2020 – Cultured Scene

Surviving the Viva: PhD defences remembered

December 13, 2020 Rachel Harrison

The PhD viva (or defence) is likely one of the most stressful moments of many academics’ professional lives. What’s worse is that this rite of passage doesn’t even follow the same format across institutions or countries, making preparing for your viva even more difficult. Will it be a public or private defence? Will you make corrections before or after defending? Will you be faced with internal or external examiners, and how many? To shed at least a little light on the experience, Cultured Scene asked early-career researchers who studied in a variety of countries to explain how their defence worked, and to offer advice to students preparing for their own defence.

Pitch to Publication

Personality composition may determine the spread of social information in shoaling fish

December 8, 2020 Stefanie Gierszewski

Matthew Hasenjager talked to Cultured Scene about his recent findings that how individuals learn is conditional on group personality composition in guppies. The whole study by Matthew and colleagues has been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Events, Places and People

Faces of ELSR: Samin Gokcekus

October 15, 2020 Samin Gokcekus

I actually find it difficult to write pieces like this one because my interests are very broad. I believe that any topic can be interesting if you take the time to understand it, and I hope to spend the rest […]

Events, Places and People

Faces of ESLR: Jonathan St-Onge

October 15, 2020 Jonathan St Onge

I just started a PhD in computational social science at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. My research focuses on so-called echo chambers, but I am also interested in fragmentation of online public spaces more generally. The idea of echo […]

Events, Places and People

Faces of ESLR: Ahana Fernandez

October 15, 2020 Ahana A Fernandez

Language, more than anything else, defines human nature. Language appears to be unique in the animal kingdom and, thus, the question of how and why language evolved is one of the most fascinating research questions for me. However, it is […]

Interviews

Prestige: Simple, maybe, but not easy.

September 4, 2020 Stephen Heap

The concept of prestige in social learning can be difficult to address, and even more-so in the context of scientific practice. But a rumination of The Prestige as presented in Christopher Nolan’s film brings some resolution to conceptual tensions and inspires some real magic worthy of the term.

Research during a Pandemic

Research during a Pandemic: ECR perspectives

August 21, 2020 Rachel Harrison

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it a host of challenges for everyone. At Cultured Scene, we were particularly interested in how the pandemic and resulting quarantines and lockdowns have affected early-career researchers. We asked academics from different fields and at different stages of their careers the same six questions about how the pandemic has impacted them.