The College of Humanities’ recent Postdoctoral Forum launch tackled issues around academia and macro-global issues which necessitates internalisation in the context of Higher Education, a positive shift in entrepreneurship alongside intellectualisation, engaged community participation, intellectual leadership skills and mentorship of post-doctoral scholars as innovators in various fields.
The Forum also aims to prepare participants to become future leaders and innovators in their respective industries, enhancing their academic and professional skills and promoting a broader impact through community involvement and entrepreneurship.
According to Professor Vivian Ojong, Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Interim Dean of Research in the College, this platform is designed to offer holistic training for early-career researchers in preparation for academia and to foster strategic development among postdoctoral fellows by providing opportunities for experiential learning in research, serving as a pathway for both academic and professional growth.
This is in line with the recent guidelines on such training in South Africa. ‘This initiative was motivated under my leadership through the College Research Committee (CREC) to the College Management Committee under the leadership of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Nhlanhla Mkhize.
‘The idea was to create a cohort of young scholars who would network creatively amongst themselves and not merely with individual supervisors. To this end, a spectrum of mentorship skills training will be offered to the emerging scholars.’
Professor Johannes Smit, Chair of the Humanities Institute said: ‘It is within the institution’s strategic plan to promote a society that benefits a great deal of results whilst producing exceptional academics for the growth of the economy at large.’
Speaking about post-docs, Smit highlighted the importance of guidance and provision on how to plan and structure one’s first year of fellowship, stating that as a member of the National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, students and supervisors have access to assistance to make the best use of time and resources to eventually produce great research outputs.
The Director of the College of Humanities Doctoral Academy and Professor of Social Work in the School of Applied Human Sciences delved into issues around research integrity and ethics and responsible data collection, emphasising how management, storage, sharing and ownership of data issues around authorship and publication practices should be of concern to a good researcher. ‘You and your mentor must always consider aspects of fiscal accountability as fundamental in the responsible conduct of research.’ John-Langba also flagged issues of research misconduct (fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism) and the appropriate declaration of any conflicts of interest on the part of post-docs.
Professor Maheshvari Naidu, Full Professor in Anthropology, former academic leader for Research in the School of Social Sciences and current liaison for internationalisation and international collaborations, said each Postdoctoral Fellow needs to think beyond the PhD, pointing out that ‘writing for your thesis and writing for publication is completely different’ and encouraged Fellows to ‘think deeply and in a complex way about the notion of interdisciplinarity which can be applied in research studies, and that can be embedded in meaningful and translatable research.’
She advised the cohort not to treat the post-doctoral trajectory as a simplistic extension of the PhD study, but use it as an opportunity to approach the complexity of the intellectual project and to consider the post-doctoral study in the “real world” and wider societal high impact context.