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 8-9am on Thursday 19 June, you can rotate through different tables hosted by senior mentors in the field. You are encouraged to bring a particular issue they 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 you 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, but we will be encouraging PhD students to move around the tables at 10 minute intervals.