BCC EWIRA LAYS THE FOUNDATION FOR PUBLISHED RESEARCH TO THRIVE AMONGST FEMALES AT WSU

Extending helping hands, pats on the backs, and words of encouragement were the order of the day during this year’s first edition of the Buffalo City Campus (BCC) Empower Women In Research Association (EWIRA) Writing Retreat, which took place at the Phyllis Ntantala Collaborative Library (PNCL) in East London from 27 to 28 March.

Female academics and researchers from various departments and disciplines gathered at PNCL under the theme “Empowering Women In Research” to self-assess the status of each participant’s research paper, build professional academic relationships, and establish and foster a community of practice amongst female researchers within BCC.

“We must grasp the opportunity made available by the university through EWIRA with both hands. Despite the many roles, responsibilities, and expectations that we women face daily, we must rise beyond those societal expectations to break boundaries within the research space and become equal to our male counterparts,” said Dr Rose Mbugua, the BCC EWIRA coordinator and FEBEIT senior lecturer in civil engineering.

She said that the cornerstone of EWIRA and its mandate is to:

*Increase the number of female researchers actively engaged in research

*Boost the university's outputs, leading to increased DHET subsidy

*Improve postgraduate throughput rates

*Increase the number of female researchers securing external research funding

Mbugua said a plethora of activities designed to increase professional capacity would have to be undertaken through interventions such as EWIRA. These include writing higher degree proposals, academic articles, research funding proposals, mentor-mentee gatherings, research integrity and ethics, identifying of certain research skills and entrepreneurship programmes to achieve the aforementioned targets, .

The first day of proceedings proved quite fruitful and indeed eventful as participants were bombarded with invaluable information by PNCL technical staff.

The PNCL staff proved exceptional in informing and educating the participants about a plethora of resources the university has acquired, to the tune of multi-millions, and made available for staff and students to use, free of charge.

The engagement quickly became a practical session, with a number of staff members installing applications and subscribing to various tools and platforms such as Grammarly, EndNote, Single Sign-on, Libkey, Turnitin, Google Scholar, Web of Science, amongst others, as for the benefit of their research endeavours going forward.

One of the participants, an administrator in the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and IT Executive Dean's office, Tina Bikitsha, who's currently busy with her Masters at Rhodes University, expressed great interest and willingness to learn over the scheduled two-day workshop.

“My reason for being here is to enhance my academic writing skills and I am now very interested in publishing. Also, this space has the potential to be a motivating and supporting environment for upcoming publishers to engage with colleagues about our research progress and academic challenges," she said.

The second and last day saw the researchers pulling up their sleeves and getting down to the business of the proceedings - working on their research papers.

To kick off the day’s proceedings however, Applied Informatics and Mathematical Sciences lecturer Dr Olutoyin Olaitan, shared the importance of a researcher setting goals for themselves – identifying a conference to attend, choosing a journal to aspire to write for, or identifying a special issue to publish in.  

By Thando Cezula