Precarious funding forces prize-winning professor abroad

What you say is just as important as how you say it says linguistics expert Lorenza Mondada. www.unibas.ch

The 2001 winner of the prestigious Latsis prize has been forced to take up a post abroad because of uncertain funding in Switzerland.

Linguistics professor, Lorenza Mondada, is moving to the French city of Lyons, where she will continue the successful research that she began in Basel.

The Latsis prize, worth SFr100,000 is given annually by the Swiss National Science Foundation to scientists under 40 in recognition of outstanding research.

“I am leaving Switzerland because the market situation for a university researcher is not very good at the moment,” Mondada told swissinfo. “I was not expecting them to give me this kind of recognition because I feel obliged to look for a job in other places. It’s a kind of paradox.

“The jobs are very few at the moment. The academic career is very precarious. You live on the basis of grants and every few years you have to find other grants in order to survive so it’s not an easy life compared to other disciplines or other kind of work.”

Financial security

Projects in Switzerland are generally funded for a three-year period explained Heidi Diggelmann, president of the research council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, when swissinfo asked her about financial security.

“Rumours have gone around that humanities and social sciences in Switzerland do not get appropriate funding,” she added.

“But if you compare this at an international level, we spend about 20 per cent of our total budget on humanities and social sciences which is more than other European countries and even at the worldwide level. So I think it is really not true that social sciences do not get enough attention.”

Switzerland’s academic world was shaken up last year with the establishment of national centres of competence in research (NCCRs). The programme will eventually embrace about 25 NCCRs promoting long-term research projects in areas important “for the evolution of science in Switzerland, for the country’s economy, and for Swiss society”.

Of the 14 NCCRs so far funded, only one humanities or social science project has made it on the list.

“I think it is also important that people move around,” said Diggelmann. “Switzerland has probably the most international scientific community. Almost 40 per cent of the university professors are foreigners and 35 per cent or more of the students are foreigners.

“The esteem in which the Swiss science community is held depends to a large part on this very high level of internationality and competition.”

Social relations

Traditionally, linguistics studies grammar and the structure of languages. Mondada’s specialism is interactional linguistics. This relatively new field studies the actual uses of language and verbal relations.

“Language is considered as a social action, as communication between people and what is observed and analysed is the way in which this organises itself,” said Mondada, who has been focusing on scientific collaboration.

“I wasn’t just interested in how researchers were working together but how the way in which they were working together had an impact on what they discovered. Science is made through the practical activities of teams and it is therefore important to investigate how those teams function.”

“You have the social relations. You have the kind of language that they use and you have the fact that they were international groups. I had French, German and Swiss researchers and they had also to solve which language they would work in.”

Mondada observed four research groups between 1997 and 1999. She is still analysing the data which she collected. Her latest interest is how people use technology like video-conferencing for communicating.

Born in Locarno in 1963, Mondada has worked in Brazil, France, Germany and the United States.

by Vincent Landon