I am the new Early Career Researcher (ECR) Ambassador for the university. My research and teaching focus on examining questions around global and intersecting inequalities, conflict, violence and social justice activism. I joined the University of Brighton as a Lecturer in Criminology in September 2018, one year after completing my PhD at King’s College London (2017) and after taking my second career break for maternity leave. Prior to that I was a lecturer at the University of Westminster and a research fellow at the Kluge Centre, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., US.
Since then, I have been an active member of the ECR network, as well as other national and international networks and professional societies, including the Urban Violence Research Network, the Feminist Urban Violence Research Collective (which I co-founded), British Society of Criminology and European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control.
What made you interested in the role of ECR ambassador?
Like many of other academics and activists, I chose a career in education because I wanted to make the world a better place and I believe in the transformative and liberatory potential of education. I see research as inseparable from education, broadly speaking.
I grew up in Brazil where my mother was a student of Paulo Freire, so I’ve been inspired by their ideas and routine militancy, as well as the work of researchers and activists such as Angela Davis who remind us that “you have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time”. I wanted to become ECR Ambassador because I believe in the importance of research for transforming the world and I wanted to help other researchers as they navigate their journey.
Early career can be an exciting time for establishing new ideas and innovative contributions to knowledge, but it can also be a dauting and challenging time. I experienced first-hand the challenges of being an ECR in an increasingly competitive environment, while raising a new family, commuting for work and dealing with the hurdles of doing research abroad. So, I wanted to develop the ECR network to increase spaces of mutual support and dialogue, which can help us navigate the tricky terrain in which we are ECRs.
I hope the ECR network will offer possibilities to foster collaboration between ECRs and beyond. The network should be a space for cross-fertilization of ideas through interdisciplinarity and forms of knowledge exchange that can contribute to create the necessary tools to try to address the challenges we face.
What do you hope to achieve in the role?
I am the ECR Ambassador for a year, which is not a long time, but there is scope to work together with fellow ECRs to foster collegiality and mutual support. In my tenure, I hope to establish and maintain engaging, regular and diverse forums of communication, so as a network we can share opportunities and exchange ideas. I also hope to represent the views and concerns of colleagues, make concrete and realistic recommendations for strategic developments to support ECRs foster creativity and sustainable futures through research that addresses global challenges – not least, the deepening social inequalities post-pandemic, social and environmental crises.
I hope to help to connect my colleagues so that we work together for social justice, a fairer world, and embed our cutting-edge research in our pedagogical practices so that our students, local, national and international communities all benefit from our work.
How will you be finding out about what the ECR community will find helpful?
As a network, we are setting up and participating in a series of recurrent and one-off collaborative activities. I will be working with ECR representatives from each school to ensure that ECRs have a voice within the university. Over the coming year, I will continue to meet ECRs in person and I am keen to hear about what they would find most helpful, either directly or through their representatives. For example, this could be related to training needs, funding or making connections. As a network, we will send regular email updates to ECRs and we also have an MS Teams group where we will hold online meetings and events. I encourage colleagues to get involved with the ECR network, as it offers the possibility to create valuable connections with other colleagues, PGRs, academics and senior staff.
Contact Dr Roxana Cavalcanti by email at: r.p.cavalcanti@brighton.ac.uk
