My Experience in Prague: From the Doctoral Training Academy to the UACES 56th Annual Conference
Hello, this is Valeria, although most people call me Vale, and I am the UACES Graduate Forum Communications Officer. Welcome to our Graduate Forum blog series on the 2026 UACES Annual Conference. This first post is about my overall experience at the conference, but stay tuned: next, we’ll talk about publishing!
This series was made possible by the UACES Microgrant Initiative. You can learn more about the Microgrants here: https://www.uaces.org/funding
I arrived at UACES 2026 after a year of developing new research ideas, applying for postdocs, and generally trying to work out what comes next after the PhD. Wearing several hats at the conference, as a presenter, organiser and convenor, made the experience especially immersive: somehow chaotic, but wonderful. It was a great experience that felt deeply meaningful on so many levels.
This year also marked a big first: we decided to hold our Doctoral Training Academy, an event offering training opportunities for early-career researchers, right before the Annual Conference welcome drinks on Sunday afternoon. With this event, we wanted to give participants the chance to interact with experienced professionals, learn more about publishing, and ask the questions they might not always feel comfortable asking elsewhere. Most importantly, we wanted to foster a sense of community among Graduate Forum members and help them meet and get to know each other before the Annual Conference.
When we started planning our Doctoral Training Academy, we wanted to focus on some of the hardest parts of the academic experience: publishing and networking. Through UACES’s existing network, we brought together a panel representing different sides of academic publishing across European Studies: JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Contemporary European Politics (CEP), and the Contemporary European Studies book series. Our session started with the question, “What does it take to turn an idea into a publication?” We asked all our editors, and they said there is no single answer. It really depends on a lot of factors: timeliness, coherence, good and (mostly) bad reviewers, and learning that Marketing Studies is not the same as Market Studies. A huge thank you goes to Gabriel Siles-Brügge, Monika Brusenbauch Meislová, and Christopher Huggins for their lovely presentations and for giving us their time.
The second part of the afternoon was dedicated to our Meet the Experts session, where we tried to (and hopefully did) make networking less intimidating and give participants a chance to connect with our UACES experts. We split our participants into small groups and sent them rotating through four conversations on Leadership in Academia, Career Development, Publishing, and Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Community, hoping that somewhere in the organised chaos people would actually talk to each other, and somehow it worked. The conversations became more informal and flowed much better than anything we could have planned: people asked questions, shared experiences, and discussed things that people sometimes struggle to bring up in a conference room. Even though I was busy keeping time, I enjoyed watching the session turn from an activity into a conversation and seeing how a project that had, for months, been an increasingly terrifying spreadsheet of groups, rotations, and names became something really beautiful. A huge thank you goes to Toni Haastrup, Thomas Hoerber, Tomáš Weiss, Filiz Dogan, Olga Litvyak, Koen Slootmaeckers, Roberta Guerrina, and William T. Daniel.
The DTA was only one of the many events we planned for the Annual Conference, and I often forget that I started planning it months ago as a co-convenor for “Sectoral challenges for the implementation of the green agenda in Europe,” along with Rosa Fernandez Martin and Blanca Marabini San Martín. Being a convenor is an understated role, mostly because it happens behind the scenes, but it is one of the most crucial roles in shaping the conference programme. This year, we saw a wide variety of topics on the green agenda, ranging from the more political aspects to geopolitics and the implications of the European Green Deal beyond EU borders, including questions of securitisation.
Working on the securitisation of green tech myself, I was particularly interested in learning more about how sustainability, resilience, and security intersect beyond the trade and technology dimension. Much of my recent work has focused on resource dependencies through supply chains and how these can become vulnerabilities. Key supply chains linked to the EU’s twin green and digital transition are increasingly showing how the EU’s industrial base is becoming securitised. In areas such as semiconductors, AI, critical technologies, and green supply chains, the securitisation shift is becoming increasingly visible in the language of technological sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and economic security.
This was one of the threads of one of the papers I brought to Prague, “Trade as Crisis Governance: Legal Responses to Strategic Supply Chain Dependencies in the EU”, which I presented in the Trade Policy track. In this paper, I am examining the international dimension of the EU’s response to dependencies through strategic partnerships. The semiconductor sector is probably the clearest example of this securitisation shift. The EU’s attempts to strengthen its own technological capacity are happening alongside deeper cooperation with actors such as Taiwan, showing that resilience does not necessarily mean less interdependence, but often a more selective and politically charged form of it.
What I found really interesting was that both the Green Agenda panels and the Trade Policy panels were sometimes looking at versions of the same issues from different starting points. The securitisation of the EU’s industrial policy is turning sector-specific questions into matters of broader resilience through diversified international partnerships, strategic autonomy, and concerns about the future of European economic governance. This is another of the many things I value about UACES: it made me think less in terms of separate tracks or different policy ‘boxes’ and more about a broader shift in how the EU is governing interdependence.
European Studies cannot be reduced to a checklist of separate approaches; instead, it is made up of the ways trade, sustainability, law, policy, security, and social policy constantly intersect. These different perspectives constitute a community, and together they shape the broader picture of what European Studies is. In a way, our maps at the Graduate Forum booth became a literal representation of this idea when we put up maps of Europe and the world and asked people to stamp where they came from. Over the course of the conference, the maps slowly filled up: people came from different countries, institutions, disciplines, career stages and research areas, but for a few days all of those different points became part of the same picture. It was slightly chaotic, increasingly imprecise, and somehow a very fitting picture of UACES itself.
My presence at the Annual Conference was also made possible by a UACES Microgrant, which was particularly important for me this year, as I do not currently have a full-time position with access to conference funding. After a year spent trying to work out what comes next after the PhD, Prague did not give me one neat answer, but it gave me new ideas, new people to talk to, and a much stronger sense of belonging to a wider European Studies community. Maybe that is also what the increasingly chaotic maps at our Graduate Forum booth came to represent: lots of different people, disciplines and paths, all leaving their mark on the same space.
This is only the first post in our Annual Conference series. Next, we are going to talk a little more about networking, what makes it difficult, and what we learned from trying to make it slightly less terrifying at the DTA. Stay tuned!