2026-05-06 –, Track 1
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.
Diversity: We need people from many different academic settings with various positions. Join to share your local experience from anywhere in the globe.
Inclusion: To ensure broader accessibility and participation, we will offer both written and spoken communication options to accommodate different preferences and needs. No recordings provided to enhance free speech and encourage participation.
Improvement of PsySci: Documenting the variability of academic settings should contribute to better recognition of individual works.
Recognition of Contributions: The project will use a CRediT-like format. In further steps, participation in the unconference will be an acknowledged contribution.
To contribute meaningfully to the discussion, participants should have minimal knowledge of local academic settings (at least at the level of a PhD candidate or post-doc). Other interested people would be able to assist with the unconference anyway.
