AWC Welcome Day

At this seminar, I will share my personal experience of overcoming several rounds of blind reviewing, which successfully resulted in a published paper. You will learn not to be afraid of the process. We will focus on how to engage in a constructive dialog with reviewers and advocate for your position. We will discuss possible comments from reviewers and the way to deal with them; we will practice persuasive strategies and polite refusal to firmly stand your ground.

Speaker: Olga Karamalak, PhD in linguistics, an associate professor of the HSE School of Foreign Languages (Moscow), an ICELT (In-service Certificate in English Language Teaching issued by Cambridge) holder, a member of  the international association Distributed Language Group, a member of a research team in Switzerland Digital Fashion Communication (Università della Svizzera italiana), an alumna of American educational program Fulbright FLTA at Lees-McRae College (Banner Elk, NC) and German scientific program DAAD Immanuel Kant at Leibnitz University, Hannover.

The workshop is aimed at discussing how to set up a successful international research group using academic social media, e.g. ResearchGate. We will examine how particular information posted on researchers’ academic profile and their formal performance indicators work in practice for the partner search. The participants will explore strategies for
- highlighting their own academic profile
- engaging in online discussions
- composing questions on a research topic
- answering questions from other researchers in order to build successful academic relationships and carry out joint research.

Based on her own experience of the international partnership in the field of earth sciences, the speaker will focus on common pitfalls of initiating an international project and ways of avoiding these pitfalls.

Speaker: Maria Kozlova, PhD in Biology from Lomonosov Moscow State University, a researcher at the HSE  Institute of Education with more than 15 years of prior experience in geoecology, satellite remote sensing, and interdisciplinary studies; international research team leader; author and co-author of research papers, including Scopus and WoS publications. Her special area of interest is exploring the potential of various kinds of online communication to exchange experience and find partners for joint international research projects.

Writing a research paper is a challenging, time-consuming and often lonely endeavor. Setting up an academic writing group within your lab or department might be helpful in order to find and lend support along the way. At this workshop, I will share personal experience of an academic writing group that we hold at the Center for Language and Brain. We will discuss how an academic writing group can be set up and coordinated, what the meetings may entail, etc. We will also have hands-on experience as a writing group: we will analyze examples of academic texts in terms of their structure, clarity, and language. Together, we will discuss what can be improved, and, hopefully, see that not only the author but also the readers can benefit from such activities in academic writing groups.

Speaker: Svetlana Malyutina, Ph. D., graduated from the Department of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics of Moscow State University and obtained a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of South Carolina in 2015. She is now a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at the Center for Language and Brain at the HSE. Svetlana conducts research in psycho- and neurolinguistics (aphasia, language changes in healthy aging, non-invasive brain stimulation, etc.) and has co-authored over 15 peer-reviewed papers in English. Svetlana is leading a weekly academic writing group at the Center for Language and Brain.

Composing a dissertation as a compilation of published or accepted journal articles is becoming a popular way to obtain a doctoral degree. This eating-the-elephant-one-bite-at-a-time way has clear benefits: it is easier to maintain concentration and motivation working on a smaller piece at a time. However, there are shortcomings; for instance, it can be challenging to compose the pieces into a coherent (final) text of the dissertation. At the workshop, we will discuss and try out instruments and techniques aimed at helping a doctoral student to write this type of dissertation. We will cover the issues of planning a doctoral study, working with literature, drafting articles, choosing the right journals, writing the Introduction and Discussion chapters as keys to get an integral dissertation by the moment of defense.

Speaker: Dmitry Abbakumov is a leading psychometrician at the HSE University. He holds a doctoral degree in the methodology of educational sciences from KU Leuven, Belgium. His dissertation is a compilation of papers published in Applied Measurement in Education, Behavior Research Methods, Heliyon, and Psychologica Belgica.

Editors of international peer-reviewed journals and international co-authors often ask questions that seem to us redundant, and the answers to which seem to be self-evident. In most cases, these are the questions: "Why...?" and "What do you mean by...?" The seminar aims to analyze what prevents us from making a text clear. The speaker will present cases of the most typical semantic barriers that arise between Russian-speaking authors and English-speaking editors in the field of social sciences and humanities. The speaker will also share her tips on how to write in such a way that your English-speaking colleagues will understand.

Speaker: Victoria Vasileva, PhD, associate professor at the School of Cultural Studies, the HSE Faculty of Humanities, graduated from Moscow State University in 1999. During 2009-2016, she was the Head of the International Audiovisual Anthropology Film Festival “Days of Ethnographic Cinema” ( Moscow). Her research areas include theory and history of media, media and cultural memory, audiovisual anthropology, history of the humanities and social sciences in the USSR. Victoria authored a number of research papers published in international peer-reviewed journals.