Effective Interdisciplinary Academic Communication

Ziele

Participants will be able to accurately and concisely communicate their own research and its importance to multiple audiences. They will be able to modify this communication (while maintaining precision and brevity) based on the expertise and interest of the audience. These strategies will ultimately allow them to effectively represent their work and network in professional settings.

Kursinhalte

This ½ day workshop is intended to hone written and oral presentation skills of all participants. In the frst session, we will focus on developing written abstracts. Abstracts are the most easily accessed and widely viewed part of any academic publication. An effective abstract – which we will develop together – will ably demonstrate your scholarly prowess to readers within your specific field and subfields of study.

In the second session, we will script an oral “elevator pitch” that communicates your enthusiasm as well as the importance of your work to intelligent audiences outside your field of study. You will be able to discuss your work with a variety of audiences, allowing them to relate and become invested in your topics of interest.

With the skills acquired through this workshop, you will be able to distill, demonstrate and authentically deliver your expertise to a wide variety of interdisciplinary audiences.

Form

For the written component, participants will compose an abstract based on provided templates, and further tailor it for intended audiences based on disciplinary (and journal-specific) conventions and considerations.
For the oral component, participants will develop an elevator pitch (loosely based on guidelines for a “Three-Minute Thesis”). The workshop includes interactive roleplay sessions that will hone the communication for a variety of expert- and lay audiences.

It is expected that participants are able and willing to share their written and oral compositions in the room for feedback and recommendations from instructor and fellow attendees.

Adressatinnen und Adressaten

All Doctoral candidates and Postdocs of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Theology

Voraussetzungen

This workshop does not require any prior preparation. The epistemic object in question may be directly related to your doctoral research, but this is not mandatory – “implosion” is a method that may be applied to anything you are curious about.

Informationen zu den Dozierenden

Dr. Sahana Srinivasan [she/her/hers] is currently a lecturer in the subject area Cultural Anthropology at the University of Basel. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Biotechnology from Ghent University, Belgium, and most recently, was a postdoctoral researcher at the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame (USA).
Sahana has researched and taught in various academic settings in six countries across three continents (Switzerland is the 7th). She has worked in both Science and Arts&Letters faculties, and is thus experienced at communicating scholarly work (both scientific and humanistic) to diverse audiences. She has previously led semester-long courses on thesis writing and presentation focused on interdisciplinary audiences. This workshop is an intensive version of these longer courses.

Leistungsspektrum / Workload

Total 4h (course attendance: writtten component 2h; course attendance: oral component 2h)

Besonderheiten

This course is reserved for doctoral candidates of the Faculy of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Theology.

Once registration is open, applications will be collected for 24 hours and course places allocated by lot. All registrations received after the initial 24h period will be put on a waiting list and assigned on a first come, first served basis.

Course places/places on the waiting list will be confirmed by e-mail. Course registrations can only be canceled before the registration period ends (send an e-mail to grace@unibas.ch). Full course attendance is mandatory. Participants who fail to attend a course without prior notification or withdraw after the registration deadline are subject to a fee of CHF 30. In addition, participants who cancel their course registration at a later point in time, are absent without an excuse or do not attend the entire course will, for reasons of fairness, not be considered for course registration in the following semester and will be removed from other courses offered in the same semester. Please find the detailed regulations on the Transferable Skills Homepage.