National Research Staff Association of the UK: topic
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Reclaim the word "researcher"?
Paul Wicks
Thursday, 01 March 2007 19:33 UTC
Dear all,
Little idea I had in a meeting today. Why don’t we try and reclaim the word “researcher” to describe our job roles? Lecturers aren’t “professor students” or “post-postdocs” so why should our labels be attached solely to something we’ve already done (sometimes many years ago)? By extension why not call undergrads post-a-levellers?
Also circumvents the issue of whether people actually have a “doc” or not.
Thoughts?
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Replies
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I used to scoff at ideas like this, but I’m coming round to it pretty strongly.
In its favour, ‘post-doc’ is a horrible term, for the reasons you mentioned; staff on grants are supposed to be research-only and it’d diferentiate us from ‘lecturers’; ‘Research Staff’ is the new official moniker but one word is always better than two and, most importantly, we’d then have to change our name from NRSA to NRA, which would mean that nobody would argue with us. Ever (*).
Fancy writing an op-ed piece for somewhere like the THES?
- Hat-tip to Vanessa for that joke…
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Gha! Forming my incorehent ramblings into an actual article?
Oh, alright then…
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Well John, you were spot on. A rather better formulated version of my first argument has been published as op-ed piece in today’s THES! Next time we meet perhaps we should discuss a more coordinated media strategy?
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Hi,
as I said in the e-mail I sent you on Friday, Paul, congrats for you article!
I’ve read the comments that others have raised and although I can understand them, I also understand how difficult it is to try to capture the feelings of a bunch of people, within a limited space and giving “food for thought” to not necessarily informed readers as well.Well done…I guess, as you said, you should work on a more coordinated media strategy…
Cheers,
Vanessa
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