Why we need to internationalize our research

COVID has forced many institutions to abandon research as usual.

Some of those unanticipated adjustments have been very clarifying about the purpose and value of the research we do and how we do it. In the last two years we have seen how critical, indeed life-saving, it is to share research and knowledge with others and to work towards a globally unified aim.

I think we have also come to understand the importance of being alongside other people when trying to imagine creative solutions. Whereas previously we may have thought research required a lot of solitary time and application to a task, we have learned that personal interactions are vital when conducting research. I have certainly changed my view since the start of the pandemic and I’m very keen to reactivate SSSHARC as a collaborative research space in new ways.

After the disruption brought about by COVID, we now have a moment to reset the ways we interact around research agendas that have themselves been changed by our experience of the global pandemic.

We need to internationalize our research and keep ideas and commitments moving across borders in ways that, right now, people can’t, or at least not as easily as we have been accustomed to.

COVID has meant that all of us are now at home on Zoom and other platforms that lend themselves to remote collaboration and the sharing of resources. But it has also revealed the limits of our virtual attention span and the lure of multi-tasking when attention drifts. Which is why we need to maximise the opportunities we have for face-to-face interaction and its potential for creative connection and spontaneity.

And what happens at a personal level, needs to be mirrored at an institutional level. Relationships need to be respectfully cultivated if knowledge is to be a genuinely shared enterprise. The online resources created by the Community-Led Research group really bring home how communities can experience researchers seeking partnerships with them, but who instead arrive with their own well-honed agendas.

Collaboration is not as easy as we sometimes think, partly because our academic training so often focuses on the individual and the way they mark themselves out from the group. Once again, COVID has taught us a lot about how thriving is collective.

Global partnerships

As I look ahead to my role as Director of SSSHARC, I hope to find ways to reinvigorate existing international partnerships and exchanges and build new ones around jointly pursued research projects.

One of my goals this year is to broker relationships with one or two cognate international centres and set up forms of research exchange based on the alignment of projects.

A model often seen in scientific research sees higher-degree researchers moving between labs for short periods of intensive research induction. This builds methodological and theoretical knowledge on both sides. I am interested in these kinds of team-based approaches to research and in particular the benefits they return to early-career researchers.

I would like SSSHARC to provide a laddered environment with a high degree of informal exchange between academics with different skillsets and levels of experience.

COVID has made us value the energy that other people give us, in sharing their ideas certainly, but also in just being there, for real.

Associate Professor Lee Wallace is the Director, Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre, and an Associate Professor in the
Department of Art History and Film Studies.