The Faculty Board released the news in October 2022 that a financial boost from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science has been granted to all faculties within the Social Sciences and Humanities domains in the Netherlands based on the sector plan. In recent months, the faculties concerned have worked hard at the national level on the final document of this sector plan. The sector plan was published in March and can be found here (only in Dutch).
Four themes
The faculty sees the momentum from the sector plans as an excellent opportunity to achieve our ambitions to strengthen interdisciplinary education and research. Our faculty has, therefore, enthusiastically set to work in anticipation of the final contents in 2022. Within the five overarching themes of the sector plan, our faculty is committed to the following three themes:
- Resilience in youth;
- The human factor in new technologies;
- Social inequality and diversity;
In addition, we are committed to a sector-wide Education Sciences theme.
Joint recruitment of new lecturers and postdocs
A faculty-wide recruitment process was launched in 2022 to appoint university lecturers and postdocs within all faculty teaching and research units, which enabled interdisciplinary recruitment. With this new and unique collaboration, we fulfilled the abovementioned themes, so far appointing 14 new university lecturers and seven postdocs, which we are extremely happy with.
Although the outcome of the new procedure is positive, there are also some learning points regarding this procedure. For instance, the vacancies were posted in several rounds with the idea that we could make quick decisions and provide clarity to the candidates promptly. Unfortunately, this did not succeed in all cases. Due to the high speed at the beginning of the process and the sometimes long lead time during the process, communication and feedback towards various candidates was insufficient. For external candidates, the response time proved too short. The faculty regrets this state of affairs and will ensure that the procedure will improve for future recruitments.
Theme coordinators
In addition to the appointment of university lecturers and postdocs, coordinators have been appointed for the four FSS themes. They are responsible for implementing and coordinating the objectives of the sector plan within FSS of Radboud University and for cooperation with the other faculties of social sciences. We even have the national coordination for the theme 'the human factor in new technologies', which involves the following coordinators:
- Youth resilience: Jacqueline Vink and Anna Tyborowska
- The human factor in new technologies: Wolter Pieters and Eelke Spaak
- Social inequality and diversity: Joost Beuving and Francesco Cerchiaro
- Educational sciences: Eddie Denessen and Lieke van Lieshout
All those involved met on 22nd March with the administrative contacts for the sector plans, Vice Deans Rob van Lier and Bert Steenbergen, and Organisational Coordinator Dorien Wellen. During the meeting, they made a flying start on the programme and set to work on specific action plans for each theme. There will be frequent communication on progress in the faculty newsletter. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch with Dorien Wellen (dorien.wellen [at] ru.nl (dorien[dot]wellen[at]ru[dot]nl)).