CYGNA: General assembly - co-creating our CYGNA future through academic storytelling
Reports on our 61st CYGNA meeting where swans with different backgrounds and experiences within CYGNA shared their stories of how their participation in the network has contributed to shaping their academic career and identity
After our wonderful 10-year anniversary event in June (see: CYGNA: 10 year anniversary 2014-2024) and a record attendance of no less than 30 swans at our 6th new members meeting (see picture here), 8 October marked our first regular online meeting since May. And what a meeting it was!
We had an all-time record attendance of 62 CYGNA sisters who were able to attend (part of the) meeting, fifty of whom can be found in the picture above. The chat was overflowing and ran to 18 pages with more than 300 thumbs ups, hearts and hugs. We had members joining at 4am in the USA and staying until midnight in Australia.
As always we had many countries represented in the meeting including: Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, Sri Lanka, the USA, and of course the UK, the country in which CYGNA was established in 2014. Our audience was perfectly balanced between UK and non-UK members.
As nearly all of us work in a country different from our birth country, we had many nationalities and cultures represented. But we were all united by our common identity as female academics trying to achieve the - sometimes precarious - balance of realising our careers goals, whilst staying true to our personal values.
Welcome & opening
Ciara opened the meeting with her trademark stunning slides (see below), taking us through the network's co-created mission and values (see: Mission, values, and meeting charter), a snapshot of CYGNA today (see below) and our plans for the coming academic year (see: Meetings).
Academic storytelling
Swans with different backgrounds and experiences within CYGNA then shared their stories of how their participation in the network has contributed to shaping their academic career and identity.
- Anne-Wil Harzing: Personal motivation for founding & sustaining CYGNA
- Christa Sathish (Univ. of Westminster, UK): Nostalgia as a bridge: how memories have motivated me to join CYGNA
- Satkeen Azzizadeh (Middlesex University, UK): CYGNA as a source of identity and community of support
- Tatiana Andreeva (Maynooth University, Ireland): Organising meetings: considering volunteering activities as part of your academic portfolio
- Jane Neal-Smith (Univ. of York, UK): Finding and creating your tribe at CYGNA: CYGs
- Ruwaiha Razik (Univ. of Colombo, Sri Lanka): New members: how to find your way in CYGNA
Thank you all for sharing your stories about what CYGNA means to you. It was heart-warming for all of us to hear them and to see how much they resonated with the other participants who in turn contributed with their own stories. As all these stories were very personal, we will not share them in this post. However, my own story refers to the network as a whole so is included below. It ended with this brief video celebrating 10 years of CYGNA.
CYGNA - Anne-Wil's story
My interest in the role of gender in academia has a long history. One of the reasons I moved away from my native country – the Netherlands – nearly thirty years ago is that I couldn’t see myself having a successful academic career there. At the time, I could almost count the number of female professors in Business & Economics on one hand. Things have improved a bit since then, but the Netherlands is still bungling at the bottom of the European ranking in terms of the proportion of women professors, which in Economics & Business is even lower than in Technical studies.
Working my way through the ranks in the UK and Australia, my interest in the barriers for female academics only increased. Rather than things getting easier, barriers only seemed to increase with every new career stage. At that time, I also conducted a major longitudinal study of gender [and international] diversity in editorial boards of academic journals with Isabel Metz, a gender researcher, written up in the blogpost Trailblazers of diversity: editors and editorial board diversity.
When, after 13 years in Australia, I returned to the UK – or rather London – in March 2014, I was struck by two quite contradictory aspects of academic life there. First, the larger London area has a very high level of concentration of universities, making it a potentially very rich and supportive academic environment. Second, most individual female academics that I spoke to felt quite isolated, especially when working in smaller departments where they were often the only ones working at their level or in a specific research area.
Therefore with two junior colleagues - Argyro Avgoustaki and Ling Eleanor Zhang, later joined by Shasha Zhao – I decided to set up a support network for female academics in the London area. Today, 60 meetings later, we have more than 400 members – including a growing number of non-UK members – and CYGNA is a major part of my life. There are 15 CYGNA pages on my website, as well as nearly 50 blogposts reporting on CYGNA events. We have also expanded the coordination team to some 17 members, and I am now working with Ciara and Christa on the new Lead Team.
After some 35 years in academia, for me CYGNA is a way to “give back” by creating a supportive environment that helps other female academics to achieve their own careers goals, whilst staying true to their personal values. Working with many different CYGNA members on papers has also allowed me to broaden my own horizons, both in terms of research topics, and methodologically/epistemologically.
Finally, now that I have taken early retirement from my job at Middlesex University, CYGNA will allow me to keep “my finger on the pulse” of academia and spend time in pleasant company!
Related video: rejections & career as a marathon
Related blogposts
- When to say no?
- How to prevent burn-out? About staying sane in academia
- Would you ask a male academic the same question?
- How to hold on to your sanity in academia
- Female academics: Wives of the organization?
- How to create a sustainable academic career
- Book series: Crafting your career in academia
- CYGNA: One size doesn't fit all - Diversity of academic career paths
Related video: sustainable careers
Related pages
- About Cygna - Background on the CYGNA network
- Quick overview - Overview of presentations in our meetings with linked slide decks
- Meetings - Information about forthcoming CYGNA meetings, and links to prior years
- Membership - Information for and about the Cygna network membership
- Readings and inspirations - Inspirational readings and resources for female academics
- The Cygna charter - Documents our CYGNA charter
- Cygna videos - Repository of introduction videos of our CYGNA coordination team
- Cygna history - Tracing the history of our network since 2014, includes links to all of our meetings
- Frequently asked questions - Everything you may want to know about the CYGNA network and more
- The SWAN project - Initiated by Christa Sathish and Clarice Santos and implemented by Jacqueline Leon Ribas, this project created two swans reflecting CYGNA’s equal, inclusive, collective identity and the diversity of the network and its members
- Conference meet-ups - Provides brief write-ups of CYGNA conference meet-ups
- 10-year Anniversary event - Programme page for our 10-year anniversary event
- International Women's Day - Our collection of posts for international women's day
- CYG: Teaching & Scholarship Research - Our first CYG = SIG = Special Interest Group
Copyright © 2024 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Thu 10 Oct 2024 15:14
Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.
