Prior to tenure, I looked into ISA-sponsored workshops and organized a few conference panels in hopes that they might materialize into something further (like an edited volume or special issue). I also secretly hoped that friends from graduate school or more senior colleagues at well-endowed universities might invite me to participate in a joint project. But other than the festschrift thrown for my PhD adviser, no one came knocking. Up until tenure, I had been doing mostly individual research leading to single-authored products.
Post-tenure, then, I made it a goal to get more involved in collaborative research. This meant applying to foundation grants, conducting sponsored research, working with a team of researchers, organizing conferences, and doing an edited volume (despite everyone saying they’re not worth the time and effort). I felt that this was the next step for me in my career. But more importantly, I felt like I was missing out on the social aspect of research and learning.
With that goal in mind, and with help from colleagues and mentors I reached out to, I managed to put together two collaborative projects. The first one on “Re-building Trust” is a relatively small, inter-disciplinary project comprised of scholars mostly from my university affiliated with the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies. It began as an informal brown-bag luncheon to exchange ideas on how trust is conceptualized in different disciplines. We developed into a small working group over the course of the semester, and with my department co-conspirator, are now planning a conference locally for next spring.
The second and more ambitious project is on "The Evolution of North Korean Human Rights Discourse and Advocacy" which emerged somewhat organically. I reached out to a researcher (Jiyoung) from Singapore who was visiting Washington DC. I remember the excitement of our initial conversation in the balcony of Starbucks trying to map out different networks in the North Korean human rights (NKHR) advocacy movement and the diffusion of NKHR discourse. We talked about co-authoring an article. But in the flurry of emails that ensued over the next two weeks, our potential collaboration of two multiplied into a project of four. We looped in a researcher in Australia (Danielle) whom I had never met, but whose book manuscript I had reviewed two years earlier. We also invited an anthropologist friend of mine and Danielle (Sandra) in Japan I knew from a Korean scholars’ networking program who was coming out with a book on North Korean defectors. From Jan. to June, we exchanged probably over a thousand emails and set up multiple conference calls across four different time zones to pass along research ideas, work on our grant application, and plan out our first workshop in Melbourne this past June with generous funding from the Korea Foundation. We still have a long way to go with this project and have yet to produce any deliverables. It’s hard work, but thus far, doing collaborative work has been richly rewarding. My collaborators have made doing research more fun, and I’ve certainly learned more from them on North Korean human rights than I ever would have on my own. Equally important, I’ve learned a LOT about the world of grants, dealing with offices of sponsored research, and organizing academic events.
Based on my recent (and new) experience, I thought I’d offer some thoughts (I hesitate to say I have any advice based on an n of 2) on organizing collaborative research projects for those who are on the junior-ish end of their career and situated outside a major research institution. I’m sure there are plenty of junior scholars who have already organized conferences or launched major collaborative research projects through large grants. But I write to encourage those who have less access to institutional resources or who are at an institution lacking a strong collaborative research environment (for the record, it’s not that my department colleagues don’t do research. They just tend to go solo). One caveat: although I work at a small research university, I’m based in Washington DC which does make it easier to network with other scholars.
1. Be entrepreneurial. This was advice I heard from a policy school dean on how to survive when your university faces serious budget windfalls. Although he meant apply for outside funding, I took this to also mean being entrepreneurial in the intellectual/academic sense. That is, reaching out to scholars who share potential interests with you (see next point), and mentors who dish good advice.
2. Network. You never know who may become a potential collaborator. One connection may lead to another. A random conversation may open several more doors. One of the reasons why our team of four clicked so well was that even for those who had never met in person, we knew of each other through our existing networks. As mentioned, I knew Sandra from another group. Sandra had roomed with Danielle in Seoul through a sponsored program event. I met Jiyoung in DC for a Brookings conference. None of us imagined during our initial encounter that we would do a project together.
3. But be patient. There’s usually an opportune time to reach out to other scholars so by suggesting to network, this doesn’t mean you start firing off emails to anyone and everyone who writes on your topic. Sometimes it pays to wait and be patient. In retrospect, my APSA and ISA conference panels probably never materialized into anything further because the timing wasn’t right.
4. Seek out mentors outside your department and university. When I first started as an assistant professor, I kept wishing a senior colleague would take me under his/her wings and show me the ropes, or at the very least, have someone whose career trajectory I could emulate. Eventually, I stopped wishing and sought advice on my own elsewhere. After attending a talk by a senior faculty member in the psychology department which overlapped with my research, I asked if he’d be interested in getting together for lunch. That lunch turned into the first of many lunches and his insights and experience on collaboration, grant applying, cutting through university red tape etc….have been invaluable. Although we meet as friends (despite he being emeritus now), whether he sees it this way or not, I look up to him as a trusted mentor.
5. Who makes a good collaborator? A blog post on co-authoring appeared on the Duck of Minerva so those insights apply here. Researchers have different work habits, personalities, professional goals, etc . . so obviously collaboration does not work well with everyone. A lot of times, a junior scholar will partner with more senior colleagues to “learn the ropes” (i.e. junior colleague does most of the organizing and grunt work; senior colleague attracts people and money). That was the model I had envisioned for myself at the very beginning of my career, and I’ve seen it work. But one thing which I believe helped our group mesh well (other than the fact that we’re all highly interested and motivated in our research topic) despite our different work habits and personalities is that we’re all in similar stages of our career. All of us are relatively junior, but at least have one monograph under our belt and are working towards a second. Thus we work as equals which creates a more open and friendly dynamic.
6. Become allies with the Office of Sponsored Research. I’ve complained about our OSR in the past b/c they set up all sorts of bureaucratic roadblocks simply because they can (but more likely for very good legal reasons). But that’s just the nature of the game. Ultimately, you will have to get their support to successfully complete a grant sponsored research project. OSR wants you to win grants and do great research b/c it reflects well on them and your university. They are there to help you – even if there’s a lot of red tape to cut through.
7. Budgeting. With foundation grants, the incentive structure is often stacked for over-budgeting. I tend to be a budget conscious person so I actually struggled with this, but as one of my collaborators with more experience reminded me - if you need the money and can justify it, just go for it. However, from our Re-building Trust project, I’ve also learned that it actually doesn’t take much money to get people together and talk about an interesting topic. The three brown bag lunches I hosted on trust was on a budget of under $150 (basically lunch for 10-12 people three times). I ended up paying the last lunch out of my own pocket because there was no funding, but it was worth the cost of a few boxes of pizza to keep the conversation going. Our conference is local with mostly our own faculty, so we anticipate pulling this together by receiving small pockets of money from different parts of the university (for the record, everyone we’ve asked about contributing to our budget have supported our venture since it fosters collaboration with faculty across different units).
8. Be patient, again. Opportunities will eventually come if you really want to pursue collaborative research and keep your eyes open. No need to force it. A safer career path is setting an early foundation for tenure (i.e. converting dissertation into book or articles; figuring out your own research goals and interests; building a steady stream of publications) before jumping into a larger collaborative project. Of course, collaboration may help generate new ideas and spur greater research productivity and help with tenure recommendation letters. Keep in mind though that producing deliverables out of collaborative research projects may end up taking much more time than anticipated. More people = less control over the intangibles. The point is not to discourage junior faculty from pursuing collaborative research projects early on, but to be patient and not force yourself to initiate collaborative projects for the sake of collaboration.
I still have much more to learn about the grant world, and I’ll only be getting my feet wet with conference planning for the first time next year. Any other comments or suggestions from past collaborative experiences are welcome.
