Maria Francesca Murry: A participant’s reflections on the ECREA Doctoral Summer School 2009

“A PhD is an empty signifier” - Coming from a joke that gladdened the workshop on Laclau’s Discourse Theory, this sentence followed my thoughts throughout the ECREA summer school in Tartu, while it sometimes reappears in the conversations I’m having when keeping in touch and sharing my doctoral experiences with other school participants.
 
Far from the intellectual uprightness that Laclau’s work usually inspires, I am convinced that the 2009 ECREA summer school offered me for all its duration a thick web of resources to redress the sense of emptiness that my “PhD identity” often carries along the way.
 
Forty-five doctoral students from all over Europe spent fifteen intense days in the historical setting of the University of Tartu, discussing, presenting, living and studying together. Based on a combination of lectures, workshops and student sessions, the summer school became a full intercultural experience, precious both from an intellectual and a human point of view.
 
Among the vast array of opportunities involved in it, the most important was the chance I had to receive a high-quality feedback on my own PhD project. The presentation of my project outside the academic context from which it comes was a worthy step forward, as it obliged me to make explicit any implicit of taken for granted assumptions about my research. Along the more or less numerous occasions that I could present my work publicly, the context of a ECREA summer school was particularly constructive essentially because of the pedagogical approach inspiring its core format. At this school, each student receives four kinds of feedbacks: the first comes from the students-respondent, the second from lecturer-respondent, the third from the “flow-manager” (students are usually divided in three “flows” on the basis of the presented project) and finally there is a discussion involving all the members of the group. This year the format was proven very successful in stimulating reciprocity and commitment towards constructive feedback. I think its efficacy lied in two elements: first, it allowed the gathering of feedback from multiple perspectives, with diversity marking the academic backgrounds as well as the level of experience and proximity of the various interlocutors involved; second, it motivated the participants to rearticulate any previous knowledge in a format that could be useful to other students’ projects, thus testing it through the cultural lenses of different countries or research traditions.
 
A second aspect of the Summer School that is worth being mentioned is linked to the programme of lectures and workshops which consists of a great variety of content and approaches, in line with the aim of creating a multilateral dialogue within an enlarged Europe. But if theoretical contributions about our discipline correspond to the general expectations of a doctoral school, the 2009 ECREA summer school included other workshops providing more practical training on issues related to poster demonstrations, abstract writing and publication work, as well as to conducting qualitative interviews or designing a research project. Even in the more theoretical workshops, almost half of the time was dedicated to the empirical application of abstract concepts through the simulation of related research questions and methods of inquiry, and by means of students’ direct involvement in the process of presenting and constructing knowledge.
 
Finally, the time in the host country was lively and enjoyable thanks to the beautiful summer nights that all school participants spent together in the picturesque context of Tartu and also by means of “working visits” which gave us a better insight into Estonia’s politics, media system and history.