Travel Bursary Report April 2023 - Mengxuan Li
Mengxuan Li is a 3rd Year student in the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy - Sociology.
The TRiSS travel bursary supported my presentation at the Research Committee 28 (RC28) on Social Stratification and Mobility of the International Sociological Association in Paris, May 2023.
At the conference, I engaged with a variety of inspirational keynotes, talks, symposiums and workshop. The funding enabled my travel to France, allowing me to participate in this significant event within the field of Sociology.
I was honoured to receive the Alan C. Kerckhoff Award for presenting my paper 1 (Parental investment or parenting stress? Examining the links between poverty and child development in Ireland) at the main conference. This presentation and the constructive feedback I received from peers and experts in the field were invaluable for refining the theories and methodologies of my paper and integrating them into my overall PhD thesis. The paper is now published at European Societies.
The connections I made at the conference have opened opportunities for potential collaborations and have inspired my future research endeavours. During the pre-conference workshop, I got chance to present my paper 2. My Paper 2 presentation (precarious parental employment and children’s mental health) resulted in several offers to collaborate on a new cross-country comparative birth cohort analysis paper. After the conference, I am now involved an additional research project as part of the European Association for Population Studies (EAPS) adolescent well-being working group. It involves a collaborative five-country study (France, Germany, the UK, Ireland and Australia) focusing on the impacts of parental unemployment and children’s mental well-being with researchers from Sciences Po, France and University of Bamberg, Germany.