| Editorial Statement |
and productive academic environments, if fuelled
by willing students, teachers and management, as is
the case at the Faculty of Archaeology.
In what follows, we invite our readers to return to
some of these general issues permeating current
This does not say, of course, that everybody needs to
agree with the assessment of current academic state-
of-the-art presented here, yet some of the raised
issues, regardless of the taken stance or perspective,
might help to reinvigorate a broader discourse on
the matters touched-upon within our faculty – a
discourse that is urgently needed since the overall
trajectory of change appears to be irreversible.
Reassessment and Extension of Aims
During the last two decades, most European
countries have witnessed a dramatic re-organisation
of their academic systems, resulting in a radical
done, perpetuated and ultimately communicated.
have driven this development: (i) the so called
‘Bologna Process’ based on the earlier Magna
Carta Universitatum (1988) and the Sorbonne-
Declaration (1998) with the aim of “harmonising
the architecture of the European Higher Education
system”, and (ii
funding framework through the establishment of the
European Research Council (ERC) in 2007. These
two top-down adjustments have fundamentally
research and the mechanisms and logic of publishing
cf. e.g. Hagner 2015). Effectively,
(i) and (ii) have issued a somewhat ‘cruel’ tension
between the political will to streamline and
normalise university curricula on the one hand,
thereby swinging away from humanistic ideas of
‘education’ (Bildung) towards the pragmatic notion
of ‘training’ (Ausbildung) 1 – and, on the other hand,
the tendency to primarily support cutting-edge
research conducted by a small number of high-
as Horizon 2020. 2 The strong emphasis on training
rather than education, in conjunction with the
ongoing separation between teaching and research,
has resulted in a situation where students become,
ironically, more and more detached from real
more and more expected to deliver exceptional,
innovative and high-quality work in their BAs/MAs/
PhDs and beyond to be able to compete for funding
and/or positions on the next rung of the academic
ladder. 3 Essentially, this situation has created (a) an
extremely competitive environment for prospective
researchers and fostered (b) ‘academic elitism’
(Closet et al. 2015) for which students, precisely
because of the relatively manageable BA/MA
curriculum, are often only poorly equipped .
INTER-SECTION pursues two interrelated goals
it aims to bridge the gap between well-structured
training and individual research by assisting students
standard; it helps them to translate their ideas into
an article-format, to develop the necessary skills to
write in Academic English and to experience what it
means both to be self-critical and to be criticised in
the face of peers. Secondly, it aims to counterbalance
the apparent fetish on excellency that prevails in the
current system. INTER-SECTION’s primary goal is
not so much to support those who are already well-
supported, but rather to offer an opportunity for those
who have shown great potential yet lack possibilities
and courage or simply shy away from high-impact
journals and their self-proclaimed elitism. On the
that most student research is valuable in and of itself
– and thus deserves to be visible – and that most
paper can be acquired quite easily after all. 4 On the
other hand, INTER-SECTION wants to make room
for a different vision of science than the one mainly
propagated by institutions such as the ERC. This
particularly in archaeology, must be conceived of as
a fundamentally collective enterprise transcending
one-sided teacher-student hierarchies 5 , and that,
as a consequence, archaeological knowledge can
only be substantially advanced when wide-ranging
horizontal rather than narrow vertical exchange
and interaction are promoted. This entails hearing
the voice of students and being open to synergise
with them. The respective vision of university and
academic practices comes close to ‘and partly even
extends’ what Jacques Derrida (2001) has famously
termed the “unconditional university”. 6
Addressing the gap between training and research
also requires new forms of engagement between
students and academic staff/researchers. INTER-
SECTION’s referee system, where each student
brings in her/his preferred referee to assist in
conceptualising and writing the manuscript, can be
seen as one such attempt. Ideally, this re-engagement
results in close collaboration and supervision
which not only improves the overall quality of
the submitted papers, but also contributes to the
staff interactions. In the long run, we hope that this
2017 | INTER-SECTION | VOL III | p.3