CYGNA: Internationalisation of Japanese academia

Reports on our 27th CYGNA meeting with presentations on internationalisation of academia and a social media clinic

The name CYGNA comes from the female version of the Greek word for SWAN (Supporting Women in Academia Network). The main objective of the group is to promote interaction among female academics based in the London area and to provide a forum for learning, support, and networking. We typically hold five meetings a year with a mix of presentations and informal discussions. We also maintain a readings and inspirations section for female academics and have a Twitter hashtag #cygna_london. If you’d like to join the CYGNA network, just drop me an email

27th meeting 14 June 2019: London School of Economics

Organised by Hyun-Jung Lee  London School of Economics

Our last meeting of the 2018-2019 academic year took place at LSE's New Academic Building, located conveniently across Lincoln Inn Fields, the oldest public square in London, an ideal place for pre-CYGNA meetings with research collaborators that many CYGNA members now schedule. As usual we had a mix of regulars and new attendees such as Aleksandra Boskovic, a PhD student who has been visiting us at Middlesex University from Serbia, and Chie Iguchi, Professor at Keio University Japan, who is on sabbatical at Reading University. Sylvie Chevrier from Universite Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee, on sabbatical at Royal Holloway, attended her last meeting before returning to Paris. We just love it how London is such a hub of international academics!

Japanese academia

This was the second time in CYGNA history that we had a June meeting at LSE; strikingly it was also the second time we had a "Japanese theme". In June 2015 Sachiko Yamao, my Japanese colleague at the University of Melbourne, talked about her experiences of working in Australian universities. This time, my Korean visitor Heejin Kim shared her experience of working in Japan. Her presentation: Internationalisation of Japanese academia: is there a role model? generated a lively discussion about differences in university systems, facilitated by our collective experiences in different countries.

Social media clinic

In the second half of the meeting, I ran a skills development session called “Social media clinic” in which we went through participants' questions on Google Scholar Profiles, Researchgate, LinkedIn and Twitter and shared our experiences in using these platforms. For more detailed information about Google Scholar Profiles see: Google Scholar Citation Profiles: the good, the bad, and the better. CYGNA's twitter feed can be found under the Twitter hashtag #cygna_london.

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