D. Vaidis
This communication examines how institutional contexts shape researcher activity and outcomes. While comparisons often focus on personal characteristics like privilege and identity, they overlook how academic settings themselves create inequities. Drawing from previous initiatives at SIPS2025 and BTSCON2025, we investigate key contextual constraints including teaching workload, research infrastructure, funding limitations, institutional policies, and teaching language barriers.
Our unconference will gather direct experiences from researchers to identify and discuss situational obstacles while exploring potential gaps in our present approach. This qualitative phase aims to capture researcher perspectives, constituting the first step toward developing a comprehensive survey. In the next step, relying on collaborators to expand this survey across multiple countries will document major constraint patterns and identify systemic barriers within academic institutions. This research ultimately results in a report documenting academic settings, with the optimistic goal of enabling institutional reforms and supporting the creation of more equitable research environments globally.
