The following are some reflections and blog posts about different aspects of being a researcher and doing research that I have written over the course of the years.
The Academic Job Market: Choosing Yourself
For early career researchers, the academic job market is challenging. It can easily feel like an obstacle course without a finish line. I found the cycle of looking for jobs, writing applications, waiting, getting a rejection (or never hearing back), then scouring for jobs again both exhausting and demoralizing. This is an attempt to put…
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Musings of a Postdoc
Sometimes students who are considering pursuing a PhD contact me for advice. Is it worth it? What’s it like being a(n early-career) researcher? What are the advantages and challenges? Or people ask about postdoc life, as they are deciding whether to give academia a shot or do something else after finishing their PhD. It has…
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Pandemic Blues: Lonely New Life
This summer, while Norway was slowly easing its lockdown but cross-border travel was still severely restricted, I relocated from Göteborg to Oslo. Moving across borders during a pandemic posed many bureaucratic and logistical challenges, but these are too numerous to get into here. What I want to write about instead are some of the issues…
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Peer Support and Networking (An Introvert’s Perspective)
The last few months, I have reflected a lot on the importance of peer support – so important throughout my PhD journey, but also not receiving enough attention in academia. Of course, formal support, supervisor and mentoring relationships are essential and will greatly affect both the productivity and the well-being of graduate students and junior…
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On Difficult Research and Mental Wellbeing
As part of my dissertation research, I carried out two rounds of fieldwork in Colombia, during which my research assistants and I interviewed women active in civil society. Many of these women work very closely with victims of sexual violence and/ or the armed conflict, by providing psycho-social or psycho-legal support or by documenting cases…
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Finding Feminism
Disclaimer: This is a personal essay about how researching sexual violence in conflict has affected my feminist consciousness. As such, it offers but a snapshot of my feminist identity. It is not to be understood as an academic text. Something I have been thinking a lot about this past year is how writing a dissertation…
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Anne-Kathrin Kreft 