Mission
The mission of the VU-GSSS is to promote academic excellence by providing a stimulating academic environment where new generations of scholars committed to excellent academic research and social engagement are trained. The VU-GSSS aims to establish a community of engaged scholars, who involve themselves with current issues affecting global society, and interact with local and global communities in relationships and activities that can be characterized as ‘scholarship in action’.
In the spirit of this mission statement, the research conducted at the VU-GSSS addresses the challenges of engaged scholarship and involves MSR students and PhD candidates in critical assessment of and reflection on scholarly engagement. There are many ways in which scholars express engagement. This engagement can be viewed as a form of collaborative inquiry between academics and professionals that leverages their different perspectives on commonly defined issues to generate useful knowledge in three specific contexts: (1) theory-building and research, (2) teaching and education (knowledge transfer), and (3) institutional and organizational intervention. Engaged methods such as collaborative university-community research, at home and across (inter)national borders, is often advocated as a way of strengthening academic research. The incorporation of grassroots empirical research into joint research initiatives with governments, non-governmental organizations and the corporate sector promises to may enhance the quality of research and connections among communities at national and international levels. Engaged scholarship, however, raises issues pertaining to academic independence, problems of involvement and detachment, quality control, accessibility to knowledge, copyrights and ethical concerns. In the VU-GSSS, scholars well-reputed for their engagement with social issues and stakeholders are involving themselves with the students in an effort to promote a critical evaluation of their own engaged scholarship.
One form of engagement that the VU-GSSS is actively pursuing is the encouragement of female talented scholars. For this purpose, the VU-GSSS hosts the working group for ‘Female Talented Scholars’ which involves itself in measures to advance female scholars. One of these measures is the bi-annual award of the ‘Jenny Gierveld’ Fellowship in social sciences, a prestigious position (at associate professor level) bestowed upon an excellent female assistant professor affiliated to the faculty. The Graduate School hosts an annual workshop for female talent, which focuses on career strategies, and features invited speakers who act as role models for successful academic and professional careers.
The pedagogical vision of the Graduate School of Social Sciences sees graduate students as junior members of the research community of the Faculty in all respects. The VU-GSSS:
- supports graduate students on their individual path towards scholarship in an international environment
- functions as the central node in a network of institutions and individual tutors
- offers brokerage between supply of and demand for specialized training
- integrates graduate students in the ongoing work of active research groups
- ensures that graduate students become responsible ‘citizens’ of their respective departments
- offers its students manifold opportunities to pursue a part of their studies in prominent international partner institutions
- advocates the emergence of a community of PhD candidates and MSR students based on the principle of peer-socialization and exchanges across their respective boundaries.
