The Career Development Network (CDN) Networking Event

The Career Development Network (CDN) held its first networking meeting on the 10th October 2018. The objective of the meeting was to bring together past and new members of the IGDC to introduce the aims and vision of the network, as well as to know each other and share our research interests, ideas, and look for future collaborations.

The event had the participation of around 30 researchers from a wide variety of disciplines and research topics. In an exercise led by IGDC Member Adrian Villaseñor-Lopez, everyone shared the main issues that their projects addressed, the geographical focus, methodology and software skills. We found that the researchers of the CDN work on areas that span across the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, with people working on economics, politics, health, human rights, gender equality, environment and climate change, as well as communication and journalism. Our global expertise covers mostly Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe with an ever-expanding list of countries being researched by our members. We also realised that interdisciplinarity is at the heart of our network. Our members are experts in qualitative methods like document analysis, participatory ethnography, discourse analysis, interviews, focus groups; and quantitative methods like econometrics, behavioural and decision-making experiments, survey analysis and design, and climate change related data collection and analysis.

Overall, the event was a great success in building an initial rapport between people working on development issues from different perspectives, and in identifying common interests and potential avenues for collaboration. The aim of the network is to keep a flow of communication among its members and to find and discuss novel and innovative ways to work together and to combine our different disciplines to provide more robust and credible research that improves the lives of people around the globe.

If you are a researcher at the University of York and would like to learn more about the CDN or become a member, please get in touch by emailing igdc@york.ac.uk.