Social Science Research Council

The SSRC recently launched a pilot project entitled “Predissertation Fellowships for International Collaboration” (PFIC). Offered in 2006, this project was directed toward a key problem in doctoral education – the way in which graduate students are unprepared for the teamwork and collaboration required once they are professional researchers and faculty members.

The PFIC fellowship program consisted of a competition open to students at U.S. campuses who are at the dissertation proposal preparation phase (between the second and third year of graduate school) in the social sciences and allied disciplines. The competition solicited applications that proposed preliminary fieldwork outside the United States and that included a component of collaboration with an institution or a researcher in the location of research. In each case, a designated scholar was responsible for acting as international mentor/advisor to the graduate fellow and provided input and guidance to the student’s research, while simultaneously introducing the graduate fellow to relevant opportunities and channels for research as well as regional scholarly networks.  At root, the fellow would gain from a second advisor who would help refine research questions and methodologies and would also make the student aware of how the fellow’s proposed research may be received in the region of the fellow’s research.

Successful applicants were awarded funds (up to $7,000 based on an itemized budget) for fieldwork for up to 3 months. In addition, fellows participated in a workshop on international collaborative research, held in New York on December 1-2, 2006. Fellows shared the results of their fieldwork and evaluated their collaborative experiences with one another and with a select group of resource faculty. The focus was on how their dissertation and post-dissertation plans were affected by their experience with the predissertation fellowship and fieldwork. In addition, resource faculty led a roundtable discussion on the promises and challenges of international collaborative research, and presented papers on different aspects of the international research collaboration process, such as the ethical dilemmas of North-South research collaborations; the best practices for executing collaborative research with non-academic partner institutions such as research NGOs; and strategies for addressing the differences in national social science research capacities and research agendas.

Program staff are presently developing a proposal for an expanded version of the PFIC program, which will be open to graduate students from across the globe.