From 1 to 4 July 2024 we ran our first Summer School. 10 participants and 8 speakers got together at the Institut du Travail (Labour Institute) in Strasbourg, joined by several local researchers from the Labour Law team and beyond. The topic of our Summer School was “Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the legal regulation of labour migration” and, as such, it had a markedly methodological focus, while also bringing together researchers with a common research interest, that is, labour migration.
After several months of planning and organising, the whole E-BoP team was incredibly happy of welcoming everyone and spending four days of discussions together. The Summer School was punctuated by four thematic sessions each of them introducing a specific approach and ran by one or more researchers with direct experience with the given approach. We also ran two feedback sessions, allowing the participants to present an ongoing research and to receive feedback from the speakers and the members of the E-BoP team, as well as to discuss it with all the participants.
In the designing the content of the Summer School we agreed on several guiding principles:
- In terms of methods/approaches, going wide instead of deep, by providing a broad spectrum of those instead of focusing only on a specific one;
- In terms of participation, going deep instead of wide, notably by opting for an entirely in person (and residential1) event, with no streaming or recording, so as to allow for more open discussions;
- Bringing together researchers around a topic (“labour migration”) instead of dividing across disciplinary and methodological lines.
Among the many topics covered by our discussions, the ongoing challenges of carrying out interdisciplinary research as an early career researcher (notably, as a PhD student), in particular in continental Europe, emerged as a common topic. This was one of the challenges which the Summer School, and, to some extent, the E-BoP project wanted to address and it was great to have concrete insights from the collected experiences of our speakers.
The feedback from our participants seems to be very positive, so we are all looking forward to repeat the experience in two years! (spoiler alert: next Summer we’ll be busy organising the first E-BoP conference)
- This specific element was inspired by our PI’s fond memories of the Pontignano Seminar of Comparative Labour Law, and allowed by the availability of accommodation facilities at the Institut du Travail ↩︎