On the 28th and 29th of January the CASCADE Network came together once again for what would be our 4th official reunion and first convention, this time the venue was the charming town of Leuven, Belgium. Unfortunately, since we arrived the evening before the start of the convention after a full day of travel from Sheffield, our wanderlust would have to wait.
One and a half years in, the network seems to have developed a tacit routine during these meet-ups with some of us choosing to use breakfast time to socialize and talk about the upcoming activities while others prefer to catch-up on sleep. However, this time, the interactions had an underlying nervousness as ESRs prepared to present their research projects to both peers and supervisors.
The premise of the convention was the following: The ESRs were split into two groups, so that each day of the convection would span five presentations. Each ESR would have thirty minutes to give a thorough and comprehensive talk about their work while another ESR would act as the respondent, whose role was to keep track of time and prepare questions for the discussion part which would take another 20 minutes. The Speaker-Respondent pairs had been assigned by supervisors prior to the convention after the ESRs had submitted a short and long abstract of their projects. However, ESR presentations were not the only thing on the schedule. On the afternoon of the first day we were also joined by the MECANO team. MECANO or The Mechanics of Canon Information is also a Marie Curie Doctoral Training Network. Their aim is to apply qualitative and computational methods to gain insight into the mechanics that allowed ancient Greek and Latin texts to become canonical pieces of work. Beyond the thought provoking subject matter, it was interesting to learn how a similar doctoral network is tackling the challenge of creating an environment that is conducive to the creation of new knowledge through extended collaboration.
The evening of the 29th, once all the presentations had wrapped up, we left the Irish College which had served as our main hub for the convention and were given the opportunity to finally explore Leuven. Our guide of the city was KU Leuven supervisor Dr. Kris Heylen, who took us through some of the most iconic historical landmarks of the city. A favorite of mine was the Grand Beguinage which is a UNESCO site that dates back to the fourteenth century and once served as a religious community for unmarried women known as Beguines. The buildings were restored by KU Leuven and are now used for a wide range of activities while preserving their unique medieval facade. Even if we had to be on the constant look-out for rapidly approaching cyclists, the red brick buildings and narrow, winding cobble stone roads are a lovely sight and walking through them made for a much welcome change of pace despite the cold of the winter months.
On a more personal note, visiting Belgium was an opportunity to reflect on my path in academia. I spent a year living in Brussels while studying my MA and it was there that I received my offer to join CASCADE. Having navigated academic spaces in Mexico, Belgium and the U.K. has made me keenly aware of their cultural differences and also the need to remain open and adaptable. It takes a certain amount of ‘ease with uncertainty’ in order to remain level-headed and oversee the challenges of an early career scholar, one of the biggest ones being learning to communicate your work to a wider audience. I am still polishing my skills as a public speaker, but having nine of your peers on the same boat makes it easier to overcome stage-fright. My main take-away from this was that the first convention was, perhaps, an ideal environment for this sort of exercise. It definitely pushed some of us out of our comfort zone, while exposing us to a more diverse range of feedback from our network who are, at the same time, rooting for all of us to succeed.
Maria Flores Alejo is a doctoral research fellow and part of the CASCADE Doctoral Network who is currently based at The University of Sheffield. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Languages from Universidad de las Américas Puebla in México and went on to complete a master’s degree in Linguistics and Literary studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussels under the Mastermind Scholarship Scheme. She has a wide variety of research interests including language teaching and language acquisition, Spanish as a Foreign language, corpus linguistics and lexicography. Her current research focuses on the development of new methods for historical thesauri creation by blending aspects of techniques like hierarchical structures, word embedding and linguistic concept modelling.
CASCADE is a collaboration between University College Cork, University of Sheffield, University of Helsinki, KU Leuven, and Universität des Saarlandes. Funded by Horizon Europe under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks and the UKRO.