About the project
The ConCoRD-SHS project was initiated in 2024 by researchers in different universities and scientific fields as well as at different career stages. It aimed to provide a platform to share and discuss research on the material conditions for completing doctorates in the humanities and social sciences, in different disciplines and different countries.
To that end, participants carried out a collaborative review of the literature on the subject, focusing on how doctorates are completed according to scientific fields, sources of funding, work locations, conditions of supervision, etc. This international and transdisciplinary literature review makes it possible to identify not only specific and localized surveys, but also comparative analyses that have been or are currently being carried out.
The results of this work, the identification of existing research projects as well as potential follow-up investigations and their articulation were discussed in an international conference held in Paris at the Sorbonne in January 2025. Some presentations are available online. In the future, we would like to publish the proceedings of this conference and translate them to promote their dissemination.
Finally, we established and coordinated throughout the project a network of researchers which could be mobilized for additional research.
Project calendar
- March 2024 : Launch meeting with project coordinators and partners
- October 2024 : Publication of the call for proposals for the international conference
- January 2025 : International conference in Paris
- March 2025 : Closing meeting.
- Upcoming : Publication of the collaborative literature review
Rationale for the project
The ConCoRD-SHS project questions how doctorates in humanities and the social sciences are completed. What makes research possible in these fields, what constrains it ? We look into the social dispositions of doctoral candidates, their social origins and trajectories, as well as their objective and practical working conditions. As funding sources as well as academic employment conditions are evolving, we analyse how the “good doctorate” is produced, in terms of the researchers’ training, the definition of scientific excellence, as well as science/society relations.
This project stems from several collective research efforts on the production of doctoral research, for instance in the case of Cifre partnerships, which involve private funding, in several disciplines of the social sciences (de Feraudy et al, 2021), constraints associated to research contexts (“La recherche sous contraintes” seminar), financial insecurity as well as the conditions of supervision and the difficulties encountered by advisors.
During the congress of the French Sociological Association in 2023, we organized a workship to form a research group on our shared research themes, i.e. professional socialization mechanisms and what shapes and frames doctoral research. Several topics were discussed :
- the conditions of scientific production depending on the methods of financing and organizational setting of research (university or public contract, Cifre, private law contract, lack of financing, etc.), as well as the determinants of research paths (financial insecurity, health, etc.);
- forms of doctoral supervision and support (seminars, doctoral school, CNU, COS, juries and monitoring committees), situations of competition between research advisors or supporters, as well as the role of elective groups (associations, collectives, unions, “side” research projects, etc.) in socialization to research.
We had been working on these themes alongside our main research areas, and wished to give these “side-projects” a more perennial dimension and envision scaling them up. This implied a more interdisciplinary approach, mobilizing the sociology of work and institutions, of academic practices and policies, the history of educational and professional configurations and careers in academia, law and political science to understand the types of regulation of research or the role of activist organizations, among others. It also entailed enabling an exchange with European and international projects on this subject.
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