Navigating critical approaches to IR: Troubleshooting your PhD!

Thursday 19 Jun 2025, 08:00 → 09:00 Europe/London

Europa

This event is only open to attendees of the BISA 2025 conference in Belfast. Pre-registration is required so that the organisers can get an idea of delegates' PhD topic and the issue you would like to discuss in advance of the event.

 

This is an informal mentor café session for PhD students attending #BISA2025 who are working with critical methods, approaches and/or epistemologies. The School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy & Politics, in collaboration with the Queen's University Belfast Mitchell Institute, will host a morning session where PhD students are invited to discuss their PhD projects with established scholars in Critical International Relations. 

From 8-8:50am on Thursday 19 June, you can discuss your PhD project with a senior mentor in the field. In advance of this event, we ask that you fill out this form outlining a particular issue that you are struggling with – it might be methodology, a theoretical concept, discerning your contribution, establishing originality, an ethical dilemma, how to sustain motivation, or finding a workable writing strategy. While we appreciate that these issues are interconnected, mentor cafés work best when we can disaggregate these entangled threads and focus on a specific issue so that mentors can provide helpful and targeted advice. 

Coffee and tea will be provided for attendees. We aim to keep these sessions as informal as possible. Hopefully you will leave the session with some pragmatic tips on how to troubleshoot an issue in your own PhD, some helpful advice on other common challenges faced by your peers, and new contacts with other PhD students working in critical fields.