This year’s ECREA Summer School took place virtually (on zoom) from September 20th to the 24th. As a first-time participant, I didn’t know what to expect as I prepared my 10-page dissertation summary. Preparing this document was extremely insightful because it provided an opportunity to think of my article-based dissertation as a whole and reflect about aspects such as the empirical material or the methods used and how they connect and make sense. Participants also needed to include some questions they had about different aspects of their research to be answered during the sessions.
For this Summer School participants were organized in ‘flows’, which are groups of doctoral students whose topics connect in some way and are led by a senior scholar who is an expert in the field. In my case I was part of the blue flow, led by the brilliant Andra Siibarak. The general theme of our flow was research on social media. It was exciting to read other participants’ dissertation summaries and learn about what other people are doing, especially the diverse formats —article-based and monograph— methodologies —including qualitative and quantitative— as well as the insightful questions and doubts they wanted to clarify during the Summer School, which ranged from questions about thesis supervisors to methods and how to publish. These questions were often applicable and useful for many of the participants, which was reassuring to many of us as we felt less isolated. We were able to engage in a sort of collective learning process, where we discussed our own experiences and challenges as well as reflections about how to tackle them while dissertating.
I was really impressed by the supportive and positive tone of the group. Each participant had one hour devoted to their dissertation and the rest of the members had to read the summary and provide feedback. The experience was truly great as a lot of the participants participated and provided useful comments, each session was a learning experience for us all. At the end we were sad to say goodbye, we had built a small ‘blue flow’ virtual community and have kept in touch afterwards through a slack channel we created to maintain the momentum we experienced during the summer school.
Daniela Jaramillo-Dent
