scholars. This is valuable because working together on research projects helps to build connections that lead to other opportunities.

There are limited opportunities of this kind – I have been very fortunate with my experience of various postdoctoral opportunities – including a Leverhulme postdoc that involved eight months in the UK and a Fulbright Senior Scholarship that involved three months in the USA. These were great platforms for building ongoing networks and connections. The connections I made during my Leverhulme Fellowship, for example, led to me being awarded an ARC Future Fellowship (which also supported further research in the UK). My Fulbright Senior Scholarship was a wonderful opportunity not only to connect globally but also collect data and publish work from the areas I visited in the US.

It is possible to forge global connections without working overseas, whether you create an international reference group for a project or by attending international conferences, publishing in international journals, and sitting on boards of journals that are international in scope.

There is always an element of luck and serendipity to developing connections with other researchers, but it is also important to be strategic and take opportunities that present themselves. It is about being in the right place at the right but also putting yourself in certain situations.

Professor Amanda Keddie