maandag 23 juli 2018

Friday July 20th 2018


The topic of this walking seminar was “the issues at hand: whatever it is you are currently concerned with and/or facing in working on your research project”. With a smaller group than usual - due to conferences, vacations and possibly the hot weather we where no more than 10 people - we walked the dune paths of Overveen towards Sandpoort Noord, this being a route through the dunes that is slightly more covered by trees to at least keep away some sun from our hard thinking and talking heads. A Northern breeze caused some refreshments now and then which kept us from overheating and afforded for a productive afternoon. With enough issues at hand we once more had fruitful exchanges and talks: from practicing conference talks to discussing strategies of how to best manage academic life. The Walking Seminar being one of them. 



Walking Seminar May 2018 on collaborations



This walking seminar we focused on collaborating across differences. Disciplinary differences; differences between the inside and the outside of academia; differences in professional/work orientation (e.g. policy maker, nurse, activist, engineer, infrastructure-user and so on); or in political sensitivities; differences of socio-cultural etc. context (what is what in the US; in NL; in Ghana and so on); which differences have you; and how to not live them as problems to solve, or gaps to fill (or deny), but as creative tensions? How to handle the way relevant differences are handled by those you want to, or have to, collaborate with? What to do with/about words that mean different things at two sides of the dividing line? And what to do about ways of doing that have a different salience; different backgrounds; different effects?


We walked through the famous Dutch “polders”, which does not just make the walk productive in terms of exchanging about the topic at hand. Having Annemarie as our knowledgeable guide, we also learned about Dutch history infrastructure and the country's landscapes, water treatment and inhabitants.