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Update your browserNot everyone is fortunate enough to receive guidance on career progression, particularly when coming from educational systems or countries that have never prioritised such forward-looking support. Many people must navigate this career journey on their own, often through trial and error, which can be both time- and energy-consuming. With that in mind, perhaps the question should be reframed: What is the best advice you WISH someone had given you about your career progression? Personally, I wish someone had told me early on that if you aspire to build a career as a researcher, especially one that maintains a foothold in academia, you must focus relentlessly on publishing, publishing, and publishing. Equally important is the ability to step outside the confines of your own discipline and explore interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and even cross-disciplinary research opportunities. Doing so allows you to gather a wide range of strategic tools and perspectives that will strengthen your professional toolkit and broaden your intellectual reach. This can be best achieved if one starts early on, when they are in their mid-twenties. This will give them plenty of time to build a robust and versatile career trajectory.
Learning. Diving deeply into issues, examining them from multiple perspectives, and questioning phenomena that others often take for granted. I’ve observed that such multidimensional analysis is often less emphasised in STEM fields, where problem-solving tends to be more technical and linear. Combining critical inquiry with empathy, being able to step into others’ shoes and understand experiences beyond my own, is one of the great fruits of the work I do.
I no longer believe that changing the world in the classical sense is truly possible. At best, we can leave traces, and even that feels like wishful thinking in the face of the devastation wrought by climate change and all the wars going on. Yet I have always believed that knowledge endures. Even when we are gone and return to the earth, the knowledge encoded in our cells becomes part of a larger continuum, seeping into the living world, resurfacing somewhere, someday, in another mind or form. Beyond this rather apocalyptic vision of the future, I hold fast to the conviction that what I produce through research has the power to make people think, and that fostering critical thinking remains one of the most meaningful contributions I can make.
Coming from a literature background, I think one of the most valuable things other SHAPE disciplines can learn from literary studies is the way we sit with complexity. Literature doesn’t rush to reduce human experience into variables or outcomes. It holds ambiguity, contradiction, and emotion in a way that insists on depth before clarity. That doesn’t make it superior, but it does offer a kind of interpretive patience that has become dangerously rare. I think, too, that literature reminds us that stories are ways of knowing. That can challenge other disciplines to reflect on how knowledge is created, who gets to produce it, and what is sometimes left out when we over-rely on quantifiable evidence.
Azadeh is an Iranian-born, Adelaide-based early career researcher and creative writer. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Shahid Beheshti University and an MA in English Language and Literature from the University of Tehran, where her thesis examined the works of the American poet Sylvia Plath. She earned her PhD in American Literature from the University of Adelaide, with a dissertation focusing on mid-twentieth-century American women novelists. Her poetry and research have been published in various journals, including Plath Profiles, The Australasian Journal of American Studies (AJAS), Saltbush Review and Australian Poetry Anthology, vol. 11. Her recent poem From Ur-Mia to Barossa is the Honourable Mention Award Winner in the 2025 October Project Poetry Contest and will be published in vol. 12 of Australian Poetry Anthology. She is currently revising her PhD thesis for publication as a book, alongside developing several related scholarly articles. Her research interests include gender and women’s studies, migration, diaspora and memory studies, cultural studies, media studies, Iranian and Middle Eastern studies, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.
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