A partnership of universities and organizations in Australia, Canada, China, England, Ghana, India, Netherlands, Nigeria, and the USA, the TRaCE Transborder project will transform the problem of humanities PhD underemployment into a global opportunity. The project will fashion narrative knowledge about PhD career pathways into an instrument for individual career advancement, international bridge-building, and institutional and social change. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the Partners, the three year TRaCE Transborder project will enable PhD graduates in the humanities from nine different nations to contribute more effectively to their own well-being and to the well-being of their own and other societies across multiple sectors of work inside and outside the academy. The project will build an international mentoring and networking community of PhD grads and PhD students and will work with that community to develop recommendations for change in humanities doctoral education. The driving engine of this new community and of the research we will undertake will be the stories that the grads recount to the graduate student researchers about their PhD programs and their lives after graduation.
PARTNERS • University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada) • Australian National University (Canberra, Australia) • UCLA (Los Angeles, USA) • Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (Ottawa, Canada) • Centre de recherche et d’intervention sur l’éducation et la vie au travail (CRIEVAT) (Ville de Québec, Canada) • Council of Graduate Schools (Washington, DC, USA) • Delta State University (Abraka, Nigeria) • Durham University (Durham, UK) • University of Ghana (Legon, Accra, Ghana) • University of Hyderabad (Hyderabad, Telangana, India) • Institute of International and Comparative Education, Beijing Normal University (Beijing, China) • University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Amherst, USA) • McGill University (Montréal, Canada) • Obafemi Awolowo University (Ile Ife, Nigeria) • Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada) • University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia) • Utrecht University (Utrecht, Netherlands)
TRaCE Transborder will be particularly beneficial for the University of Hyderabad for the following reasons. It will enable us to develop valuable international collaborations; enable our institution to address issues of central concern and in light of new evidence about PhD career pathways at an international scale; provide in-program PhD students with valuable, usable career narratives that will help them move readily from graduation into remunerative and fulfilling careers; provide in-program PhD students with an international PhD mentoring and networking community; help us attract highly capable young people to our doctoral programs, especially young people who might not ordinarily consider doing a PhD; help us raise the profile of our PhD programs, especially in sectors outside the academy; enable us to rethink and redesign PhD programs; etc.
TRaCE Transborder will connect substantially with and enable us to expand academic exchanges between international students and UoH students. For the University of Hyderabad, it is a unique opportunity to participate in a comparative global project on careers of PhD students in Humanities, Social Sciences and SN School. This is a first of its kind project on understanding international student mobility. It is an opportunity for our students to collect data and get a sense of their own projected academic future. As an Institution of Eminence (IoE), this could be a unique way of collecting data on PhD pathways as a part of the IoE student incentive scheme. The partnership is likely to lead to joint publications as well as opportunities for building academic alliances with other partner institutions. Each partner university agreed to take part in the organizational and research work of the project. On our part we have got a grant of INR 600000 from our Institution of Eminence for research assistance and transcription work for which our PhD scholars will be employed. Prof. Aparna Rayaprol is the coordinator of the project which was routed by the Office of International Affairs Director, Prof. Siva Kumar.