Funding a research project with a bridge mandate

Photo by Fredography

Céline Parotte benefits from the very first bridge mandate granted by the UR Cité. This funding allows her to devote one year half-time to the development of her postdoctoral project in order to obtain FNRS funding.

The bridge mandate is a funding that aims at excellence and allows to temporarily support a researcher of the UR whose project has been very favorably evaluated by a research funding body, but has not been funded.

This is the case of Céline Parotte, whose post-doctoral project, entitled 'Between Repair and Ruination: the Decay of Nuclear Infrastructures and the Reshaping of National Energy Identities' was not funded by the FNRS, despite a very positive evaluation. The UR Cité and the Permanent Research Commission considered that it was strategic to support it.

Can you tell us more about your research project?

I am interested in the present and future of energy infrastructures, particularly nuclear. In this period of energy transition, a lot of research is focused on innovation and new technologies. I wanted to look at existing infrastructures: how will they age? What are we going to do with them? And to what extent does the choice to maintain them, or on the contrary to dismantle them, reflect strongly rooted cultural and political dimensions? 

Your project was submitted to the FNRS for the first time but was rejected... Can we say that the bridge mandate offers you a second chance?

Absolutely. It is not easy to get funding for research on such a narrow topic. As a researcher, one is sometimes obliged to leave this kind of subject aside in order to devote oneself to projects that are more likely to provide job security. More ambitious or original projects take time to develop, you work on them in your spare time, after hours. This was not an option for me.

Thanks to the bridge mandate, I can devote half of my time to improving my project and my scientific profile: not only by rewriting certain passages but also by reinforcing my knowledge and my publication file.

Do you already have a clear idea of how you're going to do it?

Yes, I have a plan of action. When I heard about this bridge opportunity, I spent two days rereading all the criticisms that had been made of my project by the evaluators. For each criticism, I defined a strategy to adopt

For example, I was criticized for the weakness of my ethnographic approach. So I'm going to take ethnography courses. Some reviewers also wanted me to choose my case studies now. I will be working on that over the next few months.

Any advice for future candidates for the bridge mandate?

Don't give up. Facing rejection is never easy and, at first, I was rather discouraged by the criticism. But by analyzing them point by point, I realized that I could really push my project further and achieve something. Finally, this motivates me a lot!