I don't know anything about the particular needs of the STEM fields, so I'm a bit wary of charging in there waving the pitchfork of language equality. But I think the convenience of having one lingua franca in humanities or social sciences wouldn't be worth the problems it would create, for reasons of ideology and self-interest (I'm not a native English speaker either and this gives me trouble sometimes -I hate to think what it must be like for someone whose mother tongue is not close to English, as Dutch is). At the conference in Kyoto, Japanese researchers' lack of English ability was cited several times as a stumbling block towards transnational discussions of comics/manga, but nobody ever mentioned Western researchers' lack of Japanese ability. When you consider that Japan actually produces more comics than all English-speaking countries put together, choosing English as the lingua franca for comics research seems particularly weird. I wonder what would happen if someone were to stand up and say we should hold our discussions in Japanese instead.
PhD programs in Belgium seem to be pretty different, organization- and finance-wise, between different faculties and different institutions. Four years is the overall norm for a PhD program, but that's when you have a full-time scholarship, so people who research while doing other things to pay bills (like me -I do a lot of uni administration and translation work) tend to take a couple years longer. I just started my second year and am trying to shake off the administration job and flee for Japan so I can finish within four years instead of doing research in spurts in between much less amusing work ;) And actually have time to write the three articles and book chapter I'm supposed to finish in the next half year. If you'd like to read something meatier than blog ramblings, there's one unpublished article that I wrote after conducting a pilot test of my methodology. It was a very early effort and I don't want to re-submit it anywhere because it's just not mature in many respects, but you can download it from here (http://prezi.com/cckomwodfph5/view/#104) if you want (for context, that's a direct link to the prezi on my homepage (http://nelenoppe.net/fanficforensics). Let me know if directing you to the download in this way is problematic in any way -I'm experimenting with prezi software for site navigation). I'd love to hear what you think of it, if you have the time!
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2010-01-02 10:33 am (UTC)PhD programs in Belgium seem to be pretty different, organization- and finance-wise, between different faculties and different institutions. Four years is the overall norm for a PhD program, but that's when you have a full-time scholarship, so people who research while doing other things to pay bills (like me -I do a lot of uni administration and translation work) tend to take a couple years longer. I just started my second year and am trying to shake off the administration job and flee for Japan so I can finish within four years instead of doing research in spurts in between much less amusing work ;) And actually have time to write the three articles and book chapter I'm supposed to finish in the next half year. If you'd like to read something meatier than blog ramblings, there's one unpublished article that I wrote after conducting a pilot test of my methodology. It was a very early effort and I don't want to re-submit it anywhere because it's just not mature in many respects, but you can download it from here (http://prezi.com/cckomwodfph5/view/#104) if you want (for context, that's a direct link to the prezi on my homepage (http://nelenoppe.net/fanficforensics). Let me know if directing you to the download in this way is problematic in any way -I'm experimenting with prezi software for site navigation). I'd love to hear what you think of it, if you have the time!